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themagnuswriters · 4 years

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Asexuality in Fic Roundtable - What We Like

How do I write a convincing asexual character in a fic? Is there a way to address a character’s sexuality outside the context of sex or coming out? Can a story feature a character's asexuality aside from exploring the negative aspects of the asexual experience? It’s usually not too hard to find lists of what not to do when writing asexual characters, but much more difficult to find the opposite.

The asexual members of The Magnus Writers discord gathered to discuss their favorite ways to incorporate the day-to-day details of asexual peoples’ experiences into fiction. We also discussed depictions that we’ve enjoyed in the past, or would love to see more of. Note that this isn’t an Asexuality 101 resource, so if you don’t feel familiar with the basics, feel free to check out the resources we will link in the reblog of this post.

This conversation included a variety of ace-spectrum people from multiple countries, including both arospec and non-aro people, various genders, and varying relationships to sex and sexual content. Just like all asexual people are different, the things that we enjoy reading are far from universal. Some tropes/details brought up as favorites can vary widely--for example, “innuendo completely flies over their head” vs. “they understand but are completely unfazed by innuendo.” Additionally, some aces love tropes that others would prefer to avoid: for instance some enjoy discussions of physical boundaries to be included in the fic, and some prefer that to be established as happening in the past.

The examples brought up in our discussion are also far from comprehensive, and can be seen as the beginning of an endless list of possible ways to write asexual characters. Some examples given are specific to the Magnus Archives, but can apply to any writing. Take these as inspiration and a way to broaden your understanding of who we are and what we like to see!

ASEXUALITY IN YOUR SETTING

When writing a story including asexual characters, one of your first considerations may be for how asexuality is contextualized within your setting: Is it fully normalized and accepted? Does it reflect real-world stigmas? How is asexuality treated by the narrative and the other characters? Contributors showed interest in a variety of approaches on this front, with no single approach being worth more than other:

Fics including negative real-world experiences

These would include fics in a realistic setting, where characters may struggle with internalized acephobia, stigma, social pressure, microaggressions, dysphoria, and so on. This isn’t limited to just “issue fic,” where the focus of the fic is about examining and confronting a struggle, but rather encompasses anything that includes this consideration in its worldbuilding and characterization. While brighter settings can be refreshing, contributors described reasons why this kind of fic appeals to them:

Feeling seen: Reading about ace characters whose experiences reflect their own

Feeling validated: Being exposed to only stories where there are no issues on this front can feel like we’re the only one facing these struggles. It can be extremely cathartic to read something and think “I thought I was the only person who went through this.”

Exploring improvement/hope: From ace characters learning to accept themselves or other characters making mistakes and accepting correction, these can be validating and encouraging.

On top of ace readers finding worth in these fics, the act of writing the fic can also be very cathartic for many ace authors.

There is a lot of variety for how these fics can be written, such as:

Stories that focus on the negative experience

Stories where that experience is just part of the setting or characterization

The character(s) getting external support and validation

The character facing mixed dismissiveness, acceptance, prejudice, etc. from different people

The story resolving in a way where the situation is resolved: for instance, cutting off an acephobic relationship, or someone apologizing for a microaggression.

Stories where well-meaning characters are accidentally insensitive about asexuality, but learn better and change their behavior

The character confronting or overcoming an internal struggle

Stories where the issues aren’t fully resolved by the end, such as an insecurity not fully going away.

Negative asexual experiences don’t have to be the focus of a fic to be acknowledged. While “issue fics” that closely examine and explore these experiences are valuable, contributors also described enjoying stories that included them as simply an element of the worldbuilding or characterization. For instance, a story may reference Jon having bad past relationship experiences; facing assumptions that he’s having sex if he’s in a relationship; having moments of insecurities about his sexuality; etc.

Please note that writing negative ace experiences needs to be handled sensitively; fics of this type should definitely be tagged appropriately. For brief references, consider including author’s note warnings on the appropriate chapter (e.g. “asexual character assumed to be having sex”). Having an asexual sensitivity reader--particularly one of a type that corresponds with what you’re writing (i.e. sex-neutral, gray-ace, sex-repulsed, etc)--is very much encouraged.

Fics where asexuality is normalized

In contrast, there is just as much interest in stories that avoid all of these issues, and fully normalize asexuality. Contributors described how they enjoy stories where ace characters are allowed to just exist, without big important conversations or small othering details that depict asexual identities as less than fully accepted.

These can be included in any type of fic, but a few of the suggested details for how to normalize asexuality in a setting include:

A character being already out and accepted: For instance, Martin already knowing about Jon’s asexuality from early seasons.

Characters in the fic already knowing what asexuality is without needing it explained to them

Having more than one character be asexual: We aren’t confined to writing only canon characters as ace! This not only goes the extra mile in normalizing asexuality, but it gives the chance to include more of the ace spectrum.

If you’re aiming for asexuality to be normalized, please consider whether it makes sense for your asexual character to be anxious about coming out or discussing boundaries. There is a world of difference between someone responding to an ace character coming out with “I fully support you” and responding with “you’re an idiot for thinking we wouldn’t support you.” This is a common and easy pitfall to fall into, but the result is often less escapism and more a message of “your struggles aren’t real, and you’re stupid for thinking they are.”

Asexuality in Metaphor

Some contributors mentioned wanting to read settings where asexuality itself is normalized, but the issues facing aces could be explored on a metaphorical level. This falls somewhere in between the ideas of realistic or idealized settings as regards the ace experience, and could allow that exploration with a layer of distance. Ideas relating to this included fantasy settings with different kinds of magic.

PERSONALITY AND CHARACTERIZATION

The experience of being asexual isn’t something just limited to a relationship with sex: it can be shown in many ways, such as how a character relates to themselves, other people, media, and society. Like any other queer identity, it affects many aspects of our lives and informs a great deal about us as people. These little details don’t even need to be presented in a blunt “this is because this character is asexual” way--they can be little relatable notes for your ace readers, while not coming across in a “this is how all ace people are” way.

We’ve seen the question “how do I write a character as asexual, if I’m not planning on having someone ask them for sex or writing a coming-out scene?” many times. Our contributors were excited to share a wide variety of ideas for this from things they’ve read, written, or experienced:

Ace confusion

Not to be confused with the infantilizing “doesn’t know what sex is” approach, this could involve things like:

Being confused over what sexual attraction is: difficulty defining what they don’t experience.

Difficulty describing to others what lack of sexual attraction is: this is their default, and it can be difficult to contrast it to what they don’t experience.

Thinking that others describing sexual attraction or interest is just exaggeration

“Wait, that’s what you mean when you say ‘hot’? I just thought it meant they’re gorgeous.”

“You mean meeting someone and being instantly sexually interested in them is a real thing, and not just a movie trope?”

The Absurdity of How Society Views Sex

The jarring dissonance between asexual experiences and the norms in society and media can cause a lot of alienation and dysphoria in aces, but often it hits a point of feeling like a joke is being played on you. Contributors offered ideas for how this could be illustrated through a character:

Reading “How to Spice Up Your Love Life” articles out of pure morbid curiosity

Taking the most ridiculous Cosmo sex life article as How Everyone Thinks (and being concerned)

Having an allo friend or partner they can ask about whether any of it is legitimate advice (this one was brought up by a lot of people as a common ace experience)

An ADHD/autistic character getting a special interest or hyperfixation on societal views on sex or sexual practices, and pursuing it as purely a matter of research with no interest in participating

“Why do they keep bringing up ice cubes? Georgie, stop laughing, I am a researcher and a scholar.”

Needing to teleport out of the room if a sex scene comes up in a movie

Not minding the sex scenes, but needing to make fun of them or point out impracticalities

“On the beach? But sand is everywhere? Wait, they think getting sand everywhere is hot??”

Being baffled at what’s considered sexy: for example, Jon being baffled at “wet clothes are sexy,” having grown up by the beach and associating them with being terribly uncomfortable

Of course, asexual characters don’t need to be framed like they constantly need to learn about things from allo people--sometimes the reverse can be a fun twist. One reversal, for example, could be an ace person helping their allo friend parse whether their attraction to someone is simply sexual or also romantic.

Aces vs. flirting

While not specifically connected to sexual attraction, how a character interacts with flirting can very much demonstrate the asexual experience. Contributors discussed a variety of their own experiences, and details they’ve enjoyed reading for ace characters:

Having difficulty distinguishing between different kinds of draws to people--is it romance? Friendship?

Having difficulty picking up on whether or not someone is interested in them

Failing to realize they’re flirting or being flirted with

Enjoying flirting as just a fun thing to do without any particular goal (a popular suggestion for a Tim ace headcanon)

Casually flirting but then backing off if it becomes “real”

Several examples were given of scenarios these could be used for Jon:

Jon’s dry prickliness stemming from wanting to avoid people thinking he’s flirting or showing interest in them, not being sure where others judge the line between “flirting” or “being nice.”

Jon deciding he is going to make an effort to be more friendly to people, and awkwardly starts showering others with compliments; some of them interpret it as flirting and it’s very confusing.

Jon (or Martin) being overly dramatic or romantic when purposefully showing interest in someone, drawing from a basis of books or media rather than social experience.

Aces vs. hotness

We might use the word “hot” excessively, but ace people often have their own understanding of the word (and are often surprised to learn what others mean by it). Contributors brought up the following ideas for this area:

Using “hot” as an expression of “gorgeous to look at,” and being confused to learn that others use it as a sexual expression.

Engaging with “are they hot” conversations based purely on aesthetics, or other impressions like “would they give good hugs.”

Focusing on seemingly random physical details, like wrists or eyebrow shape, over more commonly sexualized ones.

Being confused over the criteria others use for hotness. Example: Jon’s reaction to “the hot one” comment.

Finding fictional characters not represented by a real person “hot” (e.g. from books, podcasts, video games with bad graphics, etc)

Using the words “hot” and sexy” for completely nonsexual things. Several contributors described being told they couldn’t be ace if they called anything hot/sexy, and then doing it more out of spite.

Being completely unfazed by innuendo or sex/nudity: For example, Jon’s calm response vs. Martin being flustered at Tim stripping

This is also an area where a story can establish the nature of their relationship with those around them: if a character is comfortably out as not being interested in sex, for instance, you can show that others around them support that by making their conversations more inclusive. For example, a “fuck, marry, kill” game with modified categories, or a “who would you have sex with” conversation changed to a “who would you have dinner with” one once the ace character enters.

Aces vs. sexual humor

Ace people’s reactions to sexual humor can vary as much as the reactions to flirting. Contributors described enjoying a broad range of these:

Aces who love sexual humor (not limited to sex-favorable aces)

Humor taking an angle of “sex is so strange, glad it isn’t real.”

Aces who are bored with or exhausted by sexual humor

Not finding sexual humor funny unless it’s also clever. “Yes I know that’s a sexual reference...wait, it was meant to be funny? Because it’s connected to sex? ....I see. Anyway.”

Bonus points if the “is that supposed to be funny because it’s sexual?” ace and the filthy humor ace are friends

It can even vary for the same person from setting to setting: someone may find making dirty jokes with a group of ace friends might be fun (see the “Absurdity of Sex” section above), but be very uncomfortable with someone else trying to twist something they said into something sexual. There’s also the nature of the joke itself: a silly pun may be fine, but a joke implying the ace person is interested in sex or said something sexual without meaning to may be alienating.

For TMA, the general interpretation of Jon is that he’d be uncomfortable with sexual humor, which is relatable to a lot of asexual people, but contributors brought up other possibilities as well: for example, the idea of Jon liking clever wordplay so much that if it just so happens to include something sexual, it doesn’t feel odd to him--why do the others look so shocked?

Note: A lot of asexual awareness posts insensitively treat the concept of aces who love filthy humor as more mature, more easygoing, less stereotypical, or otherwise superior to aces who are uncomfortable with sexual humor. This is a very harmful attitude that looks down on a lot of asexual people, and adds a pressure to push past comfort levels to fit in and “avoid being a stereotype.” Contributors loved reading stories that include flirty or filthy aces, but not when they take this tone. A favorite suggestion was to include more than one ace character to depict a variety, while treating them as equally valid.

Somewhat related to this is ace people’s relationship to sexual euphemisms. Contributors described their experiences or how they might write an ace character responding to these:

Being exhausted by how so many terms are considered euphemisms, or how any comment could be reframed as sexual.

Having a special annoyance when they accidentally stumble into or misunderstand a euphemism

Wanting to decouple euphemisms from their literal meaning: why does “spending the night” or “going home with someone” have to mean “having sex”?

In the same line, being very blunt and straightforward about making sexual references, because why dance around it?

Characterization Considerations

One discussion that is particularly relevant to The Magnus Archives is the idea of the “uptight nerd” ace persona. It may sound strange to say, but there is some legitimacy in this characterization, but for different reasons than is stereotyped. Many of us build up this persona while growing up--particularly in adolescence and early adulthood--to fend off uncomfortable social pressure, self-examination, or external criticism for why we relate to sex differently than our peers. This often involves playing up certain defenses for discomfort for sex or dating: “I don’t have time for any of that, I only have time for books and knowledge!” Or, the adult version: “I don’t have time for relationships, I’m married to my job!”

Where this departs from the stereotype is that these are generally coping mechanisms or facades rather than the truth. Asexuality isn’t “of course they don’t have time for sex, they’re obsessed with this or that”--but an asexual person who doesn’t feel comfortable in their environment, such as around work, school, or family, may deflect judgment with similar excuses. Similar to this, some find it tempting to be antisocial or hostile on purpose to fend off interest in them or avoid sexual expectations.

This is, of course, far from the only way an ace character could be written. For instance, if you wanted to write a setting where asexuality is more accepted, you could write Jon’s antisocial and closed-off tendencies as a result of being bullied from a very young age, while he is confident and secure in his asexuality. Or for other characters: you could write Tim as someone who has enjoyed sexual relationships, but just thought everyone was exaggerating on the attraction side of things.

Intersection of Asexuality with Other Identities

Another characterization consideration is how asexuality intersects with other identities and experiences included in the fic. Below are a few examples of many:

Asexuality and masculinity: Social expectations of masculinity place a high emphasis on sexuality, particularly heterosexuality, treating sexual activity as a commodity or prize. One possible reading of The Magnus Archives is Jon’s tendency to have closer and more numerous friendships with women connects to this.

Asexuality and trans identities: There is a significant overlap between aspec and trans identities, particularly nonbinary identities. Based on an October 2020 study by the Trevor Project (see link in reblog), ace respondents were roughly 50% more likely to be trans (including nonbinary) than allo respondents. Contributors described how they’ve felt things like “is this dysphoria I’m feeling a gender thing or an asexuality thing,” or how figuring out their asexuality helped them explore their gender.

Asexuality and race: In combination with LGBTQ+ spaces often being white-dominated, people of color often face stereotypes that hypersexualize or desexualize them. This can have a strong impact on people of color’s experience and self-perception as asexual. For instance, if you are writing Jon as Indian, you could consider how this may have impacted his experiences in LGBTQ spaces in university. As there is no ‘one size fits all’ experience for aces of color, we strongly recommend researching for the particular background you have in mind. We will be adding resource links to our main page shortly, but in the meantime check out the links in the reblog of this post!

INTIMACY AND RELATIONSHIPS

One of the topics addressed in our discussion was how a character’s asexuality may impact their experiences with intimacy and romantic relationships. Contributors discussed ways to portray this in fic, whether or not it includes sex or even mentions it.

Physical Intimacy

Intimacy, sensuality, and sex are separate things that may or may not overlap depending on the individual. Contributors discussed how, for people across the ace spectrum, the relationship between these three tends to differ from common societal frameworks or depictions of intimacy in fiction.

Enjoying physical intimacy without the expectation that it will become sexual: massages, falling asleep on top of each other, bathing together, etc.

This includes acts that would often be expected to “lead somewhere” but don’t, such as lots of touching or nude cuddling.

Craving closeness/touch completely outside of sexual drive

One scenario suggested for this topic is an asexual character discovering that without the worry that an act of intimacy will ‘lead somewhere,’ they enjoy something they used to get anxious about, such as sharing a bed or showering together.

Boundaries & Communication

Stories with an asexual character in a relationship often address physical boundaries within that relationship. The below are some of the scenarios contributors have enjoyed:

People communicating over their sexual boundaries, rather than assuming what these are as soon as they hear the word “asexual.”

The boundaries discussion being framed as something that any couple in a fictional relationship should have, not just because one is asexual.

In relationships between allo and ace characters, the allo character having boundaries of their own, rather than just the ace character.

Normalizing boundaries discussions for allo couples as well.

Note: If a boundaries discussion involves a sex-favorable ace character, take caution at the risk of having them sound offended or derisive that the discussion is happening (e.g. “What, I’m not a child” or “Not all aces are like that.”). Enforcing the idea that people should assume their partner is sex-interested is extremely harmful to sex-disinterested aces.

Some contributors noted that they prefer fics where the boundaries discussion is something that has taken place in the past, rather than run through at the beginning of each fic they read. In these cases, this past discussion could be illustrated in the interaction itself: a character’s awareness of what lines not to cross, the other’s confidence and trust that those boundaries will be respected, and so on.

Issues of Intimacy Outside of Sex

While aversion to sex is the most well-known dimension of asexuality, there are other aversions and boundaries that could apply to either ace or allo characters:

Ace characters that are kiss-averse and/or touch-averse: This also works against the “They won’t have sex, but they’ll make up for that with kissing even more!” trope that implies asexual people have to compensate for a nonsexual relationship.

Allo characters with their own aversions or specific boundaries: suggestions included how this can apply to trans characters.

Fluctuations in levels of aversion (note: it is important to not treat increased aversion as “progress” or decreased aversion as “regression”)

In cases of fluctuating aversion, characters developing ways to communicate these levels, and responding appropriately. For example, “Kissing is not on the table right now, let’s move on to something more comfortable.”

Contributors were excited to discuss how this area could particularly be used for the allo partner of an ace character, such as an allo Martin having difficulties with touch post-Lonely, or discovering that he doesn’t enjoy kissing.

Relationships to Sex (or Lack Thereof)

Asexuality ‘subtypes’ are terms many aces describe their personal relationship with sex and/or sexual content. These are simplified self-descriptors rather than rigid categories or mini-sexualities, and the terms rarely encompass the full detail of that relationship. Please note that the below discussion assumes a general familiarity with ace subtypes.

Needless to say, aces across the spectrum and of every subtype want to see their identities represented in fic. The discussion focused on ways to illustrate those experiences, and details contributors would enjoy seeing:

Non-averse aces trying sex and deciding they have no interest in it: pushing back against the “if you’re not repulsed you’ll like and want sex” idea.

No expectation that “sex-favorable” means always interested in sex.

The pressure an ace person may face to oversimplify their relationship to sex or sexual content out of fear they’ll appear inconsistent or exaggerating: “If I’m okay with this now, what if I’m not later? Will I seem picky if I’m only comfortable with something in an extremely specific scenario?”

“Sex repulsion” and “sex aversion” generally are used to describe asexual people who don’t want sex, but are simplified terms for what can be immensely varied experiences. Someone could be repulsed by physical involvement in sex, repulsed by personally engaging in anything sexual, repulsed by sexual content, repulsed by just the idea of sex--or any variation or combination of these. There are even repulsions that could be part of more sex-interested subtypes: an ace who enjoys sex but is repulsed by nudity, or an ace who enjoys sexual activities with a partner but not being touched during them, etc.

Contributors discussed how much they enjoy reading simple “I just don’t want sex” approaches to aversion/repulsion, but also look forward to reading explorations such as:

Enjoying one specific type of engagement with sexual content or activity, but having an aversion to others.

Regularly varying levels of repulsion: Days of “please don’t remind me sex exists” to days of mild curiosity, for instance.

Aces with a relationship to sex that doesn’t involve another person, including if they’re in a relationship.

Fluidity between ace subtypes can fluctuate between sex-interested and sex-disinterested in both directions: it can be both “I said I wasn’t interested in this before, but let’s carefully revisit” and “I know we’ve been doing this, but I’m no longer comfortable with it.” Contributors mentioned never having seen fic with the latter, and expressed an interest in reading stories exploring this.

On this note, it is common for stories of fluidity between subtypes to be only moving in a more sex-interested direction. Many asexual people, particularly sex-averse aces, face immense pressure to ‘learn how to like sex,’ or have their sexuality erased by saying they’re a ‘late bloomer’ who will learn to like it later. Depicting this direction should be done with great care and nuance, and we strongly recommend getting feedback from a sex-disinterested sensitivity reader for stories of this type. It’s possible that an ace reader who isn’t sex-disinterested would miss or not be affected by something that is quite painful to sex-disinterested aces.

