#This is a real canon discussion they had (albeit in english)

[mllenugget]

Iconic.

(English translation in alt)

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#This is a real canon discussion they had (albeit in english) #and i will forever stay sad that I cannot find the clip anymore #i only know it happened prior to July #my art #baghera fanart #dapper fanart #comic #et ça fait bim bam boum #ça fait pschit #et ça fait vroum #ça fait bim bam boum #dans ma tête y'a tout qui tourne #Ça fait chut et puis blabla #Ça fait comme ci comme ça #Ça fait bim bam ahah #dans mon coeur je comprend pas #ça fait bim bam là #bim bam là #ça fait bim bam quoi #ily je crois qu'cé ça #mcyt #qsmp

[scoopstrooptm]

PORTRAYAL NOTES.

#1: i am flexible in terms of writing dustin during his adolescent years in hawkins ( during the show timeline ) and also exploring his older life post-high school.

#2: i am not a fan of dustin & suzie's relationship as it is at present in canon. that does not mean i won't write it or indeed ship it, but it will take a lot of plotting & discussion behind the scenes before i could plausibly become invested in them as a pairing.

#3: headcanon tag  /  meta tag

BASICS.

NAME: dustin henderson

NICKNAMES / ALIASES: dusty, dusty bun AGE: 12 - 15 BIRTHDATE: may 29th, 1971 NATIONALITY: american GENDER & SEX: male SEXUAL ORIENTATION: heterosexual SPOKEN LANGUAGES: english OCCUPATION: middle / high school student HOMETOWN: hawkins, indiana CURRENT LOCATION: hawkins, indiana

PHYSICAL TRAITS.

EYE COLOR: blue HAIR COLOR: brown HEIGHT: 5'5" FACE CLAIM: gaten matarazzo

RELATIONSHIPS.

PARENTS: george & claudia henderson SIBLINGS: n/a SIGNIFICANT OTHER(S): suzie bingham CHILDREN: n/a EXTENDED FAMILY: FRIENDS: mike wheeler, lucas sinclair, will byers, eleven, max mayfield, steve harrington, robin buckley, erica sinclair, nancy wheeler, jonathan byers, eddie munson, scott clark ENEMIES / ANIMOSITIES: the demogorgon, the mind-flayer, billy hargrove, vecna

PERSONALITY TRAITS.

POSITIVE TRAITS: loyal, curious, perceptive, intelligent, quick-thinking, sensitive, creative, open-minded NEGATIVE TRAITS: precocious, blunt, insecure, reckless LIKES: science, comic books, reading, star wars, d&d, watching movies, animals DISLIKES: FEARS: rejection SKILLS: book smart, ALIGNMENT: chaotic good

TROPES: affectionate nickname, ditzy genius, fairy tale motif, friend to all living things, gadgeteer genius, the heart, the navigator, sad clown

D&D CLASS: bard

BIOGRAPHY.

Claudia Martin had lived in Hawkins all her life, as had her mother and father before her. She had never had any ambitions beyond her small town, not until meeting George Henderson in her sophomore year of high school. George had been moved around the care system for years along with his younger brother, Richard, with Hawkins just another shit hole with a foster family who would quickly tire of them on their road to adulthood and the freedom to choose their own future.

They were an odd pair; Claudia was quiet and reserved at school, where George, though not as wild as his younger brother, was far more outspoken and confident. But they unexpectedly hit it off and became inseparable, and so not only was George planning to move to the East Coast with his brother, but with his new wife, too. For Claudia, this was the biggest act of rebellion she had ever committed in her life: while her parents did not outwardly disapprove, they were surprised at Claudia's choice in husband --- and even more surprised that she was willing to move across the country in order to live out a new life with him on the coast.

George and his brother, Richard, opened their own garage, using their own rudimentary knowledge of repairing cars in their youth and saving up to eventually train for certification as mechanics in their own right. Claudia was content as the loving housewife, falling pregnant and giving birth to a son, Dustin, a few years later, when she became a stay at home mom, too.

Their life in New Jersey was comfortable, and at times happy --- but this all changed in the Spring of 1980. An economic downturn in the country, along with George finding out that Richard had been accruing debts in pursuit of gambling and drink, neglecting his own life and the family business, meant that he was forced to close down his garage. With no income and a mortgage still to pay, George and Claudia were at real risk of losing their home, so they made the difficult decision to cut ties with Richard and move back in with Claudia's family in Hawkins. Only her mother was still alive, albeit with failing health, but Claudia was quietly glad to be home.

This upheaval occurred when Dustin was nine, joining Hawkins Elementary for a year where he first met Mike, Lucas and Will, before the group moved on to middle school. A year after moving to the mid west, Claudia's mother passed away, and so she and George inherited the family home.

But while the family were once again financially secure ( albeit far worse off than they had been a couple of short years ago ), the fracturing of Claudia and George's relationship had begun. Small-town life had never suited George, now forced to work at a car manufacturing plant in Indianapolis in order for the family make ends meet, and like his brother before him he turned to drink in order to cope. Claudia's nerves did not recover from the upheaval of nearly losing everything and moving back to Hawkins, and was only exacerbated by her husband's drinking and his temper. The pair argued frequently, although Claudia always tried to conceal this from their son. It didn't always work.

