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#idk WHY this shit always looks so BLURRY on tumblr it drives me up a wall
aoitrinity · 3 years
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Why Do I Have to Feel Like a Fucking Conspiracy Theorist -- OR -- How I Find a Semblance of Peace on Sunday Night
I’m also going to start this out with a GIANT DISCLAIMER.
I am about to theorize about what may have happened to the SPN finale. I have absolutely no insider knowledge. I am merely speculating here based on the panels and a bunch of Twitter and Tumblr posts that I have been reading over the last few days. If you are not in a good place to read such things, TURN BACK PLEASE. Go take care of yourself and your mental health. You and your feelings are valid and deserve to be handled gently right now.
Additionally, if you are here to give me shit for being unhappy with the ending, please walk away as well. I am here to reach out and share my feelings with people who might be struggling to make sense of something that upset some of us in very deep-seated ways. I am not here to bother you or critique you or tell you that you’re lesser because you liked the ending. If you felt it was good, then go enjoy it.
Long-ass post beneath the cut, everyone.
Alrighty folks...I debated whether or not to do this because I have been spiraling down the hell that is the SPN finale since Thursday. The travesty of what happened to our show--to this beloved show that seemed to have been so perfectly and precisely written for at least four years that it had basically already paved its own tarmac on which to land its plane and we all thought we knew exactly what we were going to get. And then we didn’t. We had a nigh Cas-less and entirely Eileen-less ending. We had no goodbye between Cas and Jack. We had Dean dying young after finally finding his freedom, only to ascend to heaven with no one but Bobby. We had the weird, weird, weird incest-y death scene. We had the bridge crane shot thing because...sure. You do you, Robert Singer.
It was so terrible, so truly awful, and I couldn’t seem to square any of it with anything we had known going in. I tossed and turned and cried and didn’t eat or sleep all weekend. I spent hours just reloading tumblr and twitter, going to the Misha panel, reading and reading and listening and trying to figure out what the fucking hell is going on because I needed to know exactly where to direct my anger. And after a fuckton of talking with @winchester-reload, I think we have at least a very plausible theory about what happened here--I’m laying it out below as much for my own peace of mind as anything else, because otherwise all of these thoughts are going to continue to spin around in my head for weeks and I won’t be able to do jack shit.
Now to start off, unfortunately I do think Dean was slated to die from the beginning of this season. I don’t know WHY they thought that was the best way to go, and I wish they had listened to Jensen on this one. Part of me wonders if it was an order from on high based on the discussion between Becky and Chuck earlier this season--the writers knew it wasn’t a great choice, but they were trying to signal to us that we should feel free to write our own endings to the story because they’d be better (I can wax poetic on the signs of why many of the writers probably wanted Dean to live, but that’s another post). I’m not defending that choice by any means, just laying it out there that I think they didn’t necessarily all want to kill Dean like they did.
However, what I THINK I can explain now is what happened with Misha and why we got so jerked around with Cas’s story. Consider what we know (I can’t immediately source all of it, but I did my best):
At the end of episode 15x19, Lucifer has been returned to the Empty after being killed AGAIN. He talks with Cas. Maybe harasses him a bit about Dean, idk. But then...Jack shows up. New God Jack. And he picks up Cas and pulls him out of the Empty, leaving Lucifer behind, because seriously. Fuck that guy (also leaving behind his abusive father is character growth for Jack, so yay for that).
-Misha was contracted to film 15 episodes this season. He was only in 14.
-Misha told Michael Sheen he had to go back to film 1.5 episodes after the shutdown in March. (Starts at 6:13)
-Misha was in Vancouver during filming of the finale.
-Mark P said at Darklight Con that the last scene he filmed was with Alex and Misha (and Mark P was only in episode 19).
-Misha implied that he was present for various filming moments, including Dean’s death (start at 35:15), and said that it felt like a “mini-reunion.”
-Various sources have mentioned that Jimmy Novak was supposed to be in the finale.
-After episode 18, Stands tweeted a fan who was angered and hurt by Cas's death that they could talk about the “bury the gays” issue after the finale aired.
-In episode 19 we know there were takes of the parking lot scene where the only thing fans observing could hear was Dean yelling “CAS” at Chuck (fuck I can’t find this one right now, but it’s definitely out there)
-Also in episode 19, we had a very strange, awkward montage at the end of the episode.
-In episode 20, we know there were a FUCKTON of missing scenes
-We also had no opening montage, but three other separate montages.
-Carry on My Wayward Son was played TWICE, back-to-back at the end of the episode.