CONCLUSION

If you’ve stuck with us for this long, well done! We understand that such a long resource can be a bit overwhelming, but we hope it can show you the depth of variety and enthusiasm ace readers have for more ace content and inspire you further. One thing we all had in common during our discussion was how excited we were to have a canonically asexual protagonist, and how thrilled we were to see content that explored his asexuality. In putting together this resource, we hope that you are encouraged to write about characters whose asexuality impacts their experiences and the story in unique, thoughtful, and creative ways. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

#asexuality #asexuality in writing #ace week #the magnus archives #tma #writing resources #asexual characters #roundtables

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tearsofgrace · 3 years

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endings are hard... but they aren’t impossible

tldr; the good place fucking nailed the finale, supernatural completely and utterly bombed it.

tags: wc--4.5k, gif heavy, spn meta, the good place, supernatural finale, spn wank, all gifs are mine, if you read til the end there’s a pretty gif

so i recently finished the good place (i was watching w my family and we finally had time to sit down and watch the last season) and god fucking dammit that ending is FLAWLESS. literally flawless.

and because i’m, well, me… i spent most of the time during that hour long finale thinking about how supernatural could have had even a fraction of that and avoided so much heartbreak.

anyways. i decided to compare them. to REALLY compare them. to get into the nitty gritty of why the fuck the good place ending left me feeling, as the finale is all about, sated and complete. and why the spn ending left me confused, lost, broken, betrayed, unable to even enjoy my comfort show at all until a dear friend finally just watched an episode (8.08) start to finish with me.

so without further ado (always wanted to say that) here’s the good place/supernatural finale meta that no one asked for

comedy

we’ll start small. both these shows have excellent comedy. in extremely different ways… but still

in the good place finale, the comedy was perfect. whether it was jason reappearing in the forest, michael trying to get through The Door, tahani reversing the “hot bod” bit on eleanor, every comedic moment was actually pretty emotional and added something to the show. they deepened characters’ meanings, added to their relationships, and made the audience think as much as they made the audience laugh.

in the spn finale… the comedy was the pie gag. the whole sam shoving pie into dean’s face. beyond this being… like meta as hell (the whole prank thing) it doesn’t have any depth to it.

and to add salt to the wound, this “hilarious” thing happens RIGHT AFTER salmondean have a conversation about missing jack and cas that is equal parts flat and infuriating. the brothers, in particular sam about jack and dean about cas, should care more. this is their family. and family is everything to them. but, no, by all means pie dean in the face.

last lines

this one IRKS me. okay.

the last line of the good place "I'll say this to you, my friend, with all the love in my heart and all the wisdom of the universe: Take it sleazy.” “All right.” is ICONIC. okay?

it’s a reference to season 1 that doesn’t feel fan-servicey. it’s kinda honestly emotional cuz it’s like a message to us, the audience. it perfectly completes michael’s arc. it captures the light-hearted vibe of the show while also somehow managing to be poignant. you can see it coming like the second before it happens but it’s also not the obvious choice. it’s just. goddamn it’s good.

the last line of supernatural…. is… “and cut.” not even said by one of j2. i mean i know it’s a meta show but COME ON ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME??????????

now i hear you shouting wait but that’s just the end of the thank you message. okay fine whatever. in that case the last lines are “Hey, Sammy.” “Dean.” (i couldn’t bring myself to gif that moment)

i’m sorry but. that’s predictable. that’s obvious. that’s boring. that’s flat. sure, it celebrates the bond between the brothers. but like… that’s not what this show is about anymore. it’s not just about sam and dean winchester it’s about what they’ve created. it’s about the world they’ve saved, the family they’ve made, about how they always keep fighting but nope we get bland, boring, coulda seen ‘em coming from miles away lines for the very end. that’s fine.

montages

the spn finale is like 50% montages that don’t make sense and are poorly done and not emotional

the good place has a montage of michael being human that brought me to tears

timing

here’s another short section. the good place finale was 53 minutes long as opposed to the usual 20 minute long runtime of every episode. granted, the fandom of the good place is very different, but STILL there was no documentary telling the fans things they ALREADY knew (there was a short special after the ep, but the episode itself was still far longer than normal). it was 53 minutes of plot. of really fucking good not rushed plot.

the supernatural finale was… what 36 minutes long?? as opposed to the normal 40 minute runtime?? granted, we did get an hour long documentary of things we’ve all heard in cons and interviews a billion times so hey. take what you can get i guess.

character arcs

this is most of the meat of this meta. one thing we’ve all been harping on a TON is how they RUINED character arcs. soooo let’s go through and juxtapose some character arcs shall we

eleanor

eleanor shellstrop starts the show completely self-obsessed. she died getting hit by shopping carts while picking up margarita mix and let’s be real she’s a total icon. love her to death. she grows a ton, becomes one of the most selfless characters on the show, and starts to actually (jack forbid) CARE about things. it’s one of the most satisfying and relatable character arcs i’ve ever seen.

it’s not just her selfishness either, her character is super multi-faceted and complex, and i feel like even in the end we’re getting to know her better. she’s afraid of commitment, always worried about what others’ actions will do to her, loves the trivial side of life, is queer as fuck (as acknowledged by the show in a way that’s not harmful at all but also isn’t explicitly bi/pan/unlabeled/omni etc, allowing queer fans to see their own identity in her), and is all around a HUMAN BEING. her ending at the beginning of the show was her death. her stupid, trivial, meaningless death where she was, as she puts it, all alone. and her final ending ISNT that. yes, everyone goes before her. and i think that’s purposeful. to show that she’s grown enough that being alone in some sense is okay.

but she’s never TRULY alone. and in the end. the REAL end. janet is there. the whole time. because eleanor asked her to be!! she got over her crazy need for independence and simply asked for help. and eleanor dies an amazing person that has become selfless, has found joy in philosophy while still enjoying trashy content, has fixed her relationship with her mother, and has found a sense of completion. eleanor’s life ends on her terms, and it’s beautiful.

dean

alright. now just as you’re feeling all warm and fuzzy let’s look at dean winchester’s ending. you’ve heard it a million times, so i’ll be brief. dean was raised to be a hunter, a soldier, a killing machine with no feelings and no purpose. he was raised to die scared on a hunt, his life over because of some mistake he made because he will NEVER measure up. at least that’s what john and everyone else told him with the exceptions of some of his family (and family don’t end in blood). he started to accept that he didn’t have to have this. he started to realize that he could CHOOSE what his ending was.

the beautiful thing is, we never truly got to see what that was. i personally like to think it’s similar to the roadhouse michael locked him in while he was trapped in his own mind. a safe place for hunters, somewhere he (and cas in my opinion, but that’s not important) could settle down and still be in the life. it would be an amazing tribute to jo and ellen, and just all around a great ending. he wouldn’t have to be scared, but he wouldn’t have to conform to some apple pie facade of normalcy. and ya know what?? say that he died so he could have peace i dare you. because dean doesn’t find peace until sam is there anyway so i beg of you WHAT WAS THE FUCKING POINT.

dean winchester died scared. dean winchester died on a hunt. dean winchester died on one of john’s old hunts. dean winchester died not directly at the hands of a monster, but at the hands of a mistake. his mistake. dean winchester died without ever working through the trauma of his best friend in the entire world confessing his love in a final act of self-sacrifice. dean winchester died in a way that leaves a sour taste in my mouth and does not at all show the audience what he’s been through and how much he’s grown. dean winchester did not die on his terms, and he deserved better.

chidi

okay back to happy. chidi anagonye. by far my personal favorite good place character (don’t tell anyone i always say jason cuz he and i are very similar). chidi in the last few episodes is SO DRASTICALLY different than the chidi we meet at the beginning. he’s decisive, confident, self-assured, and it’s amazing to see. he’s not afraid of life anymore. he’s not afraid to make the wrong decision and forever alter his reality, because he’s okay with failure.

at the beginning, chidi was so petrified of life that… it killed him. and in the end, he’s completely at peace with every decision he makes, even the final one. yes, he considered staying for eleanor, but that just shows how his moral code and his compassion for others is still very much still intact. it shows the audience that you can be confident and decisive without being a selfish asshole.

chidi leaves the good place knowing that it’s the right thing to do. knowing without a doubt that his time has come. the old chidi never would have been able to fathom being that sure about something. it’s beautiful. it’s a development that can give the audience peace, can show them that this drastic of change is possible, and that chidi became a better person for all of it. chidi went on his own terms, and it was beautiful.

sam

… this one might be controversial… but sam winchester. god i hated sam’s ending. at first i was kinda okay with it. like, okay fine he got his normal life. but, really, in the end that’s not what sam wanted. he started to realize that he didn’t need that apple pie, white picket fence life. he didn’t need the wife and the kids and the backyard and the barbecues because that is NOT sam’s personality and i will throw hands on that.

that’s not to say he doesn’t want some sort of romance, maybe even kids, but not in that way. he lets himself see that he doesn’t need to be defined by his rebellion to john. doesn’t need to be defined by going to college or any of those “normal” smart kid things because it doesn’t fit him. and that’s okay! but how does sam’s story end? it ends with a wife (that isn’t even important enough to show her face). with kids. with a goddamn white picket fence. we think he’s still hunting to some extent… but it’s not the arc we were led to believe would happen. it’s not this amazing leader sam that we see in season 12-14, uniting hunters and organizing them.

he had SO MUCH potential and they throw it away on a vanilla ending that shows only surface level pain at losing his brother. he doesn’t even invite the rest of their family to the wake for fuck’s sake. jared did an incredible job. pls don’t think i’m saying he didn’t. but that script…. sam winchester’s arc was cut short. he didn’t go on his terms, and he deserved better.

jason

jason mandoza. the only character that has ever embodied my complete dumbass energy to the insane extent that it exists. he went to hell for his impulsivity. he never thought before a decision. i aspire to be as reckless as jason while on earth. but he LEARNED. he got better, just like they all did. and by the end of the show, jason doesn’t need to be impulsive anymore. much like eleanor being left “alone,” the show does a masterful job with making him be the first one to go, capturing his old impulsiveness. but he chooses to leave. he takes his time in deliberation, waiting until a feeling of peace, of completion, of well, ‘true happiness’ (sorry cas stans, i’m right there with you) has settled over him.

the ending of his story is one of growth, just like all these characters have been. and the best part? the show makes it comedic in the most poignant and beautiful way, because it’s jason, it had to be funny. we learn that jason has been in the woods for like, eons, just waiting to go through the door because he wants to give janet a necklace. he’s learned to simply wait. to be at peace with… nothing. his torture was being a monk, but in the end, jason embodies those ideals. his arc comes to fruition in an extremely satisfying way. jason goes on his own terms, and it’s beautiful.

castiel

this one is gonna hurt like a bitch. castiel is my comfort character. he’s my role model. he’s me in a lot of ways. i love him. so fucking much. so excuse me if this is slightly incoherent. i’m actually okay with cas’ ending… in a way. because his actual ending as an on-screen character? perfect. self-sacrifice while coming out and professing his love to dean winchester. a little bit bury the gays, but let’s be real, it’s supernatural. and “happiness is in just saying it” has to be the most powerful way to think of coming out. it takes away the fear, it takes away so much of the pain that can follow. because the joy is in just saying the words.

it’s how this was treated on the show that makes cas’ character arc terrible (and we haven’t even gotten to 15.20). YOU CANNOT JUST IGNORE A LOVE CONFESSION. that is god awful writing and i will never change my mind on that. cas deserved his family to care about him. to at least address and be sad about the fact he was gone. jesus fucking christ after everything castiel deserved at least that. and then we go to 15.20. cas is in heaven. cas is serving god. cas is right back where he started. now, i’m coming off a little strong.

if the show had decided to show us cas and jack in heaven makin’ the world a better place… i woulda come around to it. i woulda realized that that’s not REALLY erasing 12 years of character development and cas realizing that his whole identity isn’t just him serving heaven and isn’t just him being an angel and that he’s so much more than all of that and he could still be happy as a human… because really he’s with his son. but they didn’t show us that. they barely even mentioned him. and to me. that counts as a bad character arc. and i’m sorry if you disagree. castiel may have gone on his own terms, but they treated that beautiful sacrifice with disrespect and disdain, plus resolved his arc by putting him back where he started. he deserved better.

tahani

*deep breaths guys this is a long post i’m sorry* anywayyyy tahani!!! we love tahani obviously. let’s talk about her arc, because it always kinda bothered me. throughout the show, we see all the other character’s growing and expanding their knowledge of right and wrong. and, don’t get me wrong. we see tahani grow a lot. but she makes a lot of the same types of comments and shit like that. but it’s how she treats the reactions to those comments. by the end of the show, she laughs at the caricature of herself that the others see. she isn’t looking for vindication in name-dropping, she just does it. she is far less self-absorbed, and is genuinely interested in those around her. she fixes her relationships with her sister and her parents in a way that doesn’t feel forced and actually feels like a beautiful, healthy family reunion.

she has a list and she does everything on it. it’s worth noting, that the things on her list are not at all what they would have been at the beginning of the show. most of them are humble “labor” type tasks, and all of them are in self improvement. tahani’s end on the show is not the same as everyone else’s. she realizes that she doesn’t need to be done. that there doesn’t have to be an end to self-improvement. and she becomes an architect. the writers perfectly embody her transformation from a self-obsessed rich girl who has never done a thing for herself and laughs at the lower-class to a down-to-earth worker that simply doesn’t want the journey to end.

it’s incredible how perfectly the writers were able to close off these character arc’s without it feeling forced, and without ignoring their character development. imagine that. tahani chooses her own way, and it’s beautiful.

jack

jack’s ending may be the only one that i’ve actually somewhat come to terms with. it’s not terrible. it’s not great. but it’s not nearly as bad. because ignoring that awful monologue about every drop of rain and shit, jack really does end up helping people. he ends up doing something that he loves and that makes the world a better place. and he doesn’t lose his personality in it. but. i dunno, that’s still his destiny, right? to create paradise. and this is a show about ripping up the rule book, about choosing free will above all else… so to have every single character just fulfill their destiny is cheap.

still… i’ll try to be unbiased. because really at the beginning of jack’s time on the show, he’s unsure what he wants. and at least, in the end, he’s sure. he has a wisdom that he’s always had but he’s now using. and i’m good with that. but what’s NOT okay about jack’s ending is the lack of on-screen family. jack learns that family is important. sam, cas, dean those are the people he cares about. and you’re telling me he would just NEVER see them again? and be okay with that? i know he rebuilds heaven with cas, but we don’t even get a story about him rescuing cas from the empty. and he seems in 15.19 to not be that concerned about it (after the amazing emotional scene at the beginning). jack should have cared about his family. he did. but they ruined that for him. so jack kline deserved better.

michael

oh man where do i start. michael’s growth is the biggest on the show. i mean. he starts as a literal demon and ends a human. he gets better, he falls in love with humanity (*castiel fan in me sobbing again*) and he chooses over and over to be good instead of bad. his whole arc is a classic redemption arc, and every single beat just gets better. he chooses selfishly to side with humans but in the end it turns out to be the best decision he could have made. because he develops emotions, he develops compassion, he develops a moral compass.

and his end reflects that. because to complete this arc of a demon becoming more human… he literally becomes human!!!! it fits so well. and he’s allowed to make mistakes and be happy and gain all that humanity has to offer. this just shows that human!endgame for cosmic beings that become more human WORKS SO WELL (and it shoulda happened for cas and jack that’s all i’m saying). michael went on his own terms, and it was beautiful.

eileen

oh boy… this one stings. because they brought her back, used her up, and we never saw her again. eileen was one of the best side characters on the show, and they rarely addressed her arc. she comes onto the show as a hunter seeking revenge, and gets that revenge in the same episode. her s15 arc is focused on what’s real and what’s not, with her relationship to sam admittedly being a central part of her character because… it’s supernatural and women can’t exist without that. but still! eileen grows throughout the show and in the end… we don’t even know what happens to her. it’s as if her arc wasn’t important enough to even glance at.

it’s as if the connections the boys make outside of each other mean nothing when in reality they mean everything. they prove that the co-dependency is behind them and that family doesn’t end with blood and that real connections can be formed between people that last a lifetime. eileen was a disabled hunter that was shown to still be one of the best in the business, and they didn’t even give her the courtesy of a goodbye. eileen didn’t go on her own terms, and she deserved better.

janet

this is gonna unbalance my list but goddammit janet’s ending was perfect. she was a not-robot, not-girl that should have been incapable of feelings. but throughout the series we get to watch as she learns first-hand about human emotions and processes them. she cares about the humans in her charge and fights for them on multiple counts.

in the end, we see janet come to terms with both her cosmic being side, and her human side. she never stops being with the “cockroaches.” she sees them all leave, she’s there for them while they’re there, and she also continues to speak her mind and live autonomously. janet was a non-human character done right. she lived on her own terms, and it was beautiful.

some honorable mentions

spn ignored (in the finale) chuck, amara, stevie, charlie, jody, donna, garth, bess, the other angels, claire, kaia, patience, alex, and the list goes ON in favor of focusing on JUST sam and dean. did none of those characters at least deserve a quick goodbye??????

the good place wrapped up multiple arcs i had completely forgotten about in a totally natural and not forced way. mindy, doug forester, (the mushroom guy, i know, it took me a second), pillboy, donkey doug, kamilah, tahani’s parents, eleanor’s mother, eleanor’s friends, chidi’s best friend, vicki, shawn, glenn, simone and so many that i’m forgetting all got satisfying ends that they totally deserved.

they even fucking resolved FROG GUY’S arc and gave him a real frog. that’s right. frog guy (jeff) had a better character arc resolution than dean motherfucking winchester.

heaven and hell

obviously in very different vehicles, both shows explore in depth the realities of the afterlife. and lemme tell ya, at the end of the day, one sits a whole lot better than the other.

the good place finale ends this quest for the perfect afterlife by saying that everyone can improve and that an eternal paradise shouldn’t keep you from eternal rest. they pretty much make me wish that this is what our afterlife looked like. they handle everything with care so it’s balanced precariously in a way that doesn’t give you anxiety looking at it but instead fills you with peace and faith in humanity.

supernatural addresses this series long battle between heaven and hell by creating a heaven where you drive for forty years without seeing the people (cough cough cas and jack not his parents) that matter to you and drink beer that tastes like shit. a place you can’t be happy or find any sense of peace until your brother has died and he’s there too.

and hell… well they barely even address it. there’s a new queen of hell i guess? but so what. it’s still very much heaven and hell in a way that’s the worst and hey plus to them… makes me wanna stay alive thank you very much. oh and purgatory is in shambles and not functioning properly cuz all that eve bullshit.

loose ends

whenever something is ending, you gotta tie up the loose ends. not in a “oh, we must wrap everything up and leave no stone unturned” kinda way but in a “wow, we should probably try to make this unambiguous because this is the last time we will ever see these characters” kinda way.

the good place does that. so fucking masterfully. all these side plots with all these different characters were taken care of all while focusing on the main six characters. we get to see how their intervention has changed everyone else. for example, mindy’s arc is wrapped up perfectly, with eleanor going to save her.

plus different running jokes like “take it sleazy” are wrapped up, we revisit really old callbacks like the original neighborhood, and all of it feels natural and in the moment. it feels like full circle in a way that doesn’t erase growth.

supernatural, on the other hand, left a million loose ends open. what happened to the boys they saved? where the fuck are jody, donna, etc.? did eileen make it back? cuz sam was pretty upset about that. what happened to it “being loud” in the empty? hell, what happened to the empty? what happened to hell? what about chuck? it woulda been nice to see just for a second what became of him. did charlie and stevie make it (i’m very invested in that relationship)? if we’re taking the original ending… why the fuck is jimmy there? did kansas just all,,, die?

i’m not saying they needed to address everything… but god a few wrapped up storylines besides the brothers wouldn’t have hurt

coloring

can i just… real quick… as a giffer lodge a complaint

the good place has beautiful vibrant coloring in the finale

spn has like bland washed out whatever the fuck that is coloring. it’s not even the dark early aesthetic cuz they dropped that it’s just… ew. so. do with that what you will.

conclusion

first… while writing this i realized just HOW MUCH it’s not about destiel… like believe me. i knew i wasn’t just pissed about destiel. but holy shit it’s not destiel at all like did i even mention destiel that much???? this was never about a ship. this was just a trash finale.

in the end. the good place writers knew what they were doing. they knew their fans, they knew their characters, they knew their world, and they knew how to wrap it up in a way that was satisfying and sad and perfectly fit the tone of the whole show. it wasn’t out of character or rushed, basically every loose end was tied up without the audience even realizing that’s what they were doing, and i feel happy and complete having watched it.

the supernatural ending was a betrayal. flat out. to the audience that has stuck by it in a way bigger way than the good place fandom. to the characters that have helped so many people. to the actors that have given so much of their lives. to the other members of the crew, to certain writers… all of it was just a slap in the face.

we deserved better guys. there are better endings possible. so i’m sorry. i really am. but i guess… that’s what fanfic is for, right?

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waffles-for-brunch · 3 years

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This project began as an indirect response to a few negative tweets in the days following the Valentine's Day Destiel wedding. During such time that “certain sources” chose to speak against the impromptu "wedding" and state that the direction of the show never included sexuality or romance. Since this argument has sparked a bit of discourse as to the validity of Dean Winchester and Castiel's relationship and sexualities, I began this edit as an exploration of observations throughout the entire 15 season run of the series. (That's not to say that Sam does not also have his own impactful romances throughout the show -he does have several notable ones- but in his case they are never debated upon or erased.)

There are three complete edits linked below. The differences are explained in their descriptions. (I also recommend downloading for best quality rather than simply watching in the browser, but it’s your choice)

BiDeanEdit: (Click here to download)

Runtime: 18:04:44

File Size: 10.0 GB (10,741,415,805 bytes)

Series long compilation edit (in sequence) of Dean Winchester and Castiel’s relationships and intended expressions of their sexualities (ie interest in both genders). This edit focuses on their relationship as it develops with one another, their other notable relationships (DeanxBenny, CasxMeg, DeanxLisa, etc), and the framework around their sexualities with small scenes of expression (ie Dean in ‘Playthings’ or ‘Everybody Hates Hitler’, or early seasons Dean & his transgressions with women, or Cas in ‘Caged Heat’)

BiDeanMLMEdit: (Click here to download)

Runtime: 14:40:57

File Size: 8.05 GB (8,649,798,685 bytes)

Series long compilation edit (in sequence) of Dean Winchester and Castiel’s relationships and intended expressions of their sexualities. This one is the same as the last but with only MLM content (Otherwise referred to as ‘only the gay parts’). We focus on this more repressed side of their sexuality and see these clues laid out altogether in one fluid edit (these examples are also available in the previous edit, however are just not aligned beside any heterosexual content). DeanxCrowley, DeanxBenny, DeanxLee, DeanxCas, etc.

DestielOnlyEdit: (Click here to download)

Runtime: 13:08:49

File Size: 7.17 GB (7,709,560,696 bytes)

Series long compilation edit (in sequence) of only Destiel related content. The same as the above edit, just simplified even more to only focus on Dean and Cas’ relationship over the years.

Keep reading below to find my full analysis of the complete edit regarding these guys sexualities, relationships, and the parallels we can draw.

To understand why it is that so many queer fans of Supernatural and other similar shows read queerness in characters and their relationships, we should look at the hays code established in 1930. At this time this certain code was established to monitor what was allowed to be depicted outright on film. Within the margins of what was to be stifled, was homosexuality. As such, filmmakers had to plant “queer-coded” seeds into the writing and subtext so that queer audiences watching could interpret these characters and relationships in this manner without the words and actions stating so outright. (At this time homosexuality could be depicted on film as long as said gay character was either a villain, caricature, or met an untimely end- feeding into the blossoming of the kill-your-gays trope. But that’s another topic for a later time.)

As film changed over the years and times became more accepting of lgbt characters portrayals on screen outside of simple coding, this did not make the code obsolete. Queer-coding and queer-baiting are often used in media in present day as a way to pull in viewership. Networks are able to garner the best of both worlds, in a sense. They can draw in heterosexual audiences that may not want to watch queer media, whilst also drawing in queer audiences by coding some characters and relationships just enough to pull those viewers in. This works simply because there is such a lack of queer representation in most media that we’ll take what we can get.

This is where Supernatural comes in. There is a reason that Supernatural and thus “Destiel” is known by some as “The Great American Queerbait.” This twelve years long gay slow-burn between one overly masculine character and his awkward angel best friend did not begin with the intention of romance or baiting, as many of these things generally don’t. However, once fans realized the chemistry between these two particular actors and characters, it became something blatantly written into the show. Sometimes jokingly, other times as legitimate moments of emotional intimacy between two characters. So to say that the show’s direction never included sexuality or romance is, to put it bluntly, bullshit. Just because something is not written in clear and concise wording right in your face, does not mean that it is nonexistent and that the writers did not know what they were writing into the show. (Not even to mention the actual love confession in 15x18, but I digress).

We know very well that queer content has been written subtextually into media for the better part of seventy years. It is a language in media just as much as lighting is a language, just as much as certain camera angles, color design in costumes or set decor, and music design are languages. All of these, outside of the simple words said on screen, make up our media and these characters and our shows. Tv is a world of color, not black and white.

[[ further readings on the above topics: X X X X X ]]

I decided upon this full edit encompassing both the female and male aspects of Dean Winchester and Castiel’s relationships & sexualities because oftentimes when we’re looking into potentially queer characters we tend to focus on the same sex attraction and neglect the opposite sex attraction. Both are very important to acknowledge and compare, if at the very least to view where they may overcompensate, where toxic masculinity may come into play, compulsory heterosexuality, trauma responses, etc. Sometimes what a character doesn’t do is just as important to interpret as what they do do.

For instance, Dean Winchester. If we are to operate under the assumption that he is bisexual, any repression we witness throughout the series as to his male attraction is likely to be a result of his difficult upbringing, similar to most queer identifying people with childhood trauma. His father is a marine, the picture of manliness in which Dean himself blatantly embodies in an effort to impress and make his father proud in any way he can. Dean is already unlikely to seek out activities in any aspect of life of which might make John look at him in a different light (ie, in an every day setting, even simply watching Finding Dory- this is not something S1 Dean would have admitted to liking, but we see Dean in later seasons standing up for himself and his appreciation for it).

Is it perhaps for this reason that we see Dean as an overly blatant and flirty ladies man in season 1 when John is still alive, while this side of him steadily declines as the series continues? It even becomes established in season 3- in light of Dean’s fears surrounding going to Hell, he enters an attitude for coping that Sam recognizes- hypermasculinity, promiscuity, deflection. Heightening the idea that this caricature of himself that he embodies is a mask that he wears in order to cope with something else. He is donning the image he assumes others think he should fit into. Sam calls him out on this through the years, and eventually this becomes something we see in him less and less as he feels more comfortable simply being himself.

If we take into account the time of which this first season is filmed, this is 2005, a time where gay jokes were still funny and an overcompensating character was a joke attached to it. We see Dean built up in these first couple of seasons through this lens of jokes about a hyper-masculine character being mistaken for gay, however instead of this building up the masculinity to encourage a raging heterosexual characterization, this overcompensation is exactly what inadvertently sows the seeds of queer-coding. To queer watchers this reads as a deeply repressed character with childhood trauma who overcompensates when faced with observations of gayness and uses hypermasculinity to counteract these accusations.

It is through circumstances such as “Bugs” in S1 or “Playthings” in S2 that we first see these ‘jokes.’ The brothers are mistaken as a gay couple. Dean being the more “masculine’ of the two characters has a blatant reaction to these situations (Overcompensating), and Sam’s lack of a reaction is what solidifies his own straightness all the more. Neither brother is homophobic (this becomes established as time goes on) so why would either have a problem with this mistake? Sam wouldn’t care because he’s clearly not gay- in fact, he usually just laughs it off. Dean would care because he wonders what about him looks gay? Do other people see it too? Do they know? What’s wrong with him?

We also see another blatant example of this type of freakout in season 8. “Everybody Hates Hitler.”

(Images: “Playthings” S2xE11)

(Image below: S8 “Everybody Hates Hilter”)

We frame these situations in early seasons around girl of the week scenarios and brief bar flirtations. Have to make it clear that our manly straight character looks as manly and straight as possible. Dean is also in his 20s, he’s more carefree/not as traumatized yet, and he is a sexual man so he does sleep around quite a bit. What is notable, however, is how much this drops off in later seasons. As time goes on Dean seeks out less and less the fleeting encounters of one night stands, in favor of genuine connections- even if he himself frequently doubts his own ability to ever have a settle-down type of relationship or life. Lisa is the only long-term female romantic relationship Dean ever has throughout the series run, and this tentatively begins in season 5 and ends in season 6.

Dean and Lisa’s relationship is founded more in a dream of something that Dean wants to be rather than who he actually is. Although he loves her, their bond is made through trauma and their relationship overall is reminiscent of a soldier who returned home from war with heavy PTSD and begins to burden the family that he will come to realize he doesn’t quite fit within anymore.

Outside of this, his closest relationships from thereon out are between Benny, and Castiel.

Let’s start with Benny. Throughout season 8 Benny is framed as an ex and his relationship with Dean directly parallels Sam and Amelia’s. Both brothers must confront their relationships with their ‘significant others’ and decide whether to cut them off or proceed. Both brothers found these people under circumstances in which they did not get along with them at first but were pushed together. Another person comes in the middle of their relationship (Amelia’s husband for Sam, or Cas/Sam for Benny). The brothers each resent the other’s significant other or the circumstances surrounding the relationship. Sam hates Benny because he is a vampire and Sam does not understand why Dean continually trusts him (which is a circumstance inherently queer-coded in itself for comparability to an unaccepting family). Dean does not care for Amelia simply for the fact that Sam chose her over looking for him in purgatory.

Other instances we see parallels between Sam’s romances and Dean’s:

“Sex and Violence” S4 siren: Nick(Siren)/Dean parallel to Sam/Dr Lady

Season 4: Ruby/Sam and Cas/Dean teamup parallels

S1 Dean pulling Sam from the fire away from Jess vs S12 Sam pulling Dean away from Cas who may die approaching Lucifer to fight

Season 8: Dean/Benny vs Sam/Amelia. Dean and Benny, since they’re essentially going through a breakup, are directly paralleled to Sam and Amelia and their breakup. See “Larp and the Real Girl” for Charlie and Dean’s conversation about Sam’s recent breakup and Charlie picking up on the fact that Dean might also be going through one.

1x05 vs 8x07: Sam seeing Jessica on the sidewalk as they drive down the street vs Dean seeing Cas on the side of the road as he drives down the street

S11: Perhaps this one can be interpreted loosely and not necessarily romantic (esp on Sam’s end), but “O’ Brother Where Art Thou” both brothers are drawn to forces they actively fight against being drawn to. SamxLucifer and DeanxAmara.

S11: “Beyond the Mat” not a relationship but with crushes/infatuations. Dean with Gunner Lawless and Sam with Rio.

S15: Cas telling Dean that “We Are” real. vs Eileen being unsure what’s real and Sam kissing her and saying “I know that was real.”

S15: “The Trap” Dean loses all hope following the death of their friends and primarily Cas. Sam loses hope after Eileen’s death. Directly paralleled in the episode. (We also see Sam lose Eileen in 15x18, where Dean also loses Cas)

Additional parallels between Dean/Cas with anyone else:

Season 9/10: Cain/Colette vs Dean/Cas. “She only asked for one thing. To stop.” vs Cas asking Dean to “Stop”. Both circumstances referring to the Mark of Cain.

S12 “Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets” Lily (human)/Isham (angel) vs Dean (human)/ Cas (angel)

Led Zeppelin: This music means something within John/Mary’s relationship, which Dean directly acknowledges in 12x01 with Mary. We find out Dean has gifted Cas a mixtape of his “Top 13 Zepp Traxx” in 12x19. (the implications of Dean having made a mixtape for Cas, being its own point in a different discussion)

When Lucifer contacts a person to try and get them to open up to him, he uses their dead lover as a ploy. SamxJess, NickxSarah, VincexJen, DeanxCas - 15x19 when Lucifer calls Dean using Cas’ voice.

The parallels of unreciprocated love/infatuation. DeanxCrowley and CasxHannah. Dean likes Crowley but clearly not the way that Crowley likes Dean. Cas likes Hannah like a friend or sister, but she keeps putting the moves on him for awhile and he appears deeply uncomfortable and has to shoot her down more than once.

Parallels between Dean’s own relationships:

Dean in “Let it Bleed” torturing demons to find the location of Lisa and Ben vs Dean in Purgatory torturing monsters to find the location of Cas “The angel”

“The Rapture” opens in Dean’s dream which Cas visits and says he’s in trouble and gives Dean an address to go to immediately. “The Song Remains The Same” opens in Dean’s dream which Anna visits and says she’s in trouble and gives Dean an address to go to immediately.

S6 Dean dodging calls from Lisa vs S12 Dean dodging Cas at the beginning of “Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets” (notable also how Sam treats both circumstances the same)

S11: “Into the Mystic” 11x11 Mildred tells Dean the key to living a long and happy life is to follow your heart. Later in the season “All in the Family” 11x21 When Casifer is still captured by Amara, she puts her hand to Cas’ heart and is able to connect with Dean to contact him. Hinting at the link between Cas and Dean’s “hearts.”

Not necessarily a parallel but an observation. 7x01 when Cas is loaded up on God juice, and Dean has given up but Sam hasn’t and wants to talk to ‘the guy’, Dean says, “He’s not a guy, he’s God.” But in 11x18 Dean refuses to give up on Cas and let him continue to be possessed. Sam keeps speaking about Cas like he’s just a vessel and Dean says, “It? It’s not an it, Sam. It’s Cas.” Mostly this shows the development of their relationship and Dean’s willingness to continue to fight for him.

Dean’s dream world with Pamela in S14, she says to Dean “How come you only want what you can’t have?” and in S15 during Cas’ confession scene he says to Dean, “The one thing I want, is something I know I can’t have.”

Before we delve into Dean and Castiel specifically, let’s explore a few more things regarding Dean.

Let’s start with Cassie. This is Dean’s first romantic relationship we see on the show, and is arguably his first love. What is notable about her is her characterization and Dean in relation to her. We haven’t seen him in a relationship before, and thus this is the baseline to which we can draw how he is in this type of vulnerable state.

We see here that he is drawn to strong individuals. Cassie is a very strong willed character and can hold her own. She has a boldness about her. Dean appreciates that. We see similar in his next framed love interest: Jo Harvelle. Jo is another strong character, and though Dean sees her more as someone he needs to protect because she doesn’t have as much experience under her belt, he respects her intellect and strong will all the same. They connect through a love for hunting and mutual daddy issues. Personally, this is a relationship I view more as a little sister dynamic in a similar vein to Dean and Charlie, however this pairing is still worth noting because as it was written it was intended to potentially flourish into a romantic relationship. This did not pan out, though the seeds are still there.

Next up is Anna. Again daddy issues are a solid connection these two hold, and while this relationship is more of a one-night-stand than anything else, there are still important points to be taken from this encounter. The first is just how much Dean cares. We don’t see very many sex scenes with Dean throughout the series, but of the ones we do see, it is apparent that he is a gentle and tender man. He cares. About even a single night with a woman. (Cassie, Anna, Lydia ’The Slice Girls”) This is a contrast to Dean’s general persona of the masculine straight promiscuous lady’s man. He has all the bravado of a man who ‘loves em and leaves em’, but in reality that is not who he is. This is another example of the faces Dean wears in front of certain people (and what he thinks they expect of him), and the person he is once he lets that mask fall.

It may be important to note as well that Anna, (it is rumored) was originally meant to be more to Dean than this simple one night stand and connection. She was intended to become a romantic interest but, as it turned out, Dean and Cas had more chemistry so the arc that Anna was meant to follow was instead given to Castiel.

It is another year until the apocalypse comes along, Sam dies, and Dean falls back into Lisa’s lap. While Lisa is another strong-willed woman who rolls with the punches, her lifestyle deviates from Dean’s usual romantic interests simply because of her offering of a normal life outside of everything he’s usually known. A life with her is dipping his toe into a life he could have had if he didn’t hold the weight of the world on his shoulders and hunt the things that go bump in the night.

This is Dean’s last “official” relationship of the series. After putting Lisa and Ben in danger by being someone that he cares about, Dean accepts that he’s simply not a guy that can have a normal life or a normal family. He cares about people and they get hurt. This is a weight he holds on his shoulders for the remainder of the show. He loves someone, or more accurately, they love him, and they’ll get hurt. End of story. It doesn’t help that immediately following this, Castiel “dies” too.

Maybe it’s Lisa, maybe it’s Cas. Maybe it’s a combination of the two at this point in time, but Dean is never again the same when it comes to relationships after these events at the end of season 6. He becomes more cautious, tries to keep people an arm’s length away, and we even begin to see less and less promiscuity and flirting with miscellaneous women from this point on.

Let’s talk about Castiel.

Although Dean has had various queer-coded moments throughout the beginning of the series and up to Castiel’s entrance in season 4, his minimal relationships up to this point have all been with women. Simply exploring the evolution of this relationship from Dean’s side of the picture, Dean doesn’t start to truly warm up to Castiel until perhaps the end of season 4. He begins the season unsure of the angel, perhaps even a bit afraid of him, before the two garner a sort of mutual respect as Dean begins to see that there’s more to him than simply an agent of heaven.

They’re friends in season 5. The quirky, strange angel that doesn’t understand social cues, stands too close, stares too much, and says things like “we’re making it up as we go” and “tonight you’re my little bitch.” He’s a far cry from the ethereal entity that showed up in Bobby’s kitchen just a year ago and threatened to toss Dean back into Hell. What really turns the curve, however, is “The End.”

5 years in the future in the midst of an apocalyptic war, Cas is still around. He’s human and he’s stuck by Dean’s side through it all, even though this Dean is just a shadow of his former self. Then again, so is this Cas. But still, they stuck together. Dean isn’t used to that. He has very few people that have stuck by him for this many years. Could probably count them all on one hand at this point. Bobby and Sam at the top of the list. Everyone else either dies or leaves. And in this future, Bobby and Sam are dead, but Cas is still there.

Dean has abandonment issues. His mother died when he was four, his dad was in and out emotionally and physically his entire upbringing, Sam left for Stanford the first chance he got. He’s got strings of dead friends and lost relationships surely in tow for years at this point, and half the time Dean has become accustomed to pushing people away before they have a chance to push him away first. (Ie Cassie, Lisa, often even Sam too at times). Cas won’t make these issues any better during their run together, but up to this point Cas hasn’t let him down. The simple fact that in this one future universe Cas had stuck by him, I’m sure that makes a big difference to Dean and actually may be imperative for their relationship going forward and the trust that forms between them.

Something that becomes a large part of their relationship is Cas and Dean’s ability to have conversations with just their eyes. This is a shorthand that Dean is known to have with Sam on occasion, especially during times of combat. It takes a certain amount of intimacy and knowledge of the other person to be able to have a shorthand like this. The first instance we see this between them is quite possibly “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester,” when Dean convinces Cas that they can save the town. We see it again in the ‘beautiful room’ when Cas slams Dean up against the wall and Dean seems to understand what’s happening. Another instance, “The Song Remains the Same.” In a way, it’s a locking of eyes that just seems to say “trust me,” and they do.

Sam wonders if Anna may be right. If killing him and scattering the pieces will stop this whole Lucifer vessel business. Sam asks Cas, Cas looks to Dean, they share a look, and Cas shuts Sam down. In all likelihood that plan could have worked, but Cas wouldn’t do that Dean. He wouldn’t do it to Sam either but at this point he’ll do anything at all for Dean.

If we take a moment to consider Dean and Cas’ relationship here, it is unlike any of Dean’s previous ones. Dean never has this same kind of shorthand with any of his other relationships, save for possibly Benny to a certain extent. Cas is an odd guy, and Dean frequently describes him as such, but he finds it endearing (if “Free to be You and Me” is any indication this early in their relationship). The previous women in his life all had the same thing in common, that they’re strong willed, brave, and don’t put up with Dean’s shit when he’s being a shit. Cas does fit all this criteria, but he’s also someone that Dean has a hard time reading. Cas is so literal sometimes that Dean can’t tell what’s literal, what’s deadpan, and what’s just Cas’ personality as an angel. But at the end of the day, simply put, he likes him and he trusts him. Getting Dean Winchester’s full trust as quickly as Cas gets it is an anomaly all on its own.

Dean’s female relationships are fairly surface level. They’re easy and fairly uncomplicated. Boy likes girl, girl likes boy. Girl gets mad at boy, relationship ends. Easy. Expected. His relationship with Cas isn’t easy. But the big endgame relationships seldom are. There’s blood, loss of trust, rebuilding, and there’s a pull that at the end of the day always brings them back to one another no matter how incredibly messy things get.

And boy do things get messy. If we touch back into the end of season 6 where things end with Lisa and blow up with Cas, Dean is at an all time low in the relationship department.

Dean takes Cas’ betrayal hard. Breakups are one thing. Leaving Lisa was expected. It was bound to happen eventually. Dean always knew that somewhere inside. He mourns leaving them, but knows it’s for the best. But with Cas’ betrayal at working with Crowley, he’s devastated all over again.

Dean never expects his relationships to last forever, but again there’s a choice few people in his life he lets take up space on the list of those who might stick around. Bobby, Sam, Cas. I don’t think Lisa was ever on this list, as much as Dean wishes he could tell himself she and Ben were. But they weren’t. That relationship was a ticking time bomb. And when they nearly die because of his life and the creatures surrounding him every day, that’s the end of it.

Fast forward, season 7 is a time of mourning. He’s lost Lisa and Ben, he gets Cas back for all of 30 minutes before losing him all over again and never being able to repair that relationship. But he keeps the trenchcoat. Fishes it out of the lake, bundles it up, and keeps it in the back of every single car that he and Sam drive that year.

Dean doesn’t keep mementos. Not of Cassie, not of Jo, Not of Anna, or even Lisa and Ben. No pictures, no items, just memories. You know what he does keep? He keeps his dad’s leather jacket, Bobby’s flask, pictures of he and Sam and his mom. Is keeping the trenchcoat in the back of the car for a year similar to those familial keepsakes? Maybe. But it’s also more than that. It’s covered in blood and lake water, and I’m sure Dean would explain it away that Cas was family and that’s why he kept the coat. Probably even believes that too.

Then we have purgatory.

Dean prays to Cas every night. He could get out of that place just on his own, but he stays there for months in full combat just to look for the angel and get him out with him.

“First we find the angel”

“Cas, we’re gettin’ out of here. We’re going home.”

“Cas, buddy, I need you.”

“Let me bottom line it for you. I’m not leaving here without you. Understand?”

“Cas, we’re gonna shove your ass back through the eye of that needle if it kills all three of us.”

“It’s gonna work. Nobody gets left behind.”

When we meet Benny, Dean’s only other primary male pairing of consequence, he is not trusted. This team-up is one of strategy and a mutual goal only- at least at first. Dean and Benny fight well side by side, but the trust only runs so far. That is, until during one particular fight with leviathans in which Cas nearly bites it, Benny saves the angel’s life. This is the main turning point for Dean’s entire trust in Benny from here on out.

“Benny has never let me down.” Dean says later to Sam. And he never did. He saved Cas, got Dean out of purgatory, and then later on he gets himself sent back to purgatory just so he can help Dean’s brother get out of there.

Dean and Benny’s relationship was “pure” in purgatory. They didn’t have to worry as much about the fact that Benny was a vampire and Dean was a hunter, they were just brothers in arms who earned one another’s trust, respect and love. There’s no way you let a man kill you and send you to purgatory to save his brother if you don’t love him.

Their relationship once they broke out of purgatory is where things began to sour, not because of anything either of them did to the other, but more the space they let grow. Regular Earth was different from purgatory and these men had to go back to their roles and say sayonara. “What happened in purgatory stayed in purgatory” and all that. Benny was a vampire and Dean was a hunter. That kind of thing mattered here despite the fact that they did care for one another.

Dean and Benny’s tumultuous relationship in relation to the people in Dean’s life could be reminiscent of a queer experience in itself. A lack of acceptance from Sam, Bobby, Martin- Dean’s family. Not because of who Benny was, but what he was. Pair this with the already established fact that Amelia and Sam were a direct parallel to Dean and Benny, Season 8 has been one of the most blatantly queer-coded seasons as of yet.

Which brings us to “Goodbye Stranger.” It is established early on this season that Dean feels that there’s something wrong with Cas, something off about him. The fact that they don’t know how he popped out of purgatory is just one part of it. It’s in the way he acts, how spacey he is, the fact that he doesn’t answer Dean’s prayers. “I always come when you call.” Cas once said. And he did. Until now.

This is another aspect of their relationship which is simply there and not spoken about much- similar to their staring and eye communication thing they do. Dean started their relationship unable to read all of Cas’ quirks very well and unsure of the guy. Now, he’s fluent in the language of Cas. He knows by tone of voice, by shiftiness, by his expressions- when something is up. Maybe he started paying more attention after the whole Rafael situation until he could read Cas like the back of his hand, or maybe he just started paying attention just to pay attention.

He’s known something is wrong for months while Cas has been under Naomi’s control. Just the same as years later, he knows something is up when Lucifer is taking a ride in Cas’ body. And he knows in 12x15 just by the way Cas speaks on the phone that something is off with him.

They come upon the angel tablet in the crypt, and Dean does fight back when Cas starts in on him, but he spends even more energy trying to get Cas to come back to him and fight whatever force has him under control. He never once stopped to think that this was just Cas. “This isn’t you! Fight this!” Dean would repeat over and over as Cas beats him nearly to death.

There was a moment he certainly thought that Cas would kill him, and it seemed like he was more bothered by the fact that it was Cas that would do it more so than the thought of dying.

Cas breaks through the mind control, heals Dean. Then he leaves. So, again, Cas leaves. He keeps doing that to Dean. I stated before that Dean’s abandonment issues come into play in this relationship, but unlike at the beginning where Dean saw a future that Cas stays in, this Cas keeps coming and going. This makes it difficult for Dean to trust him fully, to rely on him. But the fact of the matter is that he does still trust him completely, and that’s what bothers Dean.

When Cas does come back again, collapsed and bloody in the middle of the street, Dean puts up a wall. He’s hurt and he’s tired. He doesn’t want to trust him as much as he does and he definitely doesn’t want him to keep coming and going without a thought. (What’s interesting to note here, though, is Dean’s change in character as this occurs through the years. Because while here he may simply give Cas the cold shoulder and not talk much about his hurt in this situation, we see later on in 12x19 after Dean has been fretting for days about where Cas has gone off to, and Cas finally does return, he voices his side of things. “With everything that’s going on, you can’t just go dark like that. We didn’t know what happened to you. We were worried, that’s not okay.”)

Naomi hits the nail on the head when she visits Dean after Castiel disappears and she notices Dean still hasn’t warded the boat against angels. It is moments like these that we realize just how much everyone else around these two also notice their chemistry and their deep devotion to one another, always seeming to fall back to one another.

“I think you have me confused with the other angel. You know, the one in the dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you.” - Balthazar S6

“The stench of that impala is all over your overcoat, angel.” - Crowley S6

“Castiel? Oh, he’s not here. See, he has this weakness. He likes you.” -Uriel S4

(to Dean) “Go ask him, he was your boyfriend first.” - Meg S7

“I have tiptoed through all your little tulips. Your memories, your little feelings, yes. I know what you hate. I know who you love, what you fear.” - The Empty S13

“And then after a rousing speech, his true weakness is revealed. He’s in love... with humanity.” - Metatron S9

“I’m sorry, did you just say that you lost a Winchester? Because, one, that’s... interesting. And, two, how is it that you lost Dean? I thought the two of you were joined at the... you know, everything.” - Kipling S14

“And for what again? Oh, that’s right, to save Dean Winchester. That was your goal, right? I mean, you drape yourself in the flag of heaven, but ultimately, it was about saving one human, right? Well, guess what? He’s dead, too.” - Metatron S9

“Don’t lose it all over one man.” - Hannah S9

“The very touch of you corrupts. When Castiel first laid a hand on you in Hell he was lost!” - Hester S7

“Oh, sweet. Almost anything. Castiel? He’s dead. All the way dead. Because of you.” - Miriam S13

“And then you’d kill the angel, Castiel. Now that one, that I suspect would hurt something awful.” - Cain S10

“He should know this- Lucifer, his favorite, isn’t doing so well. Say nothing of the vessel, your friend Castiel.” - Amara S11

“I’m gonna cure you of your human weakness, the same way I cured my own. By cutting it out.” - Isham S12

Bonus: Dean to Sam about Garth’s baby Castiel- Dean: “This Cas keeps looking at me weird.” Sam: “So kinda like the real Cas.”

It is time and again that opposing forces recognize the relationship between Dean and Castiel, and it’s commented on and used against them frequently.

As we move forward to the angels falling and human Castiel, this season opens up with dean in the hospital with a very ill Sam. The first thing he does before contacting anyone else is pray to Castiel. There’s a moment in 9x03 where Castiel walks into a church and speaks with a woman there. He expresses his lack of faith and she says, “I guess that’s why we pray. You need something stronger than yourself.” Dean never prayed until he started praying to Cas. He prayed to Cas during the apocalypse, in purgatory, when Sam was sick during the trials, now in this hospital. Dean might not have faith in God, but he does in Cas.