-Episode 20 was shorter than normal and had surprisingly little dialogue. The pacing was VERY strange.
-The cast and crew has been almost completely silent about the finale since it came out. When they have spoken, it has been with an awkward excuse of “Uh...COVID?”
-Samantha Ferris has specifically noted that, despite the Harvelle’s being back in play and a big heaven reunion having been planned pre-COVID, neither she nor Chad Lindberg received any such invitation to return.
-Cas and Dean POP Funko figures were pictured together in a replica of Harvelle’s in 15x04.
NOW with all of this in mind (and I’m probably missing some stuff too because there is so much--feel free to add on to that list), please bear with me because here is what I think we were SUPPOSED to get POST-COVID (after it was determined that the reunion couldn’t happen because of the virus):
In episode 20, we start with our NORMAL OPENING MONTAGE, like always. It traces everything that happened during the season. We are reminded of Cas. The confession. Rowena. Eileen. Jack. Billie, God, the Empty, all of it. 
Things then follow along in the episode where they did up until Dean dies and wakes up in heaven. After his conversation with Bobby, he drives off to find Cas (who, in the script, was listed as “Jimmy Novak” in order to protect against script leaks--who wouldn’t want to do their best to avoid spoilers about the finale with the wrapping of a fifteen-year show?). He does indeed find Cas. We get Dean’s end of the confession. Hell, maybe we even get a kiss. And then Dean sets up his new heaven home in the recreated Harvelle’s. Maybe Cas even fucking moves in. 
Years pass. We get Sam having his life on Earth (still can’t explain why they cut Eileen and couldn’t even have Sam signing vaguely to the blurry brunette in the background; if anyone wants to take that on, go for it). Eventually, Cas tells Dean that it’s almost Sam’s time. Dean takes Baby and goes to meet Sam at the bridge. The cover of Carry on My Wayward Son plays during this much shorter sequence. End of episode.
But that’s not what we got. Instead, much of what I just wrote about was excised from the episode. The remnants were stitched together after shooting had been wrapped. Filler was added in the form of montages and long, unnecessary extra shots to get the episode to something approaching a reasonable length. 
But why? Why would they spend all that time and money and quarantining on Misha, only to almost completely cut him out of the finale? I struggled with why the fuck the CW would want this mammoth show to go down as the greatest queerbait in TV history when they had the chance to do something truly beautiful and monumental with it? It couldn’t just be sheer homophobia, right? Well, I think that factored into it, my friends, but here is where my head is at right now.
It was about cold, hard cash.
Now I could be wrong, but this is what I’m thinking at the moment: Supernatural is going off of the air. Supernatural, the CW’s cash cow for fifteen years. Sure there is still money to be made on blu-rays and merchandise and cons...but they need people watching their shows. They need that sweet advertising revenue. And you know what show they have about to premiere? A show that could, potentially, bring with it a chunk of that SPN revenue?
Walker.
And if any of you know anything about the original Walker Texas Ranger, you know that the show was predominantly a show about a very heterosexual white man being very excessively heterosexual. And for SOME REASON over the years, many of the execs at the CW still seem to think that this show, Supernatural, is really attractive to a lot of middle-American white men...whom they desperately want to watch this new show with this guy from Supernatural that they already know.
Now here’s where COVID fucked us. I think Destiel was greenlit by TPTB, at least in SOME form, before COVID. But then the pandemic happened, and they panicked. They got the cut of the last two episodes and watched them in their original, probably queer form. And then, the execs at CW looked at the economy. They looked at their cash cow, about to make its journey to the great beyond. And they looked at this new little calf Walker that they were so desperately worried about. And they made a choice.
They decided that it would be too risky to take the step with Destiel. They were worried about frightening off their ever-so-valuable hetero male demographic with the possibility that a traditionally masculine man in his 40s could be in love with another man in an overt way. It was homophobia mixed with greed, spun up by fear for their revenues because of COVID.
So they called in Singer, possibly Dabb, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they went straight to Singer. They told them that Destiel had to go: executive orders. And the only way to make it go in a way that removed any trace of what had been there was to rewrite what happened to Cas and cut him out from the last two episodes entirely. It was too late to reshoot anything. They had to just cut and stitch and fill with bullshit montages. 
They removed the scene at the end of 19, probably because Cas and Lucifer discussed Dean. All that was left of Misha there was his voice on that fake phone call. They may have cut other things too, but I would bet my life that they cut a scene from the end of the episode and replaced it with that very strange montage. Then they moved onto 20. They cut out every scene with Cas. And left in only two platonic mentions of him, neither made by Dean. They tried to imply that Cas might show up in Dean’s heaven at some point, but that was as far as the editors could go in the time they had. They filled in with montages, awkwardly long shots, anything they could do to fill all of those missing scenes.