Castiel is human, and while Dean tears apart the grid trying to find him while angels are on Cas’ ass, he still watches him die, then has to kick him from the safety of the bunker the very same day. Up until this point, Cas has been a genuine part of their family regardless of their squabbles over the past months, but kicking him from the bunker damages that. Once the reasoning comes to light, however, Cas is forgiving immediately. He’d forgiven Dean even before that. That’s one thing about Cas that Dean never seems to get over either. Dean can get angry and take things out on him, kick him from the bunker, make stupid decisions and nearly kill himself, holler at him, blame him, but Cas comes back every time. He forgives him every time. It’s already overwhelming when Sam does this, but the ease at which Castiel consistently forgives Dean is a lot.

Dean gets the Mark of Cain. It’s a means to an end, he says. When he becomes a demon as a result, this is when his relationship with Crowley is deepened. This relationship is an interesting one because it’s essentially an unrequited example. Dean likes Crowley, and when he’s a demon he has a good time, but Crowley’s feelings appear to go much deeper- even if he tries not to show it.

It is very possible that Dean and Crowley’s relationship is a formation more as a result of a joke than anything else- where the writers are concerned. But whether that was the intention or not, this is a relationship that continues to affect Crowley’s actions towards Dean for the rest of the series. He doesn’t let Dean kill innocents as he’s a demon, he saves Castiel from certain death as his grace drains, he gives Sam the information to find Dean so he can be cured, and he aids in getting the mark removed from Dean even as Sam attempts to kill him in the process. In return, Dean gives Crowley the benefit of the doubt more often, and they share a sort of mutual respect. What differs here, however, from Dean’s relationships with Benny or Castiel, is Dean’s actions. It is clear that Dean doesn’t feel as deeply as Crowley does, so this is an interesting relationship to compare side by side with the others.

Not only this, but DeanxCrowley in these first few episodes can be seen as a parallel with CasxHannah. Two unreciprocated relationships which do not last long in this particular phase, but do result in a friendship within these pairings as time goes on.

Still with the Mark of Cain, Dean and Cain have a few things in common. Cain had said that his wife, Colette, before she died had asked him to stop. Stop the killing. It’s several months after that that Dean is going off the rails and Cas, behind Dean as he’s walking away, asks Dean to stop. He nearly kills Cas then, almost fulfilling Cain’s words just weeks earlier: “And then you’ll kill the angel, Castiel. And that, I suspect, would hurt something awful.” This is a direct romantic parallel written into the show.

When the darkness is released, Amara and Dean are immediately drawn to one another through some sort of connection as a remnant of the mark. This relationship is another interesting one, because it ties in to true desire and consent. Dean is drawn to her, yes, and she is sold as a sort of potential love interest this season, but Dean himself doesn’t want anything to do with her. He’s hypnotized when he’s around her, but as soon as he’s away this energy dissipates.

So in light of this storyline let’s talk about consent and the sexualization of Dean Winchester for a second, shall we?

Dean is an often highly sexualized individual. He plays along more in his younger days, but the older he gets the more frustrated he becomes with the whole situation. I’m sure there are more but here are some tentative examples (This is also something that happens to Sam a decent amount as well.):

Wendy at the psych ward in “Sam, Interrupted” kisses Dean

Pamela touching Dean’s inner thigh in “Lazarus Rising”

Ezra in “Time After Time” kisses Dean without consent

Gets turned into a vampire because he’s “pretty”

Pamela in “Dark Side of the Moon” kisses Dean

Almost becomes a vessel for Sandy’s mate in “The Thing” because she “enjoys looking at his face”

Amara kisses Dean in “O’ Brother Where Art Thou”

Mildred gropes Dean’s leg in “Into the Mystic” and continually makes advances even tho he’s uncomfortable.

Random girl slaps Dean’s ass in “The Last Call”

Ellie in S8 wants to sleep with Dean and even kisses him randomly

Meg kisses Dean as he’s being held against his will in “Sympathy for the Devil”

Granted, there aren’t a plethora of examples, but it’s still a lot and it is interesting to see how often Dean has been sexualized for someone else’s pleasure. It is bound to work into his characterization as well, and his sense of self-worth. He’s often described as the pretty one of the brothers, and seeing as he is the more promiscuous of the two, it is assumed that he welcomes all of or most of the attention that comes his way.

It is for this reason in particular that the situation with Amara is bothersome to me. Not only is Dean taken advantage of physically, but his mind is essentially hypnotized whenever she is near, not giving him total control over his actions or desires. Amara is in part meant to be sold as a romantic interest, but throughout the season Dean continually expresses his discontent. He’s even ashamed to admit these feelings to Sam and Cas, even though he knows it isn’t his fault he still feels responsible. (Which, if we think about it, this is could be a queer allegory too. The lack of choice, feeling shame, etc.)

What is notable, however, is the day that they attempt to capture Lucifer and speak to Cas to get him to expel Lucifer from his body. Amara makes a surprise appearance and captures Lucifer/Cas herself. Dean yells to Cas. This catches Amara’s attention and appears to confuse her, and even Lucifer, seeing as when Dean is around her he’s meant to have eyes for just her because of their “bond”. His link to Castiel appears to be stronger, however.

Amara uses this connection between Cas and Dean when she wishes to contact Dean, simply by placing her hand over Castiel’s heart. She says to Dean, “If you should cross paths, if (god) should reach out to you, he should know this - Lucifer, his favorite, isn’t doing so well. Say nothing of the vessel, your friend Castiel.”

If we backtrack a moment, Dean finding out that Castiel is possessed in the first place is a very emotional time for Dean. He doesn’t want to accept that Cas would make such a decision, put himself in that kind of danger, and choose to leave once again. Sam, the arguably more rational thinker at this current time, tries to rationalize that Cas may not come back willingly since he chose to let Lucifer in. “Not possible.” Dean says. It’s simply not possible that Cas doesn’t want to come back to them. It’s not something he can accept.

The next several episodes are begun with Dean either losing sleep trying to figure out what to do about Cas, or simply moping about. Sam has to comfort him each time. This is notable behavior as well, because Dean isn’t often one to wear his heart on his sleeve this frequently. Certainly he has his moments, but much of the time when he’s distressed he simply buries it all down and puts up a front. He doesn’t do that here. In fact, once they do begin to put together a plan with Crowley, Sam thinks they should still utilize Lucifer in the fight against Amara but thinks it’s foolish to move him into a new vessel.

((I actually counted up the mopey Dean scenes- between finding out Cas is possessed, to getting Cas back.))

There are four convos with Sam (multiple episodes) where Sam has to comfort Dean and say something along the lines of “we’ll get him back.” (Just as an aside, I don’t think there has ever been a scene in the series where Dean comforted Sam about Cas, it’s always Sam having to comfort a freaking out Dean)

Then, of course, there’s the scene where Dean comforts a victim and she says “I watched the man I love die. There’s no normal after that.”

There’s the “It’s not an ‘it,’ Sam. It’s Cas.” scene.

There’s Dean trying to get through to Cas when they capture Lucifer.

There’s the Dean yelling “Cas?” to Casifer when Amara is in the room.

There’s two more scenes where Sam comforts Dean again.

There’s “The Chitters” episode with the gay hunter couple. (This isn’t a direct relation, but more of an honorable mention because it seems abstractly relevant)

Amara connecting to Dean through Cas’ heart.

Dean freaking out about making it to Cas in time and again talking to Sam about it.

Dean asking “what about Cas?” as they’re planning the attack with God against Amara.

Someone has said once that you can tell that Dean is in love with Cas because Sam isn’t. It’s in moments like this that this becomes readily apparent. Yes, Sam cares about Cas, of course. But it’s just different than the way that Dean cares about Cas. When Dean cares about certain people, this love weaves into the very fabric of his being and he just feels it so completely and overwhelmingly, he can’t simply not fight for it.

“Dean, it’s a strong vessel, it’s held Cas for years, and we know what he’s been through.” Sam says.

“It? It’s not an ‘it,’ Sam. It’s Cas.”

Dean appears almost shocked that these words would pass through Sam’s mouth. He’s confused that Sam wouldn’t fight for Cas just as much as Dean would. The type of love they each have for the angel is just different. Visually, action-wise, reaction-wise. This conversation in “Hell’s Angel” highlights that.

You know what else highlights it? The fact that when they do trap Lucifer, it’s only Dean who gets through to Cas and talks to him to get him to come back and expel Lucifer. It’s Cas only seeking Dean’s forgiveness in S7 when putting the souls back in Purgatory. It’s Dean in S6 being the only one to defend Cas in “The Man Who Would Be King.” It’s Dean later in that same episode being the one to get through to Cas in the circle of holy fire. It’s “I did it, all of it, for you.” It’s Dean carrying around that trenchcoat for a year and mourning when Sam doesn’t. It’s Bobby checking in on Dean mourning Cas, but doesn’t check in with Sam about it. It’s Sam pulling Dean out of the apocalypse world in season 12 as Dean screams for Cas and physically fights against Sam to get to Cas. It’s Sam seeing Cas dead on the ground minutes later, but still able to walk away while Dean is frozen in place, frozen in shock. It’s Dean being the only one to wrap up Cas’ dead body. It’s Sam always having to reassure Dean that Cas is probably fine, whenever he goes missing for a little while. It’s Dean hardly able to function in S13 with this encompassing grief over Cas’ death and yelling “It got him dead! Now you might be able to forget about that, but I can’t.” It’s S15 when Rowena tells Dean and Cas to fix their quarrel before it’s too late, and later Dean in purgatory not sure of it is too late as he’s praying for Cas to be okay and crying against a tree.

Sam’s reactions are important to take into account. Sam cares, yes, but Cas isn’t as wholly encompassing in his life as he is in Dean’s. If anything else is to prove that, it’s the way that Dean grieves (I mean, if you were to put Sam in Dean’s place in 15x09 in Purgatory and their fight, there’s no way that Sam would react this extremely).

There are three different points to highlight Dean’s grief. The first is season 7 with the trenchcoat, which we’ve already talked about. The second is when Cas is possessed by Lucifer, which we have covered as well. The most damning, however, is Dean’s season 13 grief arc following Cas’ death. Dean also loses his mother during this time and a few other friends, but considering how he reacts when Cas comes back, a great amount of this grief has to do with Cas. Dean completely loses hope and faith in anything at all during this time. He hates Jack for giving Cas false hope and getting him killed. He doesn’t believe in their mission anymore. He doesn’t believe anything matters at all. “Right now, I don’t believe in a damn thing.” Dean admits to Sam. When Cas comes back from the dead, however, he pulls a complete 180. He has hope again. He has faith. And all of it begins with Cas.

Lastly, Dean never hooks up with anyone again after Castiel’s final resurrection. We can go through an outline of the steady decline of Dean’s hookups and relations outside of Cas as the decade goes, but during this three year window specifically, Dean’s only pairing is Cas. Sure, he might flirt with someone every now and again, but this never goes anywhere. (Arguably the person he flirts with the most in any episode in these final three seasons is Daphne, but idk if that even counts much considering she is a cartoon.) And as Pamela says once in Rocky’s bar: “Besides, you don’t want me. You just like to flirt. I’m psychic so I kinda know.” And that was just in Dean’s head anyways so it’s probably even more true than had Pamela actually said it herself.

When Jack comes in the picture in season 13, and Castiel comes back from the dead, this makeshift little family is formed. All three men act as father figures to this half-angel kid at different capacities, and amongst this dynamic another is formed a bit further between Dean and Cas. They’ve already been acting a bit as an old married couple in recent years (Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets, anyone?) but this co-parenting scenario they’ve found themselves in has solidified this dynamic all the more as they collaborate on the issues that arise with Jack. In “Lebanon” when John Winchester comes back for a brief period, John even says to Dean that he’d hoped he would get a family someday and get out of hunting and such. Dean replies, “I have a family.” Sam, Cas, and Jack are his family. Cas has been family for a long time, but here and now Dean just isn’t looking for anything else or anything normal. He’s happy with himself and the people he’s surrounded by. He’s not looking for anything else or anyone else.

For a change of perspective, let’s check out Castiel’s relationships over the years.

Unlike Dean, Castiel’s queerness and interest in Dean has been officially canonized. We can speculate all we want on the legitimacy of Dean’s love for Cas, but we can speak in certainties about Castiel. Castiel is in love with Dean Winchester. Speculation can come in when we consider, just how long has this love existed for him? Let’s start from the beginning.

Right off the bat when we meet Castiel, he’s a semi-emotionless soldier of heaven who works under strict orders and doesn’t have much free-will. Dean begins to change this. We can see even in their first couple encounters that Castiel is interested in Dean- in what he has to say, intrigue in the fact that Dean talks back to the angels (despite that these angels are unkillable beings and could smite him on the spot), the fact that he’s snarky and brave and questions everything. Where Uriel finds Dean annoying and blasphemous, Castiel finds the back-talk fascinating. Dean’s words impact Cas, and it’s not long before he starts to have doubts about Heaven. Following these orders blindly and unquestioningly starts to seem foolish when Dean puts things in a different perspective.

Even after Cas undergoes what some have funnily dubbed “conversion therapy” in “The Rapture” (when Cas had finally decided on going against Heaven and to help Dean stop the apocalypse) it’s still not enough to stop him completely. A bit more time with Dean and he’s convinced yet again to help this one human man stop the apocalypse with his brother. He even dies for him and this new mission of his.

Castiel throughout this first season is interesting because we see firsthand his struggle to understand beginning to feel emotions and accept thinking for himself. “For the first time, I feel...” He says to Anna. He wants her to tell him what to do. He wants orders because that’s all he knows, and he doesn’t understand why suddenly he cares. It hurts him to send Dean in to torture Alastair. It hurts him even later when in the beautiful room Dean dismisses him with a “What do you care, you’re already dead. We’re done.”

It’s possible that in these first several months, or even these first couple seasons, that Castiel follows Dean around and does as he asks because he’s allotted Dean as the new being he serves. Because serving is what he knows. But it’s also through this that he begins caring more and more. He learns more how to express certain emotions, he learns more about humanity, he learns more about what is important in life and what is worth fighting for. As Cas will admit himself 12 years later, “Ever since we met, ever since I pulled you out of Hell... Knowing you has changed me. Because you cared, I cared. I cared about you. I cared about Sam. I cared about Jack... I cared about the whole world because of you.”

We start to see sprinkles of this especially throughout season 5 as Cas begins to come to terms with caring and adopting Dean’s mindset to care. Consider Sam for a moment. He and Cas don’t necessarily get along a lot and mostly just tolerate one another in these early days. However, as we see in “Abandon All Hope” when Castiel is captured by Lucifer, Cas gets visually upset at the concept of Lucifer taking Sam as his vessel. “You are not taking Sam Winchester. I won’t let you.”

Sam and Cas don’t have much of a relationship at this point, but Cas cares because Dean does. In “The Song Remains the Same” not long later, he even refers to Sam as his friend.

By the time S6 rolls around Castiel is in the midst of a civil war in heaven entirely because he has adopted the Winchester’s all encompassing mindset on the importance of free-will. Castiel is making his own choices, and he does everything he can to protect the Winchesters from harm as he does so. He decides not to seek out Dean’s help while he’s raking leaves because Dean had already sacrificed too much in Castiel’s eyes. He raises Sam from perdition because he feels it the right thing to do. He re-sinks the Titanic to keep the boys from being killed by Fate.

Personally, I think Castiel has been slowly falling in love with Dean this entire time, he’s just not aware what this feeling is. But this becomes even more plausible to me when we get Castiel’s perspective in “The Man Who Would Be King.” Cas cares what Bobby and Sam think of him, sure, but all he focuses on is Dean. Dean’s happiness and ensuring he not sacrifice more. Dean’s loyalty even as Cas seems to be guilty. Dean’s words when they capture Cas in holy fire.

The problem is, their relationship this season is also rocky. Cas seems to think that he’s merely a tool at the Winchester’s disposal and not much else. But he doesn’t mind because he cares about them so much, so what do his feelings matter? He sees himself as their protector. Their guardian angel. A role he’s fine with filling regardless of how they feel in return.

But when things get bad, Dean says to him “Next to Sam, you and Bobby are the closest things I have to family. You are like a brother to me. So if I’m asking you not to do something... You’ve gotta trust me, man.” and Cas seems genuinely surprised at this admission. Emotional, even.

As time goes on, Castiel’s actions nearly primarily revolve around Dean

After Cas realizes his error and is sending the purgatory souls back to their place, he tells Dean repeatedly that he’ll find some way to redeem himself to him. That’s the most important thing to him then.

When Cas smites the demons outside of the mental hospital in 7x17, all of his flashes of memories coming back were memories of Dean.

Partially to aid Sam and partially to redeem himself to Dean, Cas takes on Sam’s Hell brain in the asylum and goes crazy.

Cas runs in purgatory to keep the leviathans away from Dean.

Cas breaks out of Naomi’s mind control/brainwashing because of his feelings for Dean.

Let’s talk about that final bullet point for a moment. The Naomi chapter is damning in “Goodbye Stranger.” It isn’t copies of both Sam and Dean that Naomi trains Castiel to kill hundreds upon hundreds of times. No, it’s ONLY clones of Dean.

“What broke the connection?” Dean will ask after Castiel heals him in the crypt and takes control back over his mind. “I don’t know.” Cas will say. It wasn’t the angel tablet. That may have unwound the last of Naomi’s control over him, yes, but he’d dropped that angel blade before that. It was Dean that broke that connection. Even if this remains unsaid, it doesn’t make it any less true. Maybe Castiel starts to have an understanding of what his feelings are and what they mean here, but he won’t be truly sure until he soon becomes human.

Before we get there, though, we’ll take a brief pause to explore Cas’ heterosexual explorations and connections.

First is Meg. Cas’ relationship with Meg is born of sexual exploration more than anything else at its conception. He’d just been watching porn in his downtime and when Meg kisses him, he goes with it enthusiastically. Later, he seems to have a certain infatuation with her in his “crazy” state, and seems to trust her perhaps simply because she had been watching over him in the institution.

This is interesting because in his “crazy” state, Cas is a lot more raw and unfiltered and optimistic than he ever has been before. He compliments her, is concerned with her safety, and trusts her. On the contrary, with Dean, Cas is a lot more hesitant and even fearful when talking about certain subjects with him because of his past failings. He tries to keep the peace without directly getting involved because his direct involvement in the past had failed them all so spectacularly.

He and Meg continue to have a sort of connection whenever they cross paths until her demise the next season, and he still holds a respect for her years later, continuing to use her nickname for him “Clarence” as an alias at various times.

When Castiel becomes human in S9, he’s a bit lost and overwhelmed. April takes him in for the night. Although this is a short-lived romance considering she tortures and kills him the next day, for a brief enough time Cas starts to become acquainted with human romance and sexual desire. He loses his virginity to her. It is estimated by some that this is merely sexual experimentation on the part of a very confused newly human Cas, and others have used this to say that Cas is not gay but pan or bi. The conclusion in any regard, in my opinion, is purely up to the viewer.

If I’m to offer my opinion, however, seeing as he has shown interest in both sexes, though remains unlabeled, I consider him simply an unlabeled queer person. Sexual identity and orientation has never seemed to matter much to Castiel, so I don’t see why it should matter to me. He loves who he loves, simple as that.

When we get to Hannah, she provides an interesting foil to Castiel for a time, and an emphasizing expression on just how much he’s changed since his introduction to Earth and the Winchesters. Where Castiel has been open to a plethora of new emotions and experiences through the years which have made him a bit more human than angel at times, Hannah is still new to humanity and the range and movement of emotions that come with it. Just how little she seems to understand proves how much Castiel has grown and does understand by comparison.

As such, he seems to pick up on the fact that Hannah has an attachment to him that appears to be forming into a romantic or sexual interest. He gently turns her down multiple times, not expressing interest in her behavior although he does respect her greatly as a person. Though this relationship isn’t considered romantic from Castiel’s perspective, its unrequited nature again is a good parallel to Dean and Crowley’s relationship at this same time. Angel x Angel and Demon x Demon. Both one sided.

Now, let’s get back to Dean.

Up to the point that Castiel turns human, for however brief a time, he finally gets a look behind the curtain of human emotion. Now, we all know that Cas is in love with Dean already here- and probably has been for some time. Years, even- but it’s my personal belief that during this time turning human is when he actually realizes it and understands where these emotions come from.

Maybe it’s the heartbreak of Dean kicking him from the bunker, maybe it’s seeing Dean again when he shows up in line at the Gas n Sip, or maybe it’s somewhere in between when he sees two people on the street looking at each other and realizes “oh, that’s love. I know what that is. I felt that, too.” And every moment from then on he realizes what that feeling was in his chest when he looked at Dean for a little too long, or why it hurt so much to see the pain in Dean’s eyes at something Cas had done, or why hearing Dean’s prayers to him just felt different than they did with Sam’s. Why everything that he’d done since he rebelled from heaven was in the name of doing the right thing, muddled alongside doing the right thing for Dean. Caring because of Dean. Caring for Dean.

It’s during this time when he realizes what these feelings are, that he also must come to terms with the fact that they’re unreciprocated (or as he believes, anyway). This is for two reasons. The first, he still believes at this time that Dean kicked him from the bunker just because. And the second, if there’s anything that Cas took to heart from Dean’s example as strongly as the concept of free-will, it’s self-loathing. He doesn’t see himself worthy of love. Dean doesn’t see himself worthy of love either. They’re both messy piles of self-loathing that breeds into a blindness to the depth of care they hold for one another.

Now that we’re on the topic of self-loathing, this leads into Castiel and his decision to become Lucifer’s vessel in season 11. Much like Dean, Cas has a consistent issue with seeing his own personal self-worth, so when the opportunity comes along to “be of service to the fight” and become Lucifer’s vessel, he takes it on easily. He considers himself expendable, and he won’t see just how much Dean struggles with this fact while he’s possessed. In fact, Cas never knows just how much Dean struggles with his absence at all, which is just one of the many divides between the two of them that could easily be resolved with communication, if either were ever good at that.

Once Lucifer is shoved from Cas’ body, however, Dean makes a point to let Cas know just how important he is in his life. He’s said Cas was family before, but that was before the falling out at the end of season 6. Dean makes it clear that he and Sam both consider Cas family, once again, during a ride in Baby. “You’re our brother, Cas. I want you to know that.”

Now, here, simultaneous heartbreak and love occur. Because while Cas is likely very much in love with Dean here, and very much aware of it, to hear that Dean simply thinks of him as a brother must ache a bit. However, we’re also talking about Dean Winchester, and for him to call someone a brother is an immense depth of love, probably the most the man is even capable of. Dean never says the words “I love you” to anyone, so this is about the closest anyone could get. Cas knows this, he’s well-versed in the ways of Dean Winchester by now. So, while it aches, his heart is also full.

Comparable to:

“We need you, Cas. I need you.” 8x17

“We’re gonna shove your ass back through the eye of that needle if it kills all three of us.” 8x05

“Don’t make me lose you, too.” 7x23

“Don’t do anything stupid”

The entire purgatory confession/apology prayer in 15x09

Cas returns this love just hours later, offering to go with Dean to die taking out Amara.

If we jump forward to the divorce arc of season 14-15, we can hit upon the next great heartbreak of Castiel’s sad little love life. While the Winchester brothers, Castiel, and Jack have all become a family unit, Castiel never wants to lose that. But two things happen. First, Cas’ deal with The Empty is made, and somewhere along the line, silently, he becomes aware that allowing himself to be happy, and that happiness, somehow involves Dean. The second thing that happens is Jack kills Mary Winchester, and Dean says Castiel is dead to him.

So, The Empty won’t take him, but his family is broken apart. Castiel never gives up on a single family member, though. That’s the thing about Cas. The same way he consistently forgives Dean for all his behaviors over the years, he never loses faith in anyone in this family. And when they come to reunite, he’s happy simply in appreciating any and all time they have together, however brief.