And they even had to take the opening montage, because literally everything in it pointed to Cas being there at the end of it all. They wouldn’t be able to leave out his scenes, they were too critical to the season. They couldn’t cut his confession without raising eyebrows. So they cut the whole thing and moved “Carry On My Wayward Son” to one of the newly-added driving montages at the end. Which is why we awkwardly had both songs play back-to-back--again, such a strange choice unless they were out of options and couldn’t exactly buy rights to a new track or compose anything else.
And so we were left with the shadow of the finale that we deserved, that Cas and Dean deserved. We were left without resolution or happiness or words. Bobo told us the most important thing about happiness is just “saying it” and our characters were silenced without anyone ever knowing the truth.
I think the writers might have known and been given the new party line that “Misha never filmed, he couldn’t, sorry, it was COVID, no one’s fault!” But I don’t think most of the cast even knew it had happened until they watched the finale on Thursday with us (though they might have been confused why the bit from 15x19 was sliced, they could reasonably have assumed it was a time thing and also BL episodes don’t make sense anyway). Why do I say that?
Well, first of all, Misha started sending out a bunch of excited texts to fans with some old BTS pictures about an hour before the show started airing on EST. He also wanted his children to see the episode, his YOUNG children. Why would he show them such a traumatic episode if their Dad wasn’t in it? What if it was because he wanted them to witness what was going to be a monumental moment in queer television history that their DAD got to be a part of? And then that was all dashed.
Which is why I think the cast and crew went almost completely radio silent the next day. I don’t think they knew. And based on how they have been acting on social media since then, I think many of them are absolutely furious, but they have been silenced because of NDAs, because they want to find work again in a cutthroat industry, because they don’t want to bring down the hellfire of Warner Brothers Entertainment upon themselves. So the most we have gotten is a little acknowledgement from the MERCHANDISING COMPANY trying to validate our pain (god bless Shirts, she is a LIFESAVER) and a response to my salty tweet about keeping good stuff in the closet from Adam Williams (the VFX coordinator) that seemed to acknowledge the validity of my complaint.
Then there was a scramble behind the scenes, I would bet my life. Talking points were fed to the boys who had panels today, to CE, to all the cast and crew:
Toe the party line. Misha never filmed. This was always about COVID. Do not mention Destiel. Do not mention Dean’s feelings for Cas. Do not promote the Castiel Project or anything that validates the idea that this was anything less than a superb ending.
And that is why we have heard so little from the cast on this front, and what we have heard has been muddled and contradictory. That is why the writers are saying nothing. That is why we have been left adrift.
Now before I close this out, I do want to say that I really, genuinely do not think this was on the writers at all. I feel like they tried to give us the best ending that they could, in a writers room that we know is notorious for splitting along party lines about the overall story (BL and Singer, who have always been about the brothers and their man-pain vs. Dabb and the rest who always seemed to want more for them and for Cas). I think they did everything in their power to at least end with Dean and Cas happy together. If they could give us nothing else, they wanted to give us that. And then the network took it from them. From us. From everyone.
For the sake of fucking money. 
And the WORST PART OF IT ALL, for me, is that in the wake of this disaster, the fans have been left to try and figure out what happened. We have had to wade through a mire of conflicting information in the midst of all of our collective anger and grief over this garbage ending of a show many of us have loved and even relied on for YEARS, all the while wondering if we’re just fucking crazy, if we have all fallen collectively into the hole of conspiracy theories. That hurts ESPECIALLY badly because we have taken so many hits over the years from other groups on social media saying we were crazy for seeing things that weren’t there (especially Destiel), for writing meta and analyzing tropes and believing the evidence of our eyes and ears. The network has made us relive that entire nightmare WHILE processing our grief for a show we wanted so badly to celebrate and which instead we now have to mourn.
So again guys, I cannot prove that this is exactly what happened at all; this is simply my idea of what may have happened. But right now, it’s the most sense I can make from this mess, and to be honest, the act of typing it out has helped me enormously in my processing of it all. I feel like I can see more clearly, like I know where to target my outrage and where to direct empathy. I feel like just fucking maybe, I might be able to do my job tomorrow without bursting into tears at random moments. 
I really hope that this post has helped some of you to, in some small way, process this too. We get through this the way that Misha told us at his panel this morning, the way the writers have told us to do all season long...we throw out the story God gave us and we make it better. We write our characters the happy endings they deserve. 
We save them.
One last thing--if you have not already, please consider channeling your rage into a donation to one of the five causes our fandom has put together to pay tribute to our beloved show and to mourn the ending it should have had:
-The Castiel Project
-Dean Winchester is Love
-Sam Winchester Project
-The National Association of the Deaf
-The Jack Kline Project
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canonicallyanxious · 3 years
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12, 23, 34 and 35. pls answer as long as u need to!
thank you for the permission to ramble anon skjfnsknfs you genuinely have no idea how much i appreciate it
12.  Tell us about a WIP you’re excited about.
sndfkjsdnfksd what wips... really though i’m finishing up my one actual wip [davenzi star wars au scream] today and once that’s done i’ll have basically no wips to speak of, wowowow! i can provide a small list of au ideas for kieutou i’m excited to tackle, though. ABSOLUTELY NO PROMISES any of these will ever see the light of day or that i’ll even get around to starting the drafting process for them but right now in the brainstorming phase they do live in my brain rent free
summer fling/romance au
high fantasy au - kieu my as a half-elf, fatou as a human bard
korrasami au
modern persuasion au
also my friend suggested doing some druck new gen spin-offs of the star wars au which, like, i’m not NOT thinking about tbqh
23. Do you prefer prompts and challenges, or completely independent ideas?
Honestly i struggle with prompts/challenges in a major way, idk it’s just a lot easier to motivate my writing brain with intrinsic motivation [e.g being really excited about an idea i came up with myself] than extrinsic motivation [e.g deadlines/prompts]. i am trying to be better about taking prompts, though! often the issue i have is with being excited about an idea that i didn’t come up with but if i can find a way to make the idea my own then i feel like that’s good practice anyway, especially for times when i don’t really have the energy for coming up with my own ideas but i still wanna write!
[as far as challenges go tho i mean i’ve tried a few in my time and all i have to say on the matter is: never again]
34. Copy and paste an excerpt you’re particularly fond of.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm bold of you to assume i remember anything i have ever written skjdnfskdjnfsdkj anyway here’s a little bit from the most recent thing i posted bc i actually really like this bit of dialogue:
Fatou reaches into the pile of nail polish and pulls out a bottle filled to the brim with a deep crimson red.
“The color of your heart,” she says.
Kieu My looks up at her. “You think so?”
“Yeah,” Fatou says. “You picked the color of mine.”
Kieu My reaches out and closes Fatou’s fingers around the bottle, warmth of her palm resting lightly against her knuckles.
“You say such pretty things,” she says.
Fatou meets Kieu My’s eyes. “I only say things that are true.”
“Yeah,” Kieu My says, and smiles. “Same thing.”
35. Ramble about any fic-related thing you want!
I HAD A TIME DECIDING WHAT TO RAMBLE ABOUT in fact i legit couldn’t decide skjnfskdjfsnd so i had @boxesfullofthoughts give me a prompt and this is what they said I should talk about: “the use of themes in your work and what themes you feel resonate most with you and your audience.” So i guess i’m gonna ramble about that now!
So one big reason why i gravitate toward fic is because i think it’s a really great avenue for exploring relationship dynamics and development. obviously in a romantic context yes, but what especially interests me is the blurring of lines between friendship and romance, as those have always been pretty nebulous concepts for me personally. like how do you even define those things? where do you draw the line? what happens when that line grows blurry and indistinct? idk i find it kind of hard to explain but for me intimacy in romance is oftentimes very rooted in intimacy of friendship and that’s what i like to explore [i think a lot about a little life by hanya yanagihara which imo does an excellent job of delving into this concept, the romance of friendships; it’s definitely a story i draw a lot of inspiration from, which i think probably says a lot about who i am as a person lol]
and a very big part of love imo is well-encapsulated by that meme quote “if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known”. which yes i know the original article is about someone judgmental attitude toward the writer’s goats or something but ALSO as i am the kind of person to take something very silly and make it incredibly serious i legitimately think this quote captures the heart of what i find so compelling about love stories! to be truly loved by someone is to be truly known by them - all the deepest, darkest, ugliest parts of you alongside the good. and that’s fucking hard! it’s hard work to allow someone to know you like that - to be that vulnerable, to really expose yourself to another human being. but also ultimately after all that difficult work what is more rewarding, what is more comforting than existing in the presence of someone you don’t have to explain yourself to because they already understand you wholly and completely, in a romantic or platonic context or otherwise? it’s something i love to unpack in my writing, like really there’s nothing i find more cathartic than really peeling back the layers and figuring out how two characters get to that point.