Then, in true Castiel fashion, he sacrifices himself for Dean Winchester in 15x18.

Their relationship has always left things unsaid, but I don’t think there’s ever been a question on whether Dean loves Cas or Cas loves Dean even if they don’t talk about it. You can’t look at Cas and Dean’s faces seeing each other again for the first time in weeks at the end of “The Last Call” and say that there wasn’t love and heartbreak there. On some level I think that Cas knew that Dean loved him back, but Dean was so buried in trauma at that point that it might take him years more to realize what he actually felt and what he needed. But Cas is such a selfless lover that he was absolutely 100% fine with just being around Dean for the rest of his life, even if he never got a chance to tell him how much he genuinely cared for him, and never got that reciprocation back. Castiel’s love for Dean is so pure and selfless it’s overwhelming to even consider, but for someone like Dean it would be a hundred times harder to accept or even fathom someone caring about him as much as Cas does.

So Castiel never pushes Dean further, never suggests, barely even touches him. The only liberties Cas takes are small touches to heal him (even though he doesn’t need to touch a person to heal them), a few small hugs through the years, just sharing comfortable space inside the impala, small moments watching Dean’s favorite movies with him, or sharing a moment over beers in the kitchen. And Cas’ happiness was in telling Dean how much he loved him likely because then maybe Dean would actually see how much he was worth. Cas wanted Dean to know how much he loved him and how he viewed him, because Dean deserved to love himself and was worthy of it.

The five types of love languages are as follows:

Words of affirmation

Physical touch

Gift giving

Acts of Service

Quality Time

One of the reasons Dean and Cas miss the mark with one another so often could simply come down to love languages. A lot of the time, what a person needs in love language is often what they also give. I don’t think this is the case where these two are concerned, though. They’re both so sacrificial that it’s difficult for them to accept this in return, even though this is what they each offer to the other and anyone else around them.

Both Cas and Dean’s giving love language is “acts of service” which translates into sacrificial actions much of the time, though it can also be more domestic than that as well. It’s Dean grabbing an extra beer for Cas or making food, or it’s Cas healing Dean without any prompting, Cas loading up on pie and beer at the Gas n Sip when Dean’s mad at him.

What they each need, however, is different. Dean needs “quality time.” He needs his people close, he needs them to answer calls, and he needs to know where they are. This clearly ties in to his abandonment issues, and it hurts his relationship with Cas significantly when the angel just keeps leaving, or disappears without answering his phone for days at a time. And when he dies, obviously. He always comes back, though. And half the time when he’s gone it’s because he’s trying to get a win for Dean against whatever issue the team is facing at the time.

What Cas needs, best I can tell, is “words of affirmation.” Cas has a consistent problem with thinking that he’s worth less than he is, and is less important to the people around him than he is. Dean obviously has this issue, too, but with Cas it’s somehow infinitely worse, if that’s even possible. Frequently, what he needs to get him going in low points is a few words from Dean or encouragement in general. To name a few:

“Maybe to fix it.” 7x17

“I’d rather have you, cursed or not.” 7x23, Cas then goes with Dean to find and kill Dick Roman

“I’m not leaving here without you.” S8 in purgatory when Cas wanted Dean to leave him behind but Dean was having none of it.

“You’re our brother, Cas.” 11x23, after Cas was possessed by Lucifer and thought he was expendable.

Over time, Dean does get a bit more vocal with Cas about issues he’s having or just with encouraging words as well. Cas, too, sticks around a lot more. They’re not perfect but they do begin to grow and work with one another in these later years to give one another what they need most to see how much the other is loved.

In conclusion, there is a significant amount of romance and sexuality written into this show, and simply interpreted as well. And that’s the thing, when a queer person says that they interpreted a certain piece of media as queer, it’s not up to someone else to say that they can’t, or shouldn’t, or that they’re interpreting something wrong. That’s the thing about media, it can have so many different interpretations and meanings to so many different people.

It’s my personal interpretation to see the queerness embedded in the text here. Maybe it’s not there for another person, and that’s cool too, just don’t tell me how I should see it. The fact is that it was written into the show to be interpreted, and interpret is what we did.

I’d love to hear any feedback that others may have regarding this. Any other theories, different interpretations, things I may have missed. I hope you enjoy the edits, and the endings I put together for them. We all need a little bit of happiness after that ending, so I hope it leaves you with a lighter heart. :)

Much love,

Taylor

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softtransbf · 3 years

Text

Mister Nice Guy, part 1

Summary: You’re new to the BAU and get along well with everyone, almost. You can’t figure out why the infuriatingly handsome Dr. Spencer Reid seems to hate you so much.

Word Count: 2222

Reader: Trans man, he/him pronouns, no physical description.

Warnings: Alcohol, brief description of a case and therefore murder. Nothing graphic.

(Part two)

~~~~~~~~~~

It was your first day at the BAU, and you were so excited. It took all of your willpower not to skip from the elevator to your new boss' office. You definitely caught a sideways glance from an incredibly handsome man with very expressive eyebrows, but you didn't let it concern you; you'd worked too damn hard for too damn long to let anyone bring you down today. You got to the door and knocked sharply.

"Agent L/N, please, come in," came a voice from inside the room. You took a deep breath and walked through the door.

You'd heard stories about Aaron Hotchner and the BAU- everyone had. Most people only heard the good parts- the heroic tales, the happy endings. But you liked to be prepared, to know the truth of what you were going after, so you'd also paid attention to the quieter whispers. The imposing boss who never smiles, the weird and maybe-pseudo-sexual relationship between the exuberant tech analyst and one of the profilers, the betting pool on whether or not the two female profilers were secretly gay for each other, true crime writer extraordinaire and profiling legend David Rossi leaving retirement to mostly be snarky, and the young agent with multiple doctorates who is smarter than seems humanly possible. You would never admit it, but you were particularly eager to meet the genius. He guest lectured once in your friend's linguistics class your last semester before graduating, and xe wouldn't shut up about him for an entire week. When you told xem that your transfer was approved, xe begged for "a full rundown on what he's like up close and personal" after your first case. But first, you needed to meet with SSA Hotchner.

"Please, take a seat." He gestured to the chairs in front of his desk.

"Thank you. It's a pleasure to meet you, sir." You thanked your lucky star that your voice didn't shake.

"It's a pleasure to have you. I heard nothing but the best about you from your previous supervisor. Officially, all the paperwork has gone through for your transfer, but I would like to ask a couple of questions before we get started."

"Of course, sir. What would you like to know?" One corner of his mouth ticked up slightly for a fraction of a second, and you counted that as a major victory.

"First and foremost, why are you interested in the BAU?" You relaxed slightly; you'd prepared for this question.

"Human behavior is nothing short of fascinating. Everyone is shaped by a unique set of experiences, but at the end of the day, we all behave in documented patterns. Everything matters, because it shapes who we are, but also nothing does, because we all end up in one of a finite number of 'shapes', so to speak. No one is the same, but we all exhibit set behavioral patterns. No matter what someone's gone through, at the end of the day, they are still understandable and predictable. I find that absolutely fascinating, and the work that the BAU does with that is incredible. I want to be a part of it, and I have the skill and drive to do so. After all, the BAU essentially wrote the handbook for Crisis Negotiation."

"That is a very interesting perspective, agent." His face was neutral, but you detected approval in his tone. "I only had one other matter to bring up- I see two different first names in your paperwork, and two of your references refer to you with different pronouns. Which name do you prefer, and what are your pronouns?"

You were floored; you'd never had a supervisor so casually look past paperwork outing you. "Y/N, sir, and he/him/his."

"Wonderful. Well, Y/N, welcome to the BAU. Let's go meet the team, shall we?" You nodded and followed him out his door into the meeting room, where the rest of the team was assembled.

"Everyone, this is Special Agent Y/N L/N. He has just transferred from Crisis Negotiation."

"Oh! New guy! Hi hi hi! I'm Penelope Garcia, just call me Penelope, and I do all the tech-y, research-y stuff." She made her way across the room to you as she spoke, talking with her hands.

"Pleasure to meet you, Penelope! I love the look you're rocking, by the way. Those shoes in particular are magnificent." You knew you were being the gay sterotype that you'd spent your career trying to avoid, but shoes that good could not go uncomplimented.

"Oh my goodness, thank you!" she said to you before stage-whispering to the rest of the team, "I like him! Let's keep him." The team laughed, and you blushed. It seemed that Hotchner had wordlessly passed on the duties of making the introductions to her, because she pointed to the agent closest to her, handsome-guy-with-the-eyebrows from earlier, and continued on.

"Okay, so, this is Derek Morgan, Emily Prentiss, Jenifer Jareau, but we all call her JJ, David Rossi, and Dr Spencer Reid." They all nodded, smiled, and/or waved slightly when they were introduced, with the exception of Dr Reid, who looked almost like he was looking at a puzzle. You chalked the feeling in your gut it gave you to first-day nerves.

"It's a pleasure to meet you all, and I look forward to getting to know you all better as time goes on." You were addressing everyone, but something about the way Dr. Reid was staring at you made it difficult to look away from him for too long.

"Wonderful! Now, as much as I wish we could all chit-chat and get to know Y/N better, we do have a case. Last night, a body was found in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park."

The case was interesting, twin injustice collectors, one more mission oriented, the other interested almost entirely on experimenting with different forms of torture on the victims. The former, over the weeks between kills, had started dating one of the local detectives, neither of them knowing of the other's involvement in the case. You were there when that information came to light at the killer's arrest, and you were able to diffuse the situation, ensuring that no one was harmed.

On the flight back, Prentiss insisted on the whole team going out for drinks to welcome you to the team. Hotchner declined, because he needed to get back to Jack, and Rossi said he had "plans with Tony Bennett", but everyone else agreed, mostly enthusiastically. It took significant persuasion from JJ to get Reid to agree to go out with you all. For the whole case, he was abrupt and distant with you, despite your best efforts. You knew it was silly, but you really wanted your coworkers to like you, so you decided you were going to do your absolute best to get him to like you by the end of the night.

"Hey, doc, first round's on me. What'll it be?" You'd noticed during the case that he shrugged off all of your attempts to start a conversation, but you figured that even he wouldn't ignore you under these circumstances.

"Uh, white wine would be great, thanks."

"White wine? At a dive bar? Does this bar even have white wine?" You'd intended to be charming, but, seriously, white wine? Who was this guy?

He opened his mouth, clearly indignant, but he was interrupted by Morgan chuckling from behind you both.

"That's why we go to this dump, newbie. It's the only bar in the area that serves white wine, which is all Pretty Boy here drinks." He winked at you and playfully elbowed Reid in the ribs.

You threw your hands up in mock surrender and chuckled. "Okay, okay, white wine for the good doctor it is. What's your poison? I'm sure word's gotten around that the first round is on me."

"You know, I might have heard something about that, and I most definitely wouldn't say no to a dirty martini." He winked at you, and your chuckle turned into full-on laughter.

You got the bartender's attention and ordered their drinks and a Jack and Coke for yourself. "It's a damn shame you're straight, Derek. Truly a crime against queer men everywhere, although I'm not so proud I can't admit that I'm a bit glad you're not competition."

"Wait wait wait, how do you know I don't like a little meat on the side?"

"So, sidestepping the fact that not all men have penises and some women do, you are so hetero that it's almost painful. Look around; men of all shapes and sizes outnumber women 2 to 1 at least. But you've spent the whole night making eyes at those women over there." You pointed to a table on the other side of the room. "Plus, I may or may not have received a very detailed string of texts from Penelope that essentially amounted to a crash course on all of y'all. I get a feeling that she might like me a little bit."

"My bad on the meat comment- I'll definitely fix that. And speaking of Penelope being a font of information, she's been uncharacteristically tight-lipped about you. What's your big secret, new guy?"

You raised an eyebrow and sipped your drink. "All you need to know is that Hotch, who strikes me as even more protective of this team than he lets on, which is really saying something, knows, and he cares less than any brass I've ever met. And I know for a fact that if Penelope thought it was concerning, she'd have at least voiced some suspicions about me, if not told you outright. I'm not ashamed of it, it's just none of y'alls business. Anyway, the blonde from the table you were eyeing earlier is coming over to see if we've been flirting this whole time so she knows whether to flirt with you or gush about how she's always wanted a Gay Best Friend oh my god. If I'm still here, it'll be both, and I'm allergic to that particular brand of cishet nonsense. Have fun, good-lookin'." You chuckled and patted him on the shoulder as you left, and out of the corner of your eye, you saw Reid roll his eyes, down his drink, and walk in the other direction. What is his deal? Whatever. I'm not about to let him wet blanket all over tonight. You took out your phone and sent out a couple of quick texts.

[To: Penelope]: Thank you for not outing me. It means the world to me. Let's get brunch sometime?

[To: Nerd <3]: you sure Reid seemed pleasant when he lectured? that has Not been my experience with him so far. you were right about him being Cute cute, though, damn. a Gay could get lost in those big brown eyes, and in different circumstances I'd climb him like a tree. shame he's Like That lmao

Looking up from your phone, you saw Emily and JJ nearby, so you went over to join them.

"Oh em gee Y/N you're gay? I had, like, no idea! We should, like, totally get brunch and then go shopping! This is gonna be so much fun; I've always wanted a gay best friend!" You rolled your eyes and laughed at Emily's terrible Valley Girl accent. "Unfortunately, I did not spend my time in the closet learning anything about clothes. I only dress halfway decently for work because my friend dragged me to the mall and updated my wardrobe when I applied for this position. It's all xir doing."

"Well, xe has excellent taste." You mentally filed away JJ's effortless use of neopronouns.

"I'll be sure to let xem know! I'm so down for brunch, though." You checked your phone. "Looks like Garcia is too!"

"Damn, you work fast. You'll fit right in here," Emily laughed.

"Honestly, I'm a little bit blown away by how awesome and welcoming you all are. Well, mostly. Is Spencer like this with every new person, or did I somehow do something to offend him?" Emily and JJ shared a look you couldn't quite read before JJ answered.

"Spencer…" she hesitated, "He's going through something right now. I'm sure he'll figure it out soon, and things will smooth out."

So you waited. Weeks passed, and you fit in well with the team. You ended up getting close to Derek and Penelope in particular, and you kept trying to make nice with Spencer. Weeks of cold shoulder and as few words as possible to you while being his normal, verbose self with everyone else. So, three weeks into your new job, on a night out with Derek and Penelope you made a decision.

"Look. It's been weeks, and the guy still won't say more than 5 words to me. I'm done trying to… I don't know what I was even trying to do," you slurred, you’d probably had one drink too many. "Make a friend, maybe? I don't even know. But I'm done. He wants to give taciturn bordering on rude? Then that's what he'll receive. Let's see how Pretty Boy likes a taste of his own medicine. No more Mister Nice Guy." You wouldn't remember the look they shared until much later.

And so, your silent war with Spencer truly began.

#spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x male reader #Criminal Minds Fanfiction #dr spencer reid #spencer reid #otp: pretty boys

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love-takes-work · 3 years

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Steven Universe: End of an Era: Outline & Review

I wrote this review in October but never got around to posting it here

Steven Universe: End of an Era is far more than an art book–it’s also a collection of behind-the-scenes material, stories about the experience of working on the show, planning documents and associated background info, and both older versions of developed concepts AND concepts that never made it into the show. It's a huge fusion of all those elements, and it's definitely an experience!

Some low-quality images are included with my review just to give you an idea of what’s there--it’s not a good substitute for getting your own copy, but here’s a tour!

Like the previous concept art book, Art and Origins, I'll be giving you a description of the structure and overview, while also collecting notable information for fans. Obviously just about everything is "notable" once again, but I'll aim for unique insight or perspective on the main source material, keeping the screaming about everything new to a minimum so you can also enjoy something for yourself if you pick it up. My low-quality photos should prevent people from feeling like I'm reproducing the book in any capacity. Please grab one while you can and have your own experience!

[SU Book and Comic Reviews]

OVERVIEW

The book is titled "End of an Era" for a couple reasons--obviously because it is released after the show has wrapped, but also because Gem history recently ended its "Era 2" and began Era 3--an age of prosperity and peace. The author--the person in charge of adapting all of this information into this slick, readable package--is Chris McDonnell, whose work was previously applied on the Art and Origins book.

The foreword is by N.K. Jemisin, a well-known science fiction author who's a huge fan of the show (and wrote a really excellent series that also has a weird geological connection, by the way).

And the cover, like its predecessor, is shiny and decorated with a beach scene featuring minimalistic characters--this time it's the Gems at night in front of the Temple, and on the back cover is a big pink leg ship in a cross-legged pose.

The interior covers are decorated with tons of amazing sketches of Steven and Connie on the front, and a bunch of Gem sketches on the back. Every interior page that most would leave blank is highlighted with some kind of sketch art or character exercise--it's so much to look at, so much to absorb.

The book is dedicated "For Eddie."

Its organization is different from the previous book in that it shares applicable work in chunks associated with groups of episodes rather than pertaining to different aspects of building the show.

FOREWORD

N.K. Jemisin gives us such a great introduction to the book--apparently understanding very well that the audience of this book is full of animation enthusiasts and adult fans more than it is full of kids, and explaining that bewildering journey some adults had from blowing this show off as a silly kid thing to falling in love with it hard and fast.

The important thing, Jemisin says, is being able to trust a storyteller with your heart. And it was clear to her that Rebecca Sugar knew what she was talking about and was saying important things about identity and the radical power that comes with accepting it and demanding respect.

Important also is how we handle heroes and who gets to be one in fantasy. That's part of the reason Steven Universe speaks to so many--because we see ourselves here, and know stories can be about us. Acknowledging the power we all have to MAKE THINGS BETTER with what we fight for is so important--especially if we're going to speaking to the next generation about it.

Highlighting Rose Quartz as a "born leader" who failed and Steven as a relatable scamp who did what she couldn't, Jemisin asserts that we can save the world.

1. END OF AN ERA

We start with an appeal to the audience to think about identity and the formative parts of our childhood--and how different it is if who you are and who you become is restricted, mocked, erased, or Not Allowed. Most people, if not ALL people, can relate to this, but for those of us with a special relationship with Steven Universe because of queer identity, this hits hard.

But it doesn't have to be anything grand to be something we respect--this show's authenticity comes largely from how personal everything is, drawn from real-life experiences and incidental truths from each artist's perspective, leaning hard on childhood and formative experiences.

Rebecca Sugar offers some interview bits to discuss writing philosophy and why "writing female characters" was difficult for a nonbinary person who'd been socialized as a girl and a woman. Rebecca has spoken before about how frustrating it is that marketing for cartoons was SO gendered when she was growing up (and to some extent still is).

The Gems in the story are all "she/her," but on their planet they're defined by their work, not by emotion or relationships (unlike women in our society), so having them be socialized opposite to how she was and be able to claim those emotions through choice and NOT as just an expectation "as women" was revolutionary. Rebecca wants her show to tell all marginalized people that they don't deserve to be in the margins.

Weighing in on other aspects of the show were Ian Jones-Quartey, Joe Johnston, and Miki Brewster. Ian describes feeling like at first doing SU was a thrill ride that meant they'd finally get to do all the cool stuff, but it quickly became a responsibility that he took very seriously--the need to tell a good story now that he'd been given a megaphone.

Promotional art, planning documents, character sketches, and concept art from the lighthearted to the stone serious is included, along with some very cool (sort of famous) timeline charts that track major characters' developments. It's emphasized by Rebecca that the developmental materials ARE NOT CANON (and especially are not MORE canon) compared the final show.

There are concept sketches alongside final art for Aquamarine and Topaz in "Wanted" (with Topaz labeled "Imperial Topaz"), the Zircons in "The Trial," Blue and Yellow Diamond, and the Off Colors (including Pink Lars).

And there's also a spread of "the two sides of Steven's life: Gem Magic and Rock N Roll" featuring Sadie Killer and the Suspects (referred to as "Buck's band")--as well as a cool "Crew Cameos" key and some concepts for short-haired Connie.

And then there's some more "finished" art with stills alongside concepts, including some background art, revision, and really cool "fairytale" art from some of the shadowplay storytelling bits. We get "Lars of the Stars," "Jungle Moon," and "Can't Go Back."

2. THE BEGINNING OF THE END: A SINGLE PALE ROSE

In discussing the huge reveals and Gem mysteries in the show, the pacing is examined, and emphasis is put on the intended "slow burn." One of the most difficult things in the show was to strategize so that every piece that was needed to support another piece in the future was placed properly to seed what it was supposed to.

Some of the ideas they developed were more of a group effort and were fit together collaboratively (like Amethyst's being younger than the other Gems and Jasper being from Earth), while others were intended from the beginning based on Rebecca's vision (the fundamental idea of Pink Diamond's true identity, for instance, as well as Obsidian's design and sword and our Pearl not being Pink's first).

The writing process gets a great deep dive here, including fun tidbits like how the orb in the moon base was inserted by Joe Johnston and they literally had no idea what it was for when they wrote the episode. They repurposed it when they figured out what they needed.

Rebecca credits her detailed timelines for helping keep the order straight, and discusses how other artists are sometimes flabbergasted that a storyboard-driven show can have this much detail and continuity and yet not get wrecked by the free non-scripted boarding process. But Rebecca and the Crew valued that approach and loved the way fresh eyes would handle an idea, making it come back alive, entertaining, vivid.

Several Crew members weigh in on the writing process. Lauren Hecht refers to making lots of incorrect guesses despite being on the inside. Joe Johnston recalled getting briefed on his first day and getting so excited to start working on this massive project.

Miki Brewster remembered being told Rose Quartz is Pink Diamond and being shocked--and also confused about why Ruby and Sapphire would need to be married if they're already basically married. Drew Green talks about being brought in late and getting to watch unaired episodes and a rough of the movie while eating cereal.

Ian Jones-Quartey complains about Pink Diamond's real jester-like form being leaked to the internet through a Hot Topic shirt. Rebecca piggybacks on that and says it was upsetting that the wedding was leaked because of toy fair keychains featuring Ruby and Sapphire in wedding attire. They'd always be worried about leaks, and sometimes Rebecca struggled not to talk about the reality of Pink Diamond before the reveal because she knew it would make so much more sense once the truth was out. And everything associated with Rose makes more sense once you know she's Pink--especially what happened with Bismuth, considering what we know about how Pink Diamond has a habit of treating anyone who no longer serves her interests.

When it comes to visual cues, Rebecca also talks about intentional designs to create a feeling of unity between concepts, like the flower shapes on Pink Diamond's palanquin lining up with the poofs of Steven's hair and the star imagery of the series. Steven Sugar and Mary Nash discuss how the Human Zoo incorporated this imagery, trying to look like Homeworld with a Pink Diamond touch.

Steven Sugar, as a game nerd, liked to throw in video game references from old and modern stuff to feel like he's inserting what he's enjoying and who he is from moment to moment, while Mary Nash, who related to Sadie as a basement-dwelling young person with cult interests, liked to include stuff from MST3K and cult movies. Pearl's hand gestures get a spotlight too--her reflex to cover her mouth when Pink Diamond was being discussed was analyzed here.

A "Top Secret Visual Timeline" from 2016 is included which tells us some Diamond history. It has an earlier version of Pink Pearl's fate and does not include Spinel since the movie hadn't been greenlit. The timeline includes the birth of the Diamonds, the emergence and major story beats for each major character, and some philosophy of the driving force behind each.

We're told that Pink Diamond straightened up, behavior-wise, after she lost her first Pearl, and that Yellow and Blue wanted to give her a planet but White only agreed to it to prove she would fail at managing a colony. Pearl, meanwhile, is so confused to have a Diamond who keeps asking her what she thinks when she doesn't believe she should have opinions.

And when Pink moonlighted as Rose to start conflict, she found herself leading an army to fight Pink's troops--then Yellow's, and eventually Blue's too. Lapis is said to be waiting for the conflict to end on Earth so she can terraform, but she gets trapped instead.

Pearl's love story with Rose is described as "an endless honeymoon" where she's free to love her, while Rose's is more like "I'm now the head of the family and I'm going to give everyone what they never had, so everyone is super special!"

Jasper is described as "adopted" into Yellow's army as the only successful Beta Quartz. And White Diamond knew that Pink Diamond was not dead--she thought she was just running away from home like a brat and would eventually be back.

3. THE HEART OF THE CRYSTAL GEMS

Now we discuss Rose Quartz--the original Pink Diamond. How she was selfish and selfless, never enough and always too much, and how Greg was her first partner who "challenged her" to be an equal. Rebecca describes Rose as being delighted by the idea that both she and Greg reinvented themselves, but when that leads her to want to share her past, Greg isn't interested--he only wants to know who she is now, and doesn't consider the old her to be her.

Rebecca likes Carl Jung's concept of "enantiodromia," which is the idea that extremes lead to their extreme opposite. This is demonstrated in all of the Diamonds. This narrative is interspersed with drawings of Greg and Rose being cute.

But another "heart" of the Crystal Gems is its relationships--particularly, Garnet, the fairy tale romance embodied. More psychological theories are discussed with regard to differentiation in a relationship making the relationship stronger, and how they made sure that happened for Garnet during the appropriate arc. Rebecca has struggled with the idea that she, like Ruby, went straight from a "family" group to a living-with-others situation and never lived by herself. But she also learned that you can in fact develop as a person in the context of a relationship--you don't have to be alone to do it. Ruby learned that too, and chose on her own terms to be with Sapphire.

The wedding made so much sense to Rebecca and the crew that they couldn't imagine a wholesome couple like Ruby and Sapphire not having a wedding episode. They wanted it for years: The wedding concepts always included the tuxedo for Sapphire and the wedding dress for Ruby.

But pushback (often blamed on the conservative standards of the international market) led to negotiations trying to keep Ruby and Sapphire's relationship from being explicit. Rebecca and the Crew were very tired of this double standard, and they were especially irritated by attempts to claim a wedding wouldn't be well received by a core demographic or wouldn't make sense for Steven's character. But other shows had done weddings and Steven had been established to love weddings already.

Rebecca kept adding more elements to the wedding episode to answer all the concerns, but she didn't want to back down from explicit marriage between these characters. They deserved it. And the audience deserved to see this as wholesome, like any other cartoon wedding. Eventually they got their way and were allowed to have the wedding. But the ordered episodes were also coming to a close without promise of more, so Rebecca had to request more episodes to be able to wrap up the storyline!

And of course, there is Steven, the true heart of the team. A very interesting aside discusses Garnet's leadership and how the network pushed the Crewniverse to acknowledge Steven as the leader. This was successfully resisted throughout as well--because Garnet is the leader (unless she's incapacitated, of course). It's fantastic that this concept was preserved because too often a young male chosen one is elevated above people with more experience and knowledge because of that chosen one tradition, so it's really nice to have a show acknowledge that team leadership is more appropriate for an adult.

4. ERA 3

Beginning with a discussion of the Diamonds, this chapter deconstructs the dysfunctional "family" of the Diamonds (who are said to be based on tropes about evil stepmothers and stepsisters), with the thread of dysfunction originating with White Diamond.

Yellow is physical, Blue is emotional, White is judgmental, and Pink is impulsive. Some philosophy on why Pink is naturally manipulative and why she clashes so much with White is offered.

White believes her identity is to be imposed on all because she is the pinnacle of what should be--and therefore, she has the right to make decisions and statements about and on behalf of everyone. But her secret is that she can't do what the others do--act or feel or want. In trying to be everyone, she is no one.

And this becomes very important when she confronts Steven about his identity and turns out to be wrong. The triumph of Steven being totally, fully himself is a beautiful, simple revelation that's described as far more satisfying than the theories about Pink living inside him or Rose returning from his Gem.

Also discussed is Gem architecture. A lot went into this idea, and Steven Sugar weighs in to say he had to think of what it would mean for a world to have buildings but serve no human needs. That's why it's mostly focused on transport and storage. Even the broken planet is meant to indicate a place stripped for its resources, and everything serves a function that is meant to avoid looking like the human equivalents.

And there's another layer, too: a difference between Era 1 and Era 2. Era 2 became more functional to hide Era 1's broken bits, and older Homeworld buildings still have some "ornate and ancient" feel to them. And the fact that props, tools, and even walls and doors could be living was taken from a concept Rebecca thought was horrible from old Busby Berkeley movies, where people were inanimate objects and it was portrayed as lovely. Tom Herpich helped conceptualize these living objects.

Steven dealing with "princess tropes" is discussed here too. The Pebbles (worked on with Pendleton Ward) were sort of his Cinderella's mice, and all the locked-in-a-tower, having supportive tiny friends help you, getting princess clothes made, attending a ball, having to mind your manners stuff was intentionally related to fairy tales.

The point of doing that (besides fun) was to easily invoke the feeling that Steven was being made to be someone he's not, and that he was being treated like THIS is who he really is when it isn't. White Diamond as the "evil stepmother" is discussed with regard to her detailed features and massive scale. They generally didn't put fingernails and eyelashes on characters (especially not to indicate that they were women or girls!), but they decided White would get all of these feminine markers for tradition's sake.

Rebecca also invokes several other references that were included and describes the princess tropes as "chipping away at his integrity" setting him up for the final challenge with White.

There is again tons of concept art: Homeworld architecture, Pebbles, Diamond diagrams, background Jades and Lemon Jade Fusion, Comby, Diamond extraction chambers, and White Diamond.

5. CHANGE YOUR MIND

Now we finally begin to discuss Steven's identity. The "Perfect Steven," discussed in several interviews before this book's release, was an idea back in 2013; the "ultimate Steven," beefed up and shonen-looking, was far from perfect because OUR Steven is perfect, while this alpha hero Steven idea (used in Steven Universe Future) didn't belong being idolized in such a show.

They thought about having Steven fall apart into organic half and Gem half early in the show (during "Giant Woman" after a successful fusion and unfusion, even!), but they didn't try the concept until the last episode. They didn't want the "Pink" Steven to be portrayed as "better" even though he would be more powerful, so they decided he isn't whole without his organic self and he's just as much of a shell as the organic half. They absolutely did not want any ending that required Rose to be inside him or waiting to come back. But the debates were fierce--what DOES it mean to have Rose's Gem?

Ian Jones-Quartey brings in an anecdote about his own family to emphasize some of the immigrant themes that inspired aspects of the show. He had a brother who reinvented himself elsewhere away from family without resolving issues, and all the ramifications of that were explored in the show through Rose Quartz. (He is careful to say he doesn't think his immigrant experience is like being from another planet!) But he did say you can hurt your old family even if they were toxic or didn't know the real you, and you can hurt your new family by hiding your past. The Pizza family of course was also a more direct reference to Ian's Ghanaian family.

In talking about the new Fusions from this episode, Sunstone is largely described by Miki, who also got to board the Sunstone section. Sunstone was described as a cool 1990s character and the evolution just continued into making them a fourth-wall-breaking PSA dispenser. Obsidian is also discussed, with their sword being an early concept. Steven Sugar said they totally knew it would be forged in action. Obsidian being similar to the Temple design is of course another very early detail.

The story of how James Baxter got involved with one of the final scenes (Organic Steven and Pink Steven fusing in front of White Diamond) was shared. His family was fans of the show and Rebecca Sugar took the time to drive to a birthday party for his daughter and give her a drawing. He then owed her a favor, and this was it.

Concept art is again included, this time with sample boards, promo images, a Diamond fight concept, costume design changes for the Gems, new Fusions, the so-called "Mega Diamond" ship conglomerate, some scenes from the White Diamond confrontation, Pink Steven, multiple pages of James Baxter animation, corrupted Gems and their healed selves, and photos from the "Change Your Mind" premiere and some awards. The show has won one design-related Emmy, a Peabody Award, and a GLAAD award.

6. STEVEN UNIVERSE FUTURE

The book doesn't cover the movie because it got its own book, but dives right into Future. Ian Jones-Quartey emphasizes that the movie and Future are separate and different from the original show, which ENDED. After all, after that, Steven has a neck!

Some new names are invoked now: new writers Kate Tsang, Jack Pendarvis, and Taneka Stotts. They were excited to have Steven make HIS OWN mistakes instead of trying to clean up someone else's! Now, instead of doing the usual shonen anime thing and having the final battle be a big physical rumble, Steven has to make peace with himself and take an active role in coping with what all the fighting has done to him and what effect it's had on who he is (and who he wants to be). There is no sudden "I love myself!" answer, either. It's always a process.

Drew Green and Maya Petersen, who came on board as storyboarders officially in Future, also weighed in on writing for a "mature" show, how to deal with Steven being a "moral compass" while being sort of unreliable, and what they learned as Crew that they didn't know as fans. Drew didn't know Garnet never asks questions. Jack didn't realize the show never deviated from Steven's point of view. Taneka was nervous but excited to collaborate. Kate was worried about how established the show was and what to do as a new writer to contribute appropriately.

Maya was on the old Crew but not as a storyboarder, so felt like some of the "old" ideas ended up not being appropriate for the "new" Future in an embarrassing way--and dreaded the idea of dealing with Steven's emotional problems when they were similar to stuff she'd been through. She also was personally behind the idea of Steven wanting to dump his problems by becoming Stevonnie, and got to work with Etienne Guignard on inventing the Pearl creation backstory with Volleyball.

There's some discussion of "depression hobbies," stress, and the show's pacing. And they say Etienne was entertaining at pitches. There's even some discussion of how Greg is taken off a bit of a pedestal because his terrible restrictive life in the suburbs sounded wholesome to Steven and Greg presented it negatively.

And then there is some information about how the Crew felt behind the scenes due to fan reactions and negative press. Ian discusses feeling offended when the Black characters are described as bad examples, as if their cartoonized but realistic-in-context features are automatically caricatures.

Rebecca Sugar felt beaten down by some of these narratives and began to access mental health services, inspiring some of the content of "Mindful Education." A long reflection from Rebecca discusses people's infighting about her show and what she had a responsibility to show or not show in the story. She learned a lot about bullying from Cartoon Network's anti-bullying program and learned that bullies thrive on whatever attention you give them--unless it is made clear to them by a peer group that no one is impressed by their cruel actions. Also, not all negative feedback is bullying. Constructive criticism is different. Self-awareness can help you avoid internalizing what bullies might do or say to you.