Another thing i think a lot about is a quote from a random tumblr post i no longer have the link for, which goes something like “tenderness is softness in the face of pain and shame”. and that is really IT, isn’t it? that’s exactly the kind of vibe i strive to capture in my writing always. particularly in the context of queer stories, when our community has had a long history of pain and suffering and repression and shame and yet despite all of that we still find ways to love each other, to take care of each other, to be ourselves and help each other be themselves too. that’s the kind of shit that drives me fucking insane! and it’s the kind of shit i love to write about. that’s all i can really say.
[is this still fic related? probably only tangentially. but this is the kind of shit i usually end up writing about on some level across all my fics so i think it still counts lol.]
q’s for fanfiction writers!
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uniformbravo · 7 years
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ok so. my day today
basically i spent a long fucking time today trying to Finally get off my ass and scan my traditional drawings so i can post them to my art blog, because like i have been drawing but these days the vast majority of my art is traditional sketches that im too lazy to scan so my art blog never gets updated and i rly want to work on that (i stg some of this shit is literally so old it’s from 2016 but whateverrrrr)
mostly the reason im finally doing this is that i don’t wanna wait too long to post my mp100 shit bc i’ve been drawing a Fucking Lot of that so i have enough to make a few posts now and i wanna get them uploaded while they’re still fresh, u know. the thing is since i was gonna scan those pages i decided it’d be a fun neat idea to scan the entire rest of the sketchbook bc Why Not
well i’ll tell u Why Not, there are several reasons Why Not:
it takes 12 yrs to scan everything because not only are there a shitload of pages but also the sketchbook is too big for the scanner so i have to do some pages 4 times to get all the edges and it’s horrible and bad, legitimately i was standing there for over an hour scanning this book, i put on an hr long video in the bg and got all the way through it and i Still wasn’t done
On Top Of That the scanner is kind of fucking garbage, as scanners are, so i have to take each image into photoshop to edit so they dont look entirely like trash (they still look kind of trashy anyway)
then for the multiple scan pages i have to patch them together so the images are complete / not blurry
then i have to collage all the drawings i want together because a lot of pages are either incomplete or only have like 1 thing i want to show on them so i spend like 100 years trying to arrange everything semi-nicely so that it’s, like, even slightly presentable, Maybe (idk i think the compilations tend to feel really cluttered tbh but Whatever it’s my STYLE), and also i have to take into account tumblr’s formatting so i usually have to make everything fit on a canvas either 540px or 1080px wide (this is even worse for pixel art bc it needs to be exactly 540px to look nice but i digress, we are talking about traditional art here)
so uh yeah that’s my process and Boy is it a Fucking Process
i think im complaining more rn because i have like a year’s worth of sketches im trying to deal with here, like. good god. i spent maybe two and a half hours working on this today (after the first hour of scanning things, just the scanning) and i did not get even halfway through the scans, and that’s just for the photo-editing stage, i haven’t even started putting together the compilations yet
god and like the Other Fucking Piece Of Shit Thing My Scanner Does is it tries to do this Smart Technology Bullshit and decide for itself where the paper ends instead of looking at, like, the actual paper’s boundaries, so even if i line everything up perfectly, a small part of the image fucking always gets cut off and if i were a stronger person i would engage in the full process of scanning the images, taking the flash drive back to my laptop, opening each image one by one to figure out which ones got cut off, going back to the scanner and re-scanning the pages and just repeating the process over and over until everything is in order but as it stands i do not have eighty-five thousand fucking years on my hands nor even a fraction of the mental capacity required to pull that off so we are just going 2 sit down & deal with some cropped images like mature adults
(tbh with all the cons of scanning the art, and there are a Lot of cons, i feel like it would probably make more sense to just take pictures using a camera instead, but on the other hand do not get me started on lighting, focus, unsteady hands, sifting through millions of copies of the same photo trying to determine which one came out the clearest, retaking photos that didn’t work out, back aching from being hunched over the paper for so long trying to get the perfect straight-down angle w/o casting any shadow, etc etc etc)
im just??? honestly, typing all of this out is making me sit back and think why?? why am i even doing this. this is so much goddamn effort for shit that probably won’t get very much attention, which is fine and all but god. jesus christ. im really putting myself through some shit for this
in any case i think i’ll probably be posting some of the more recent stuff first, like all the mp100 shit because like i said i want to post it while it’s still fresh and if i work on this whole project in chronological order u probably won’t see the things i drew this week until like next year hgkdslkdgn
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