Segueing from the discussion of how people are affected by and connect with the show, we then discuss how they chose as a team what should be covered as the show came to a close. They didn't have time to do quite a few stories they wanted time for, like a Rhodonite story, a Lars side story, and Diamond "prehistory" and religion; all of it was put aside for the main arc with Steven.

They thought people would find those stories about Homeworld and Off Color history very interesting, but so much of the show had been about Steven's Gem adventures, so keeping him mostly on Earth seemed appropriate. The acknowledgment of his battle damage, of his trauma, was necessary and real, and helpful in an important way to the core audience.

Oh, and there was some stuff about a cheeseburger tree. Don't ask.

In discussing the "reverse escapism" of the original show (Gem aliens are intrigued by everyday human culture, and realism is necessary), Rebecca says her views have changed on escapism and gets why some people want a soothing feel-better show. She acknowledged also that her own escapist dreams-come-true fulfilled in the show didn't feel like escapism because they were givens to the majority of mainstream culture, but were never guaranteed to marginalized people.

Rebecca ties in her several-times-told story about "Love Like You" and how the middle bit was when she didn't feel she was worth looking up to, and the realizations she had to tie the beginning to the end. Feeling like someone will like you less if they know you more is terrible. So sometimes a show like this can be helpful in telling people that they belong when their fantasies are things like "I want to be loved" and "I want to know I exist."

In Future, Steven has to connect to who he is and love that person--and understand that person enough to finally feel that even if he's not fixing their problems or saving their world right this second, Steven deserves his family's love and support, and they WANT to give it to him.

There's a huge amount of supplemental material in this section so there's no way I could name it all. The charts for Future's timeline are pretty straightforward, though a few episodes like "A Very Special Episode," "Why So Blue," "In Dreams," and "Bismuth Casual" aren't specifically represented and a couple are in a different order ("Prickly Pair" was conceived as happening after "Fragments" and "Homeworld Bound").

Steven feeling like a monster, having intrusive thoughts, having not forgiven the Diamonds, and getting help/moving on--it's all there.

We have keys, color scripts, and boards for the new opening and some various backgrounds and storyboard art from episodes. Model sheets for Shep, Nice Lapis and Mean Lapis, Jasper, Steven Tag Gems, Pink Steven Powers, Monster Steven. New house concepts, Era 3 Homeworld concept art for the Diamond environments, and background art for the Reef.

New Connie and Greg designs. Concepts for Mega Pearl, the Rose Quartzes, Bluebird, and Morganite (who didn't get used). And there are some photos from recording and the conference room. There are even some extras from "Crossover Nexus," the crossover with OK K.O.!--including an unused cut scene that included Ruby and Sapphire fighting. The rest of the book is a bunch of adorable Crewniverse art--extras, blog drawings, promos, and gifts to each other.

NOTABLE

The first timeline chart in the book features a cool sketch of the original Off Colors, which at the time this planning document was drafted included unused Off Colors Flint and Chert.

We knew of their existence already because of an episode of the podcast, but these two unexpectedly appeared as incidental characters in the Steven Universe Future episode "Homeworld Bound," identified only in the credits. Sad to think that instead of banding with the Off Colors, these two were probably shattered for their crime (being Quartzes who don't want to fight) and that's why we see them being repaired in this episode. Later, there's some brainstorming for types of Off Colors and "a Ruby that wants to wear limb enhancers" is mentioned as well.

It looks like there was also originally more juice to the story of tracking down the events of the war culminating in Pink Diamond's assassination.

One of the timelines talks about Steven thinking it makes sense that Pearl can't talk about her involvement because she might have been a double agent, explaining why Rose Quartz always knew what Pink Diamond was doing. It seems like that bit was supposed to be included in Garnet's version of the story she believed in "Your Mother and Mine." Seems like they originally conceived Garnet's story to inspire the Off Colors to become pirates and freedom fighters, though in the show's canon this storytelling happened after Lars had already reinvented himself the way he did.

Sadie was also supposed to be sending letters to Lars via Steven, which is funny since the "Letters to Lars" episode is just a montage Steven letter. And of course it's specified that Steven was supposed to get Pink Diamond flashbacks by going to the Palace on Homeworld.

The second chart in the book makes references to Sadie's reinvention of herself as a parallel to Lars, Greg, and Pink Diamond all doing the same thing, and how positive it is to embrace such a thing--a version of yourself that YOU create.

I love that Yellow Diamond's arm ship arm-wrestling the Cluster was always part of the plan.

There's some more explicit direction to have Connie help Steven understand the Diamonds as "strict parents," and a lot more emphasis on everyone realizing Rose had been inspired by THEM rather than them all following her.

White Diamond is presented here as if she thinks of Pink Diamond as a "daughter" (whom she now understands she has "lost"). There are notes on how the Diamonds have a responsibility to their children and should attend to it before just continuing to make more.

One of the concept art images for the Off Colors features Rhodonite crouching by Padparadscha saying "Don't worry, I won't let them hurt you." It's very interesting because she DOES seem to protect Padparadscha in the show, but doesn't seem confident about it in her final version, even though it does seem like she'd be "programmed" to guard aristocratic Gems because of her Ruby and Pearl makeup. Cool.

A "Crew Cameos" spread was included, which is of great interest to some of us who loved seeing the Crew insert themselves into the show. Not every SU Crew person who's been represented in a crowd was there, but this crowd included Amish Kumar, Kat Morris, Amanda Winterstein, Angie Wang, Lamar Abrams, Emily Walus, Mary Nash, Joe Johnston, Christy Cohen, Danny Cragg, Hilary Florido, Danny Hynes, Matt Burnett, Ben Levin, Elle Michalka.

The official national flower of South Korea, Hibiscus syriacus, is the name of Pink Diamond's flower.

One of Steven Sugar's comments about the silhouette difference between humans and Gems points out that humans have ears. This seems to be pretty good confirmation that they are not supposed to have ears, despite that sometimes we'll see ears drawn on them in some frames.

Rose Quartz/Pink Diamond is characterized in this book as "self-hating" in a really interesting way, saying that because she believed she was not capable of compassion, she practically worshiped those who demonstrated that ability and thought they were so much better than her--which is described as "intoxicating" and resulted in others being drawn to her. How interesting is that!

Timelines reveal that early plans for Pink Diamond's first Pearl originally had her getting destroyed by Pink during a game, and then her destruction was rewritten as a punishment from the Diamonds after Pink Pearl defended Pink Diamond to the other Diamonds. They went back to the idea of her getting hurt by Pink for the final version, though the cracked face and control by White Diamond was not on the agenda until they started writing "Change Your Mind."

10.

The approximate ages of the major characters, based on emergence, are revealed on these timelines. It begins with a cracked-planet-looking graphic depicting four tiny Diamonds emerging at 20,000 years ago. Some suspicious "blacked out" redacting surrounds a long timeline tail that goes back before that, which may mean there are secrets they still don't want to reveal. But the dates go like this:

20,000 years ago: The Diamonds emerge.

11,000 years ago: Pearl is custom-made for Pink Diamond.

8,000 years ago: Sapphire emerges (on Homeworld).

6,000 years ago: Ruby emerges (on a colony).

5,750 years ago: Garnet is formed.

5,600 years ago: Lapis is poofed and put in the mirror.

5,200 years ago: Jasper emerges (on Earth).

5,050 years ago: The Cluster is planted.

5,000 years ago: Amethyst emerges (on Earth).

4,500 years ago: The Crystal Gems found Amethyst.

3,000 years ago: Peridot emerges (on Homeworld).

40 years ago: Pearl found Lapis's mirror at the Galaxy Warp.

And of course we know 14 years ago Steven is born!

11.

Originally the Diamonds were based on a quartet of themes: Love, Fear, Pride, and Sorrow. It got too complicated to keep and it was abandoned, with Pink's identification of "love" being described as "particularly outdated."

12.

Notes on a sketch say that Pearl was inspired to become bold and unashamed because Pink's questions drove her to have opinions, and it's said that Rose "fell in love" with her boldness.

13.

Rebecca tells the story of driving off a ridge and getting stuck in the desert, comparing this to Ruby's tumble during her Wild West adventure and using it as inspiration. She's told this story before but here it is in print. She also included the story about using the flowers from a friend's wedding to put in Ruby's hair.

14.

Rebecca describes having to "fight" notes she was given when it had to do with Ruby and Sapphire's relationship. One she describes as NOT fighting was for a signing card depicting Ruby and Sapphire dancing. It was called "too romantic" and she decided not to worry about it since it wasn't the actual show content.

She was also scolded over her book The Answer because the powers that be expected her to downplay that relationship. She always argued that queer youth deserved these things.

15.

Tom Herpich describes being inspired to name Blue Diamond's comb "Comby" because he was watching the news about Comey getting fired from the FBI. It's also a mineral-related term and I always assumed that reference was intentional, but maybe it's not and this is the only intended significance to Comby's name?

16.

Rainbow Quartz 2.0's design is not discussed, though the other two new Fusions from "Change Your Mind" (Sunstone and Obsidian) were. RQ2 has some sketches included, but no accompanying narrative in the text.

17.

A sheet of corrupted Gems and their healed selves is offered, though it doesn't appear to be final. The obelisk in "Serious Steven" is labeled Albite. The unnamed Worm Monster, Desert Glass, and Watermelon Tourmaline are included. An unnamed birdlike Gem represents the Big Bird monster from "Giant Woman." The crab monster from "Arcade Mania" is labeled Blue Chalcedony. The Tongue Monster is drawn uncorrupted but not named. The Flower Monster from "Back to the Kindergarten" is labeled Grossular Diopside or Titanite. The invisible monster from "Island Adventure" is labeled Moonstone. The Lighthouse Gem is labeled White Topaz. A form for Larimar that was used in "Change Your Mind" but changed in Future is there. The Slinker is listed as Chrysocolla. And the Crab Monster is listed as Aventurine.

On the next page, this is changed to Bixbite (as it was in Steven Universe Future), and we then also have Lace Amethyst, Blue Lace Agate, Crazy Lace Agate (Fusion), Ocean Jasper, the Mother Centipeetle Nephrite (Facet 413 Cabochon 12) and three other Nephrites, Angel Aura Quartz, a hooded Jasper, Zebra Jasper, Biggs Jasper, Watermelon Tourmaline (labeled as Fusion of Gem * Onion--huh?), Snowflake Obsidian, "Little" Larimar, and Orange Spodumene (who was the Worm).

18.

The Rhodonite side story would have been about the love story of a Ruby and a Pearl working for Morganite. Images of Morganite and her servants, unfused, are in the book. We do not get this additional information, but Rebecca said in a panel shortly before the book's release that Rhodonite's story would have been about finding out that she had been Rejuvenated 17 times because her components kept falling in love and needing to be reset.

19.

Referring to the Diamonds on one of the charts, Steven's perspective is "I can't believe I helped these" and then there's a censor bar. Welp.

20.

Some included art by Hilary Florido features Kevin with a souped-up Koala Princess car and another where Kevin is staring at himself in the mirror in front of an altar to himself.

21.

Rebecca's sweater collection is included in the Crew art.

[SU Book and Comic Reviews]

#steven universe #steven universe end of an era #su spoilers #long post #su merch #myblog

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verobatto · 3 years

Text

Destiel Chronicles

Vol. CXXV

It was a love story from the very beginning

Loudly In Love

(14x10/14x11/14x12)

Hello my friends! After Purgatory we have a cute and dummy sweet Dean-bean in love with Castiel. As we'll see int this meta summary.

You can find the links to my metas from these episodes following this links: X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, and X.

There's something in my throat

At the beginning of episode 15x10 we can read a shop's named BERENS' KWICK TRAP.

This takes another symbology now, with the horrible ending of the show. In which we could say Berens settle a trap to the C*W and he gave us 15x18 Castiel's love confession anyway.

Before talking about Dean's mating tap dance, let's talk about Dean vomiting again. Because it's relevant again, due to the shitty ending and how C*W silenced him.

Throughout the whole season 15, we had vomits, gagging situations. And in this episode we had two important scenes related to this symbolism:

One was Dean literally vomiting, and the second was Dean datin: "I HAVE SOMETHING IN MY THROAT"

Gif credit @agusvedder

What had Dean stuck in his throat? Maybe the ILY TOO to Castiel that never happened. But writers gave it it's relevance by writing it like this.

Maybe they were trying to day we will never have it.

They silenced him, for real.

Baby Castiel and Color Symbolism

I wrote this in one of my metas...

Baby Sam was dressed with a yellow ascot. Accurate. And Baby Castiel was dressed in blue. Accurate too.

Bess was dressed, and pay attention to this..., She was in pink (happiness) green (Dean) and light blue (purity)... She said to Dean that Cas was looking at him with love. Right? The happiness and purity in Dean was telling him Castiel looks at him with love in his eyes! Now... Dean said Cas baby kept looking at him weird. And Sam (who knows) said JUST LIKE CAS DOES.

And then Castiel's eyes glowed and Dean said... I think he has something for you to Bess (symbolically representing Dean's happiness and purity) GOSH IT WAS PERFECT!

This is something too cute, because finally, they talked about the Destiel eye-love-making and the fan-service with some SAMMY KNOWS.

Gifset credit @subbydean

Another important reference was Garth. When he went to rescue the boys, Garth was playing Castiel's mirror. And when Garth breaks that lock (Just like Castiel will do in the incoming episode) But mostly because Dean's reaction to it was priceless!

DEAN: You're so strong! He's so strong!

This is, literally, what Dean thinks about Castiel everytime he's in BAMF mode.

Numbers

Just a brief travel through the repeated numbers in the narrative in this episode (you can find the extended version of this in the links I put in the top of this meta)

Basically, we had number 7, 5, 17 and 40 repeating in the dialogues and the visual narrative. Some examples of that are the following scenes...

The Beren' kwick trap had a poster naming "7 days per week", then this one...

Dean eating 7 pieces of cheese.

Biblically talking, number 7 is the perfect number, represents God and knowledge. And it talks about Chuck then, knowing Chuck is writing this. But it also is what it means KNOWLEDGE.

Now, number 5...

Also at Garth's house, the address said 75

In numerology talks about socialize, and self-knowledge in masculinity and sexuality... Hello Dean!

But number 5 also represents in Bible the grace God concedes to David to defeat Goliath, the giant, written on the first book of SAMUEL (yes, Samuel) chapter 17.

Gif credit @agusvedder

17 means HOPES,it's what TFW keeps alive go defeat Chuck.

Now, number 40...

GARTH: Yeah, better than I ever thought I’d get. I mean, hunting – I figured I’d be dead before I’m 40. You know, go out young and pretty. But now I’ve got a great wife, great kids. I guess...sometimes things work out.

Putting to a side these had been also Dean's old thoughts... writers really got me here...

40 years old, but 40 is a common biblical number that talks about self-knowledge and growth. It talks about CHANGES. So so accurate with Dean and that caterpillar/butterfly wall in episode 15x04.

I really thought back then we will have the huge change in Dean through his love confession to Castiel. I mean, we had a change in his own way to see himself, thanks to Castiel. Let's keep that as a consolation prize.

An ABO fic plus Mating Dance

This episode had an ABO fic hudden as it also had the learning lesson about MATING FOR LIFE.

The visual narrative and the dialogues pointed at it.

Garth hugging g Dean as he said: YOU SMELL GOOD, remember Garth is a werewolf, and he was smelling Dean's pheromones because this episode happened after Purgatory, Dean is facing the knowledge about his romantic love for the angel, and it shows.

The swan's statues in one of the rooms in Garth house. Swans are birds that mate for life, and males swans can mate with another males for life. Hello Destiel. (Also, the room where these statues were placed was color BLUE)

The tap dancing and the suggestive lyrics of 'Let's Misbehave' was perfectly settled as a mating dancing I'm which Dean invited Castiel (the lamp) to Misbehave with him. Showing us that there's not just sweet and innocent love in Dean's heart but also a passionate fire and a desire to make love with him. That's what the song says, and that's why Garth mentioned colonoscopy, as a medical tool to health control, because cavities are related to Colon Cancer.

The wolf puppy is back

And following the same topic about ABO, the scene in which Jack is back with his family was similar (if not the same) as a wolf pack behavior documental.

Dean checks on Jack's eyes and immediately after that he checks on his pack mate, Castiel, to see if Jack is Jack. Beautiful

Gifset credit @thelordoftherings

Bi!Dean and Tolstoy

There's more info in my links at the top, but let's see why Dean called himself "Tolstoy" in that bar in front of that greek goddess in episode 14x11.

Okay, we had the singer from 'Let's Misbehave' (Cole Porter) a queer man, and now we have Tolstoy, a bisexual man...

DEAN: I'm Tolstoy

So much love

I will only speak about this scene:

Gif credit @agusvedder

There's more analysis about the dialogue here related to the storyline about Chuck, Jack and TFW. But because these are the Destiel Chronicles, I know I have to talk about this particularly Destiel heart eyes scene.

Because Dean is loud, his eyes and his face, he is yelling how proud he feels about Castiel, but it also, the ways his eyes just lingered to him, full of love, it's perfect, and no one can tell me these are not two men in love.

Look at how Csstiel turns his face to him, with a small smile, trying to hide his joy for being praised by the man he loves and also for share this moment with him. And the feels are of an old married couple that still love each other so much.

I just wanted to finish this meta with this "Good Omens" like scene.

To Conclude:

Dean reaffirmed he is in love with Castiel, and he wants to spend his life with him, as a couple. He loves the angel romantically, and he also desires Castiel with passion.

We also had several confirmations of Bi!Dean and some fan service with Sammy knows.

Hope you like this meta, see you in the next one.

Tagging @magnificent-winged-beast @emblue-sparks @weird-dorky-little-d @michyribeiro @whyjm @legendary-destiel @a-bit-of-influence @thatwitchydestielfan @misha-moose-dean-burger-lover @lykanyouko @evvvissticante @savannadarkbaby @dea-stiel @poorreputation @bre95611 @thewolfathedoor @charlottemanchmal @neii3n @deathswaywardson @followyourenergy @dean-is-bi-till-i-die @hekatelilith-blog @avidbkwrm @anarchiana @dickpuncher365 @vampyrosa @authorsararayne @mybonsai1976 @love-neve-dies @dustythewind @wayward-winchester67 @angelwithashotgunandtrenchcoat @trashblackrainbow @deeutdutdutdoh @destiel-shipper-11 @larrem88 @charmedbycastiel @ran-savant @little-crazy-misha-minion @samoosetheshipper

@shadows-and-padlocked-hearts @mishtho @dancingtuesdaymorning @nerditoutwithbooks @mikennacac73 @justmeand-myinsight @idontwantpeopletoknowmyname @teddybeardoctor @pepevons @helevetica @dizzypinwheel @horsez2002 @qanelyytha

@destielle @spnsmile @shippsblog @robot-feels @superlock-in-the-tardis @superduckbatrebel @belacoded @madronasky @anon-non2 @cea1996 @lisafu02 @asphodelesauvage @deancasgirl777

If you want to be added or removed from this list, just let me know.

If you wanna read the previous metas from this season, here you have the links:

Vol. CXXI, CXXII, CXXIII, CXXIV.

#destiel #destiel chronicles #destiel meta #supernatural meta #season 15 meta

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ace-trainer-risu · 3 years

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oh here! i’ll come ask you for book recs lol. do you have any spooky and/or autumn-y book recs? or just your fave books :)

First of all, I'm sorry this took me SO long to answer. I want to say I've been busy but it's just been general [waves hand vaguely] life.

ANYWAY thank you for asking! I actually don't read scary stuff a lot b/c I'm a wimp, but I have a few spooky/autumnal books up my sleeves! Let's see what we've got!!

1) The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Let me just start by saying that Sarah Waters is one of my absolute favorite authors ever! All her novels are suspenseful, twisty historical novels with great female and queer characters. Although, fair warning, actually The Little Stranger is like her one novel that isn't queer, but it is VERY good. If you read The Little Stranger and like it, please read Fingersmith and/or The Paying Guests.

The Little Stranger is set in the countryside of post-WWII England and follows a mild-mannered doctor as he becomes increasingly involved in the lives of the family living in the local, increasingly decrepit, possibly haunted mansion. Think Downton Abbey but creepy. Strange things keep happening inside the house, from dog bites to mysterious sounds to creepy black spots. Literally just typing that gave me goosebumps. It seems like someone may be out to get the family, but who...or what? Is it simply the ghosts of their own painful memories, or is something more? Sarah Waters is excellent at lush, intricate historical detail, and she leans into that here to create an atmosphere of slowly building dread and horror and mystery.

That being said, as a person who isn't normally a fan of horror, I don't think this book is too scary. It's more of an atmospheric, psychological horror than a jump-scare, bloody horror. It's not a book that will give you nightmares (probably), but you might lie awake thinking about it.

Also. Pro-tip. As a haunted(?) house story, the house is obviously fairly central to the story. Dear fellow Americans, keep in mind that the British refer to the floors of a building differently than us. For Americans, the ground-level floor is called the first floor, the floor above that the second floor, etc. For the British, the ground-level floor is the ground floor, and the floor above that is the first floor, etc. There's all sorts of creepy references to characters hearing noises above them on the first floor, but I was just like, Why are they always in the basement?

2) Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia

This and the above are two very different books, and yet they are both set in the mid-1900s and both are about weird, creepy, maybe-haunted houses. What can I say, I like gothic fiction.

After our heroine, Noemi, receives a bizarre, borderline incoherent letter from her beloved cousin, she sets out to visit her in the literally decaying mansion she resides in with her husband and his new family deep in the countryside of Mexico. All Noemi wants to do is persuade her cousin to come back home with her, but her cousin's new in-laws are very determined not to let that happen...or to let Noemi leave either. Secrets abound in the bizarre house and even creepier nearby cemetery, and soon Noemi finds that she too is suffering from bizarre dreams and visions...although, are they just dreams?

This book is so weird, but in such a good way? I read it for a book club and every week we had increasingly bizarre theories about what was going on, we were googling alchemy and fungi and St George, and some of our theories were even right. Although definitely not all. Another very twisty one that keeps you guessing.

In terms of scariness, interestingly I think there's more overtly creepy and horrifying moments in this novel than The Little Stranger, but I found TLS more overall scary? But that may be because I read it quickly, which I think is the ideal setting for suspenseful stuff, and I read Mexican Gothic over a longer amount of time since it was for a book club. This one does have some more typical horror elements to it, but I don't think it's more creepy than terrifying.

3) The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

I listened to this one as an audiobook and the audiobook is excellent so would recommend that, but have no doubt it would also be great to physically read.

Oh my god this book...it's more thriller than horror, but I think it fits the brief. There were multiple moments listening to this book that I literally gasped or said "OH MY GOD!" out loud, and there are moments which are very creepy and horrifying. There's a particular scene in the backyard... Again, incredibly suspenseful and twisty. And the character development and character psychology is just! really really good! There's also really interesting and knotty feminist stuff which is a lot more complicated and nasty than some of the "girlboss" stuff which is popular right now.

Super minimal summary: All you really need to know is that it is a sci fi novel about a scientific researcher trying to pick up her life after her marriage has imploded, only for everything to go BATSHIT WRONG. Trust me, that's all you need to know, it's better to go into this not knowing what's going to happen or what to expect. I had no clue what this novel was about when I started it, and holy shit. Very good book, absolutely recommend this if you want some super suspenseful, creepy sci fi that will make you say "oh my GOD" repeatedly.

Okay, shifting gears a little now b/c autumn isn't just spooky, it's also cozy and restful and daydreamy!

4) The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic by Emily Croy Barker

This isn't maybe a cozy book per se, but it's a great book to cuddle down with on a dreary day and lose yourself in. If you've ever asked yourself, "What would it be like if you crossed Pride and Prejudice with Howl's Moving Castle except the wizard was way worse but somehow still sexy" - then you should read this book! I actually came across this book b/c I was like, I wanna read a book that's a portal fantasy but for adults, and this book was like OH here's everything you wanted.

It's about a grad student, Nora, who has totally stalled out on her dissertation and is at a shitty wedding when she accidentally wanders through a portal into a beautiful, fantastical fairy world. At first, everything is amazing and literally perfect...but surprise surprise, not all as is it seems, and soon everything goes to, how should I put it, shit. Nora escapes, but rather than returning home, she finds herself trapped in a far more dreary realm. But not one without it's own charms and it's own magic, and Nora finds herself the student-slash-sorta-captive of the crochety, sexy, maybe-killed-his-wife magician Aruendiel* and she begins to learn magic herself.

Unlike the above books, this is not a fast-paced, twisty book, and I think if you go into this expecting high fantasy along the lines of Game of Thrones, you may be disappointed. It's not really a typical high-fantasy novel, it's more of a cross of an 18th/19th century realist novel, a fairy tale, and a fantasy novel. But if you want that, then it's REALLY good! I loved this book! And the magic in it is so cool, something about the way its described feels so visceral and real and like you could really do it if you just tried hard enough. There is a romance and it's totally, intentionally hashtag problematic, but it's very laid back, very slow burn, so I think even if you aren't a person who digs romance you can still enjoy this. If you're looking for a feminist-leaning fantasy novel that you can just sink into and lose yourself in, this is the perfect book. You will long to magically fix broken plates.

5) The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner

Honestly I can't even justify why I think this one is an autumn book. It simply is. It's autumn colored in my head. It is the coziest book I have ever read about necromancy and crime. Also I just want to recommend it. This is another one that I listened to as an audiobook and it's also a good audiobook, for those who are interested. But it also means I will not be able to spell absolutely any of the character's names.

This novel follows Delly, an enterprising young scoundrel of a fire witch with a teeny tiny gin habit as she attempts to support herself and her hot-mess of a mom in the roughest neighborhoods of Fantasy-City-That-I-Can't-Remember-The-Name-Of. Lice...gate? When Delly comes across an advertisement for a bodyguarding job for young women for a hefty fee, it seems like the answer to definitely not all but at least some of her problems. She accepts, along with an interesting assortment of other sorcerous young ladies, including a wonderfully bitchy Absentia (my love), a young woman who can turn into a boar, boar girl's necromancer mother, and the very sexy part-troll Winn, who in my imagination looks like Gwendoline Christie and talks like Miranda Hart. Which. Perfect woman. Winn being a fine, wealthy young lady, Delly can't help but think to herself that it wouldn't be such a bad thing if Winn happened to fall in love with her and carried her off to be rich and spoiled the rest of her life.

Of course, things quickly don't go to plan, and soon Delly and her companions find herself caught up in wicked schemes of murder, drugs, and an undead mouse named Buttons who says BONG. I love Buttons SO MUCH.

This book is just a silly romp of a novel which worms into your heart and your brain. It's fun and cute and gay, and also it made me cry. I haven't stopped thinking, "Not quite regulation hammerball" since I listened to it like half a year ago.

Also, while I'm here, this novel is set in the same world as and features a few of the same characters as Unnatural Magic. Which is also a hell of a book. Literally the best bisexual relationship I have ever fuckin read. It's a winter book tho, so I simply can't go into it here.

Aaaaand...that it's! Happy autumnal reading :)

#things you didn't care to know about veronica #book recs #disastershy #i'm sorry it took me so long to answer! it's just been burning in my inbox for weeks and only today #did i have the courage and strength of will to get to it!#jk i just felt like doing it now :)#thanks if you read the whole thing!!!!!

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northstarfan · 3 years

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Alpha Flight #42 - (Bill Mantlo and David Ross, January 1987)

So we get two terrible bits of writing this time around, one in full bloom and one just seeded.

Let’s start with the immediate bullshit, Heather’s response to Northstar after he manages to shake off Kara’s conditioning again.

So, as I’ve noted before, most of the early indications we have of Northstar’s sexuality are varying degrees of snark and homophobia from his teammates. And that’s a whole lot of not great. But this one is really beyond the pale. Northstar was kidnapped and sexually assaulted by the person they’re debating letting onto the team, and Heather completely dismisses it as a joke. Not only that, she does so even as she acknowledges that it would have been worse for Northstar because Kara was a woman - an indication that she knows that the assault would potentially be more traumatic for him as a gay man. And she just doesn’t care.

That’s not just “quit the team” territory, that’s “quit the team and put your leader’s head through the wall on the way out”. Scenes like this are one more reason why I maintain that anyone who gives Northstar shit about his attitude toward Alpha Flight has never actually read Alpha Flight.

Then there’s the more infamous element - the cough that marks the start of the aborted storyline that was supposed to culminate in Northstar dying of AIDS. For the sake of redundancy, I’m not going to cover every panel that had Northstar sniffle, cough, and stagger his way to Alpha Flight #50, but since this is the issue where it first rears its head, I am going to give a general overview.

So this goes all the way back to Bill Mantlo taking over the title. Mantlo, who was on The Incredible Hulk at the time, was enthusiastic about taking over the book when John Byrne offered to swap titles. As Mantlo told Amazing Heroes: “I was bowled over [when Byrne called], because this was John’s creation and I’ve had nothing but admiration for the way he’s been handling it. So I said ‘My God, yes!’ And that’s how we decided to switch.” (Amazing Heroes #76, 1985). This enthusiasm also seemed to include a plan to out Northstar. As John Byrne put it in that same interview: “[Bill] is going to try and say the unsayable about Northstar in no uncertain terms; I wish him luck.”

Outside of that particular point, however, Mantlo seemed to have little interest in the Beaubier twins and had no real direction for them outside of Aurora’s fluctuating powers. From AH #76:

“So far the least interesting to me are Aurora and Northstar. John played them up the most, and really went heavily into their origins, but he made so many changes to them that it’s almost impossible for me to say what the norm is any more. I’m just giving them a chance to relax and recuperate while I concentrate on the others.”

Ultimately, Mantlo’s plans to out Northstar were blocked by editorial, and he found writing Jean-Paul under the same limitations Byrne had dealt with to be quite frustrating:

“I always felt Northstar had possibilities if his background could be developed as a logical extension of his character. But I was prevented from doing that because of creative restrictions. Therefore, I had to look at the character as a viable superhero with the reality of his gayness kept largely in the dark. And as a character, his flying and running fast just didn’t make him and integral part of the team without his uniqueness - being gay.” (The Advocate #479, 1987)

This lead to Mantlo’s decision to reveal Northstar as HIV+ and kill him off. From the same interview:

“Northstar… could have been made to just vanish or even quit the team, but Mantlo wanted to be true to the character’s integrity. He decided, instead, that Northstar would die of AIDS. It seemed, [Mantlo] says, plausible given the fact that there had been allusions to numerous relationships during his years in the book. ‘It would give me the opportunity to deal with a frightening, sad, controversial topic in a comic book - which I had always understood Marvel was all about,’ he adds.”

Alpha Flight’s editor, Carl Potts, was not on board with this. From the same interview with The Advocate: “We had never openly declared that Northstar was gay. Now we had the only fairly popular Marvel character generally acknowledged as being gay and he was dying of AIDS. You shouldn’t equate one with the other.”

The two came to a compromise on the storyline, wherein Alpha Flight’s foe, Pestilence, would sicken Northstar by quickening the “corruption” in his body, with the disease remaining unnamed and the intent being that Northstar would never realize he had contracted HIV, even as his illness progressed.

Said Mantlo: “It was really AIDS in another guise, and there were still complaints about it being too similar.”

The storyline was ultimately resolved by Mantlo having Loki tell the Beaubier twins that their respective ailments (Jean-Paul’s wasting disease and Jeanne-Marie’s increasing mental instability) were the result of them being half-elves unsuited to life in the mortal realm. Jeanne-Marie used her powers to heal her brother, Jean-Paul got sent off to Asgard to live with the elves, and both were written out of the series for about two years worth of issues. (The twins were eventually brought back by other writers via the expedient explanation of Loki being a lying liar who lies.)

Mantlo was displeased with the compromised ending:

“It’s really a fallback position, since we were precluded from doing anything else… Quite honestly, I think it’s hypocritical and pointless, but that’s comics. You can’t do anything controversial, even if it has integrity, even if it’s honest, even if it’s an attempt to deal with a serious issue affecting thousands of people and likely to affect millions more.” (The Advocate #479, 1987)

Though there were apparently plans to revisit the twins at some point, Mantlo left Alpha Flight before this came about.

So, there’s a bit to unpack here, the biggest point being Mantlo’s reasoning behind trying to kill Northstar off. This was a writer who was plainly frustrated by the limitations being imposed on him, but, at the same time, he also sounds very much like he’d limited himself by reducing Northstar’s character to the sum of his sexuality. Aside from a brief aside in Marvel Fanfare #28, it seemed Northstar’s jam-packed past of childhood trauma, circus life, professional disgrace, and political terrorism held no interest for Mantlo as something that could be used to open the character to wider exploration, nor did even his own ideas for Northstar and Aurora’s otherworldly origins. No, if Northstar couldn’t be outed, he had to die. And if he couldn’t die, he still had to leave the book.

I’ve said before that I admire Mantlo’s integrity in not dropping the subtext related to Northstar’s sexuality, and I hold to that. As a writer, he could have saved himself a massive headache by simply making Northstar straight or immediately dropping him from the roster. So I do believe that Mantlo was in some part sincere in his desire to do something authentic and emotional with his planned storyline for Northstar; he’d stated that Jean-Paul’s sexuality was a unique quality in the comics landscape and seemed to want to make that an open part of the book by whatever means he could. There’s even a case to be made that, for better or for worse, linking Northstar to AIDS and the scrutiny that storyline brought made it that much more difficult to downplay the queer subtext surrounding the character, in turn making it easier for a later writer to make a case for making his homosexuality canon.

However, I have a real hard time scraping up much patience for a straight writer who decided that portraying a semi-closeted character was just too hard, when that very life experience would have been authentic to any number of queer readers, particularly in the middle of the AIDS crisis. I’ve even less patience with the apparent conclusion that the way to remedy that frustration was to kill Northstar instead of finding more subtle ways to advance the character, as Byrne had managed, or even just having him leave the team. The notion that it would have been out of character for Northstar to leave Alpha Flight is absolutely absurd; this is a character who only ever stayed with the team for the sake of his sister. All that would have been required for Jean-Paul to plausibly leave would have been for the writer to stop torturing Jeanne-Marie for an issue or two, or to have her take a bad enough turn that he took her off the team for her own safety and that of others.

Finally, I can’t say I have much faith that Mantlo would have been able to execute his plotline at all well, particularly given how little sympathy he seems to have had for Northstar as a character or how little interest he had in him beyond the controversy of his sexuality. Whatever Mantlo’s intent, it’s hard to believe that we’d have gotten any deathbed emotion that rang true to Northstar as a character or was particularly honest as commentary on society’s treatment of AIDS victims from the same writer who had Northstar’s teammates blow off sexual assault as delivery for a truly nasty homophobic joke and who thought a gay character possibly having had two romantic relationships in his life (I’m assuming this was in reference to Raymonde and Maurice) made him so promiscuous that it was plausible he’d have AIDS. And on top of that, regardless of other motivation, the decision to get rid of Northstar seems to have come as much from Mantlo’s frustration with his editors as any desire for meaningful character development.

In conclusion, for whatever good I might be able to say about Mantlo, I’m not the least bit sorry that his plans were derailed. He seems to have been, at best, a writer with better intentions than capability when it came to the sensitive subject matter he’d decided to tackle, and it seems for the best that other writers were able to give Northstar the development he couldn’t.

Next Time: The Man You Were

Previous installments of the series can be found here and at AO3.

#northstar #jean paul beaubier #alpha flight #x factor #homophobia #northstar's gayest hits

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serpentstole · 3 years

Text

Luciferian Challenge: Day 9

How do you feel about God?

This might be an unexpected take from a Lutheran-raised Luciferian, but I don’t really have strong opinions about God. I have strong opinions about harmful actions taken in God’s name, the misrepresentation of history, and an abuse of social and political power enacted by any religious group, but not really on God Himself.

I’m a big fan of some of His people, both living and dead. I have many Christian friends who are just the nicest people, and magically speaking, I work with one Christian saint so far in the form of St Expedite, and I’ve sometimes considered trying to add St Cyprian to the mix. I am comfortable approaching Saints and other Christian entities in the way that’s appropriate to them, and this hasn’t negatively impacted me in any way so far, though I don’t know if that’ll change after I undergo a more spiritually impactful apostasy.

This feels brief and anticlimactic, so I’m grabbing another prompt from the bonus list! Another thematically appropriate one, this time in the form of…

How do you feel about the religious texts of the Abrahamic faiths? Do you use it as part of your path?

This answer is going to be longer and thus under the cut, but if people read anything I write during this entire challenge, I genuinely hope it’s this one. I will say now for any Christian, Jewish, or Muslim readers or followers I have, it will not be an answer that is hostile towards you, as I don’t want anyone to worry that they might have to either skip this answer completely or else brace themselves against an incredibly shitty take.

To get the “do you use it” part of the question out of the way, I own the Charmer’s Psalter and have used Biblical verse in magic before, but I don’t know how long that’ll continue as my magic develops and changes. I might end up just using the parts that reference the spirits and deities I work with when writing rituals, the ever popular Lord’s Prayer In Reverse, etc.

Now, onto the important stuff.

By Abrahamic faiths I assume they mean Christinity, Judaism, and Islam, since those are the three people tend to lump together during these sorts of discussions. To get two of those out of the way, I don’t think I should really feel any particular way about the religious texts used in Judaism and Islam, as I’m not Jewish nor Muslim.

I know it’s a sadly common thing for Luciferians or Satanists (or many neo-pagans and wiccans, for that matter) to be “anti-Abrahamic” and claim that while they don’t have an issue with the people that belong to those religious, they don’t like the religions themselves or the dogmatic rules those religions might encourage. But that’s sort of… missing the point, isn’t it?

The idea that anyone is a victim of their own religious belief is only half formed if you don’t look at the people or groups that will use the twisting of religious texts, ideas, or communities to victimize others. Lawmakers will often use Christian ideas to try and control women’s bodies, for example, which is something groups like TST vocally push back against. But the expectations they are willing to make on those laws reveal the hypocrisy of their stance, and that belief is being used as a smokescreen to obscure the true intentions of control over women’s bodies for the sake of it. Someone cherry picking or outright misrepresenting the words and ideals of their holy texts or religion to suit their selfish or political needs is not the fact of that holy text or religion.

We claim to reject dogma, but the assumption and blanket statement that these three religions are inherently harmful and oppressive is (in my opinion) dogmatic, and often we Luciferians or Satanists or even Pagans sometimes fall into the trap of regurgitating right wing talking points when it comes to how Judaism or Islam in particular are perceived. The issue is the people who would encourage dogmatic thinking or worse, lawmaking, while using faith as an excuse and to add legitimacy to their bigotry. To demonize the religion is to abandon great swaths of its victims, such as the women and LGBT people of that faith who are being abused by bad actors in the name of a religion they share.

If the idea of why someone would remain a member of their religion when there are so many bad actors, religious texts, or even just passages they might disagree with is a hard thing to wrap one’s head around, I ask this: would you expect rejection of their faith by a Norse pagan for the historic sexism and homophobia of old Norse societies? For the modern associations it has with neo-nazis and bigotry towards women and queer people?

If you say yes, if you would stubbornly and genuinely say yes… then what does it say about you, when we share a label with Anton LaVey’s books that were so influenced by Social Darwinism and Might Makes Right? With groups like the Order of Nine Angels, the Joy of Satan, and others who would claim to be Luciferians or Satanists while advocating for hate speech, bigotry, or literal actual murder? If a few bad actors or communities or specific books can ruin religions as old and as complex and as culturally varied as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, how the hell are there any Satanists and Luciferians left that aren’t transparently proud bigots?

If we can accept for ourselves that not all Satanists and Luciferians will use the religious label with good intentions, and that not all Pagans hold ideals that are befitting the gods they claim to serve or the communities they want to be a part of, why can so few of us extend that basic courtesy to other religions?

And all this is to say nothing of how separated from its original historic and linguistic context the bible has become, and how our view of sin is very different to how those that penned Leviticus likely saw it.

While I can understand and empathize with those who have a negative view of a religion that’s done them personal harm and caused lasting trauma, that’s the shape that their abuse took. It was the fault of the people that enacted that abuse and any churches or organizations that stood by it, not the religion they used as an excuse.* I will genuinely never blame any who shy away from a religious upbringing or culture that tried to condemn their sexuality, or gender identity, or one which tried to control their bodies. That kind of negative association lingers, and there’s no doubt that people have done terrible things in the name of their faith, like I’ve said. But to treat those religions like the root of all societal ills when there are so many who would or are be cruel regardless of their beliefs, or to be hostile towards those that follow such religions without trying to impose any restrictions or beliefs on others, is missing the broader issue and (in my opinion) far more likely to do harm than good.

Also like. Dual faith practices exist and are also fair and valid and doubtless rewarding for those people.

*Please note that I am not including small, cult-like sects in my statements about these religions as a whole. There are plenty of Christian communities who are outright hate groups or otherwise dangerous to their members. Hopefully no one tries to point to some pack of weirdos as their justification to me on why all Christians are either bad or misled, or worse, tries to apply that to other religions as well because they have some historic point of connection.

#luciferianism #theistic luciferianism #witchblr #30 Day Luciferian Challenge #30dayluciferianchallenge #illumine

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thewatsonbeekeepers · 4 years

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Chapter 4 – It is always 1895 [TAB 1/1]

TAB is my favourite episode of Sherlock. It is a masterpiece that investigates queerness, the canon and the psyche all within an hour and a half. Huge amounts of work has been done on this episode, however, so I’m not going to do a line by line breakdown – that could fill a small book. A great starting point for understanding the myriad of references in TAB is Rebekah’s three part video series on the episode, of which the first instalment can be found here X. I broadly agree with this analysis; what I’m going to do here, though, is place that analysis within the framework of EMP theory. As a result, as much as it pains me, this chapter won’t give a breakdown of carnation wallpaper or glass houses or any of those quietly woven references – we’re simply going in to how it plays into EMP theory.

Before digging into the episode, I want to take a brief diversion to talk about one of my favourite films, Mulholland Drive (2001).

If you haven’t seen Mulholland Drive, I really recommend it – it’s often cited as the best film of the last 20 years, and watching it really helps to see where TAB came from and the genre it’s operating in. David Lynch is one of the only directors to do the dream-exploration-of-the-psyche well, and I maintain that a lot of the fuckiness in the fourth series draws on Lynch. However, what I actually want to point out about Mulholland Drive is the structure of it, because I think it will help us understand TAB a little better. [If you don’t want spoilers for Mulholland Drive, skip the next paragraph.]

The similarities between these two are pretty straightforward; the most common reading of Mulholland Drive is that an actress commits suicide by overdose after causing the death of her ex-girlfriend, who has left her for a man, and that the first two-thirds of the film are her dream of an alternate scenario in which her girlfriend is saved. The last third of the film zooms in and out of ‘real life’, but at the end we see a surreal version of the actual overdose which suggests that this ‘real life’, too, has just been in her psyche. Sherlock dying and recognising that this may kill John is an integral part of TAB, and the relationships have clear parallels, but what is most interesting here is the structural similarity; two-thirds of the way through TAB, give or take, we have the jolt into reality, zoom in and out of it for a while and then have a fucky scene to finish with that suggests that everything is, in fact, still in our dying protagonist’s brain. Mulholland Drive’s ending is a lot sadder than TAB’s – the fact that, unlike Sherlock, there is no sequel can lead us to assume that Diane dies – and it’s also a lot more confusing; it’s often cited as one of the most complicated films ever made even just in terms of surface level plot, before getting into anything else, and it certainly took me a huge amount of time on Google before I could approach anything like a resolution on it!

Mulholland Drive is the defining film in terms of the navigating-the-surreal-psyche subgenre, and so the structural parallels between the two are significant – and definitely point to the idea that Sherlock hasn’t woken up at the end of TAB, which is important. But we don’t need to take this parallel as evidence; there’s plenty of that in the episode itself. Let’s jump in.

Emelia as Eurus

When we first meet Eurus in TST, she calls herself E; this initialism is a link to Moriarty, but it’s also a convenient link to other ‘E’ names. Lots of people have already commented on the aural echo of ‘Eros’ in ‘Eurus’, which is undeniable; the idea that there is something sexual hidden inside her name chimes beautifully with her representation of a sexual repression. The other important character to begin with E, however, is Emelia Ricoletti. The name ‘Emelia’ doesn’t come from ACD canon, and it’s an unorthodox spelling (Amelia would be far more common), suggesting that starting with an ‘E’ is a considered choice.

When TAB aired, we were preoccupied with Emelia as a Sherlock mirror, and it’s easy to see why; the visual parallels (curly black hair, pale skin) plus the parallel faked death down to the replacement body, which Mofftiss explicitly acknowledge in the episode. However, I don’t think that this reading is complete; rather, she foreshadows the Eurus that we meet in s4. The theme of ghosts links TAB with s4 very cleanly; TAB is about Emelia, but there is also a suggestion of the ghosts of one’s past with Sir Eustace as well as Sherlock’s own claims (‘the shadows that define our every sunny day’). Compare this to s4 – ‘ghosts from the past’ appears on pretty much every promotional blurb, and the word is used several times in relation to Eurus. If Eurus is the ghost from Sherlock’s past, the repressive part of his psyche that keeps popping back, Emelia is a lovely metaphor for this; she is quite literally the ghost version of Sherlock who won’t die.

What does it mean, then, when Jim and Emelia become one and the same in the scene where Jim wears the bride’s dress? We initially read this as Jim being the foil to Sherlock, his dark side, but I think it’s more complicated than this. Sherlock’s brain is using Emelia as a means of understanding Jim, but when we watch the episode it seems that they’ve actually merged. Jim wearing the veil of the bride is a good example of this, but I also invite you to rewatch the moment when John is spooked by the bride the night that Eustace dies; the do not forget me song has an undeniable South Dublin accent.* This is quite possibly Yasmine Akram [Janine] rather than Andrew Scott, of course, but let’s not forget that these characters are resolutely similar, and hearing Jim’s accent in a genderless whisper is a pretty clear way of inflecting him into the image of the bride. In addition to this, Eustace then has ‘Miss Me?’ written on his corpse, cementing the link to Moriarty.

[*the South Dublin accent is my accent, so although we hear a half-whispered song for all of five seconds, I’m pretty certain about this]

Jim’s merging with Emelia calls to mind for me what I think might be the most important visual of all of series 4 – Eurus and Jim’s Christmas meeting, where they dance in circles with the glass between them and seem to merge into each other. I do talk about this in a later chapter, but TLDR – if Jim represents John being in danger and Eurus represents decades of repressed gay trauma, this merging is what draws the trauma to the surface just as Jim’s help is what suddenly makes Eurus a problem. It is John’s being in danger which makes Sherlock’s trauma suddenly spike and rise – he has to confront this for the first time – just like Emelia Ricoletti’s case from 1895 only needs solving for the first time now that Jim is back.

At some point I want to do a drag in Sherlock meta, because I think there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye, but Jim in a bride’s dress does draw one obvious drag parallel for me.

If you haven’t seen the music video for I Want to Break Free, it’s 3 minutes long and glorious – and also, I think, reaps dividends when seen in terms of Sherlock. You can watch it here: X

Not only is it a great video, but for British people of Mofftiss’s age, it’s culturally iconic and not something that would be forgotten when choosing that song for Jim. Queen were intending to lampoon Coronation Street, a British soap, and already on the wrong side of America for Freddie Mercury’s unapologetic queerness, found themselves under fire from the American censors. Brian May says that no matter how many times he tried to explain Coronation Street to the Americans, they just didn’t get it. This was huge controversy at the time, but the video and the controversy around it also managed to cement I Want to Break Free as Queen’s most iconic queer number – despite not even being one of Mercury’s songs. There is no way that Steven Moffat, and even more so Mark Gatiss would not have an awareness of this in choosing this song for Moriarty. Applying any visual to this song is going to invite comparisons to the video – and inflecting a sense of drag here is far from inappropriate. Moriarty has been subsumed into Eurus in Sherlock’s brain – the male and the female are fused into an androgynous and implicitly therefore all-encompassing being. I’m not necessarily comfortable with the gendered aspect of this – genderbending is something we really only see in our villains here – but given this is about queer trauma, deliberately queering its form in this way is making what we’re seeing much more explicit.

Nothing new under the sun

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes)

"Read it up -- you really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before." (A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes)

“Hasn’t this all happened before? There’s nothing new under the sun.” (The Abominable Bride, Jim Moriarty)

This is arguably the key to spotting that TAB is a dream long before they tell us – when TAB’s case is early revealed to be a mixture between TRF (Emelia’s suicide) and TGG (the five pips), and we see the opening of ASiP repeated, we should be questioning what on earth is going on. This can also help us to recognise s4 as being EMP as well though – old motifs from the previous series keep repeating through the cases, like alarm bells ringing. Moriarty telling Sherlock that there is nothing new under the sun is his key to understanding that the Emelia case is meant to help him understand what happened to Jim, that it’s a mental allegory or mirror to help him parse it. This doesn’t go away when TAB ends! Moving into TST, one of the striking things is that cases are still repeating! The Six Thatchers appeared on John’s blog way back, before the fall – you can read it here: X. It’s about a gay love affair that ends in one participant killing the other. Take from that what you will, when John’s extramarital affection is making him suicidal and Sherlock comatose. Meanwhile, the title of The Final Problem refers to the story that was already covered in TRF and the phone situation with the girl on the plane references both ASiB and TGG, and the ending of TST is close to a rerun of HLV. It’s pretty much impossible to escape echoes of previous series in a way that is almost creepy, but we’ve already had this explained to us in TAB – none of this is real. It’s supposed to be explaining what is happening in the real world – and Mofftiss realised that this was going to be difficult to stomach, and so they included TAB as a kind of key to the rest of the EMP, which becomes much more complex.

However, if we want to go deeper we should look at where that quote comes from. I’ve given a few epigraphs to this section to show where the quote comes from – first the book of Ecclesiastes, then A Study in Scarlet. It’s one of the first things Holmes says and it is during his first deduction in Lauriston Gardens. This is where I’m going to dive pretty deep into the metatextual side of things, so bear with the weirdness.

[we’re going deeper]

Holmes’s first deduction from A Study in Scarlet shows that he’s no great innovator – he simply notices things and spots patterns from things he has seen before. This is highlighted by the fact that he even makes this claim by quoting someone before him. If our Sherlock also makes deductions based on patterns from the past, extensive dream sequences where he works through past cases as mirrors for present ones makes perfect sense and draws very cleverly on canon. However, I think his spotting of patterns goes deeper than that. Sherlock Holmes has been repressed since the publication of A Study in Scarlet, through countless adaptations in literature and film. Plenty of these adaptations as well as the original stories are referenced in the EMP, not least by going back to 1895, the year that symbolises the era in which most of these adaptations are set. (If you don’t already know it, check out the poem 221B by Vincent Starrett, one of the myriad of reasons why the year 1895 is so significant.) My feeling is that these adaptations, which have layered on top of each other in the public consciousness to cement the image of Sherlock Holmes the deductive machine [which he’s not, sorry Conan Doyle estate] come to symbolise the 100+ years of repression that Sherlock himself has to fight through to come out of the EMP as his queer self.

This is one of the reasons that the year 1895 is so important; it was the year of Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment for gross indecency, and this is clearly a preoccupation of Sherlock’s consciousness in TFP with its constant Wilde references, suggesting that his MP’s choice of 1895 wasn’t coincidental. Much was made during TAB setlock of a newspaper that said ‘Heimish The Ideal Husband’, Hamish being John’s middle name and An Ideal Husband being one of Wilde’s plays. But the Vincent Starrett poem, although nostalgic and ostensibly lovely, for tjlcers and it seems for Sherlock himself symbolises something much more troubling. Do search up the full poem, but for now let’s look at the final couplet.

Here, though the world explode, these two survive

And it is always 1895

‘Though the world explode’ is a reference to WW1, which is coming in the final Sherlock Holmes story, and which is symbolised by Eurus – in other chapters, I explain why Eurus and WW1 are united under the concept of ‘winds of change’ in this show. Sherlock and John survive the winds of change – except they don’t move with them. Instead, they stay stuck in 1895, the year of ultimate repression. 2014!Sherlock going back in his head to 1895 and repeating how he met John suggests exactly that, that nothing has changed but the superficial, and that emotionally, he is still stuck in 1895.

Others have pulled out similar references to Holmes adaptations he has to push through in TAB – look at the way he talks in sign language to Wilder, which can only be a reference to Billy Wilder, director of TPLoSH, the only queer Holmes film, and a film which was forced to speak through coding because of the Conan Doyle estate. That film is also referenced by Eurus giving Sherlock a Stradivarius, which is a gift given to him in TPLoSH in exchange for feigning heterosexuality. Eurus is coded as Sherlock’s repression, and citing a repressive moment in a queer film as her first action when she meets Sherlock is another engagement by Sherlock’s psyche with his own cinematic history. My favourite metatextual moment of this nature, however, is the final scene of TFP which sees John and Sherlock running out of a building called Rathbone Place.

Basil Rathbone is one of the most iconic Sherlock Holmes actors on film, and Benedict’s costume in TAB and in particular the big overcoat look are very reminiscent of Rathbone.

Others have discussed (X) how the Victorian costume and the continued use of the deerstalker in the present day are images of Sherlock’s public façade and exclusion of queerness from his identity. It’s true that pretty much every Holmes adaptation has used the deerstalker, but the strong Rathbone vibes that come from Ben’s TAB costume ties the 1895 vibe very strongly into Rathbone. To have the final scene – and hopefully exit from the EMP – tie in with Sherlock and John running out of Rathbone Place tells us that, just as Sherlock cast off the deerstalker at the end of TAB (!), he has also cast off the iconic filmic Holmes persona which has never been true to his actual identity.

Waterfall scene

The symbol of water runs through TAB as well as s4 – others have written fantastic meta on why water represents Sherlock’s subconscious (X), but I want to give a brief outline. It first appears with the word ‘deeper’ which keeps reappearing, which then reaches a climax in the waterfall scene. The idea that Sherlock could drown in the waters of his mind is something that Moriarty explicitly references, suggesting that Sherlock could be ‘buried in his own Mind Palace’. The ‘deep waters’ line keeps repeating through series 4, and I just want to give the notorious promo photo from s4 which confirms the significance of the motif.

This is purely symbolic – it never happens in the show. Water increases in significance throughout – think of Sherlock thinking he’s going mad in his mind as he is suspended over the Thames, or the utterly nonsensical placement of Sherrinford in the middle of the ocean – the deepest waters of Sherlock’s mind. Much like the repetition of cases hinting that EMP continues, the use of water is something that appears in the MP, and it sticks around from TAB onwards, a real sign that we’re going deeper and deeper. I talk about this more in the bit on TFP, but the good news is that Sherrinford is the most remote place they could find in the ocean – that’s the deepest we’re going. After that, we’re coming out (of the mind).

Shortly after TAB aired, I wrote a meta about the waterfall scene, some of which I now disagree with, but the core framework still stands – it did not, of course, bank on EMP theory. You can find it here (X), but I want to reiterate the basic framework, because it still makes a lot of sense. Jim represents the fear of John’s suicide, and Jim can only be defeated by Sherlock and John together, not one alone – and crucially, calling each other by first names, which would have been very intimate in the Victorian era. After Jim is “killed”, we have Sherlock’s fall. The concept of a fall (as in IOU a fall) has long been linked with falling in love in tjlc. Sherlock tells John that it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the landing, something that Jim has been suggesting to him for a while. What is the landing, then? Well, Sherlock Holmes fell in love back in the Victorian era, symbolised by the ultra repressive 1895, and that’s where he jumps from – but he lands in the 21st century. Falling in love won’t kill him in the modern day. What I missed that time around, of course, was that despite breaking through the initial Victorian layers of repression, he still dives into more water, and when the plane lands, it still lands in his MP, just in a mental state where the punishment his psyche deals him for homosexuality is less severe. This also sets up s4 as specifically dealing with the problem of the fall – Sherlock jumps to the 21st century specifically to deal with the consequences of his romantic and sexual feelings. There’s a parallel here with Mofftiss time jumping; back when they made A Study in Twink in 2009, there was a reason they made the time jump. Having Sherlock’s psyche have that touch of self-awareness helps to illustrate why they made a similar jump, also dealing with the weight of previous adaptations.

Women

I preface this by saying how incredibly uncomfortable I find the positioning of women as the KKK in TAB. It’s a parallel which is unforgivable; frankly, invoking the KKK without interrogating the whiteness of the show or even mentioning race is unacceptable. Steven Moffat’s ability to write women has consistently been proven to be nil, but this is a new low. However, the presence of women in TAB is vital, so on we go.

TAB specifically deals with the question of those excluded from a Victorian narrative. This is specifically tied into to those who are excluded from the stories, such as Jane and Mrs. Hudson. Mrs. Hudson’s complaint is in the same scene as John telling her and Sherlock to blame the problems on the illustrator. This ties back to the deerstalker metaphor which is so prevalent in this episode; something that’s not in the stories at all, but a façade by which Holmes is universally recognised and which as previously referenced masks his queerness. Women, then, are not the only people being excluded from the narrative. When Mycroft tells us that the women have to win, he’s also talking about queer people. This is a war that we must lose.

I don’t think the importance of Molly in particular here has been mentioned before, but forgive me if I’m retreading old ground. However, Molly always has importance in Sherlock as a John mirror, and just because she is dressed as a man here doesn’t mean we should disregard this. If anything, her ridiculous moustache is as silly as John’s here! Molly, although really a member of the resistance, is able to pass in the world she moves in in 1895, but only by masking her own identity. This is exactly what happens to John in the Victorian era – as a bisexual man married to a woman, he is able to pass, but it is not his true identity. More than that, Molly is a member of the resistance, suggesting not just that John is queer but that he’s aware of it and actively looking for it to change.

I know I was joking about Molly and John’s moustaches, but putting such a silly moustache on Molly links to the silliness of John’s moustaches, which only appear when he’s engaged to a woman and in the Victorian era. He has also grown the moustache just so the illustrator will recognise him, and Molly has grown her moustache so that she will be recognised as a man. In this case, Molly is here to demonstrate the fact that John is passing, but only ever passing. Furthermore, Molly, who is normally the kindest person in the whole show, is bitter and angry throughout TAB – it’s not difficult to see then how hiding one’s identity can affect one’s mental health. I really do think that John is a lot more abrasive in TAB than he is in the rest of the show, but that’s not the whole story. Showing how repression can completely impair one’s personality also points to the suicidal impulses that are lurking just out of sight throughout TAB – this is what Sherlock is terrified of, and again his brain is warning him just what it is that is causing John this much pain and uncharacteristic distress.

This is just about the loosest sketch of TAB that could exist! But TAB meta has been so extensive that going over it seems futile, or else too grand a project within a short chapter. Certain theories are still formulating, and may appear at a later date! But what this chapter (I hope) has achieved has set up the patterns that we’re going to see play out in s4 – between the metatextuality, the waters of the mind and the role of Moriarty in the psyche, we can use TAB as a key with which to read s4. I like to think of it as a gift from Mofftiss, knowing just how cryptic s4 would be – and these are the basic clues with which to solve it.

That’s it for TAB, at least in this series – next up we’re going ever deeper, to find out exactly who is Eurus. See you then?

#tjlc #emp theory #thewatsonbeekeepers #my meta #meta #mine #chapter four: it is always 1895 #vincent starrett #mofftiss #1895 #bbc sherlock #johnlock #tjlc is real

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