The disappearance of Will Byers and Barbara Holland were the final straw for the pair's relationship. George left shortly after Christmas 1983, moving permanently to Indianapolis. The two divorced soon after at George's insistence, though he allowed Claudia to keep the house in Hawkins for hers and their son's sake. For Dustin, it did not change much in tangible terms: his father had always been distant, always been away working, always disconnected from his son. Dustin could recall the pair watching Star Wars: A New Hope together as a child, but few things had connected them after that. They had nothing in common: Dustin did not like cars, or sports, and so when George left him alone with his mom, few things really changed.

George invited Dustin to Indianapolis once, and would likely have invited him again had Dustin not hated every moment of the trip. He never accepted an invitation ever again, and decided in that moment that he no longer needed his father in his life. Claudia, meanwhile, needed to work in order to provide for the two of them, and so took on a clerical job at Hawkins' Town Hall. Dustin, therefore, became very independent, cycling to school with his friends and frequently spending evenings at Mike or Lucas or Will's house whenever his mom was forced to work late into the evening.

The Upside Down's interference in the lives of those in Hawkins continued, and while Dustin kept the details of his involvement from his mom, Claudia was not blind to the tragedies that kept on befalling her hometown. Had she the finances to do so, she would have moved away long ago for the sake of her nerves, but she could not. Like her mother and father before her, she suspected she would live out the rest of her days here, and could only hope that Dustin would go on to graduate to a college out of state and branch out of her small town all on his own...

VERSES.

season 1 timeline

Follows the timeline of the first season. Dustin, Mike and Lucas' lives in smalltown Hawkins is turned upside down by the disappearance of their friend, Will Byers, and the appearance of a mysterious girl called Eleven.

season 2 timeline

Follows the timeline of st2. Adopting an unusual pet that turns out to be a baby creature from the Upside Down, Dustin teams up with Steve Harrington to defeat it and help close the Gate.

season 3 timeline

Follows the timeline of st3. Following his time spent at Camp Nowhere, during an attempt to communicate with his long-distance girlfriend, Suzie, Dustin accidentally intercepts a Soviet communication. He takes it to Steve and his coworker Robin, who decode the message and discover the sinister secret lurking beneath Starcourt Mall.

season 4 timeline

Follows the timeline of st4. When the leader of Hawkins High's D&D club, Hellfire, Eddie Munson, is accused of the murder of high school teen Chrissy Cunningham, Dustin is convinced of his new friend's innocence. But in seeking him out to help clear his name, he finds out that the Upside Down has reared its ugly head again and, this time, without Eleven and her powers, there is a very real chance they might not be able to stop it.

season 5 timeline

to be written.

apocalyptic au lead in to season 5

For any imagined plots within the post-season 4 / pre-season 5 timeline, exploring the apocalyptic fallout of the earthquake and the Upside Down bleeding into Hawkins. See more details here.

post canon

Following the events of the show and defeat of Vecna/the Upside Down, Dustin finishes his high school education and goes on to study engineering at MIT. After that, the sky is officially the limit for him, teeming with ideas and on the cusp of the technological revolution of the late 1990s and early 00s. Dustin eventually moves to California to work in Silicon Valley.

#*dustin

[moriarty1234]

T*LC Refutation (but decidedly NOT Johnlock refutation, because that definitely was a thing.)

Part- 1: Introduction.

[Note: I love and ship johnlock because I saw it for myself in the show when I watched it and was part of the general audience in the past. I even want it to become canon in some Holmes adaption in the future. But T*lc needs to get sucked into obscurity and forgotten. Other fandoms like Good Omens, etc., are following the same rhetoric in their "meta" posts, and that needs to go. This is crucial for our basic critical thinking skills and objectivity.]

Alright, folks. Let's talk about the logical fallacies, and how most of the t*lc metas are flawed to their core.

Not to beat the dead horse here, but I entered the fandom in late 2021 (after having watched BBC Sherlock a year ago). I'd started to ship Johnlock as soon as I entered the fandom (because that's what I saw on the show independently, as part of the general audience in the past, even though it was on a subconscious level at first).

I discovered T*LC in December, watched and read metas about it, became a T*LCer myself (albeit briefly - for like a month or two), and then I grew out of it.

I grew out of T*LC because while the meta posts were seemingly clever, I always thought there was something off with most of them. I didn't have much vocabulary related to critical thinking skills back then (because English is not my first language), so I couldn't put my finger on exactly what was wrong with them.

I reluctantly and falsely assumed they must be right just because I couldn't come up with effective counter-arguments then (what a flawed way of thinking). I just thought that this thing (t*lc) was not my cup of tea (ha!).

I continued to ship Johnlock though. I still do it wholeheartedly. I'm no longer part of the BBC Sherlock fandom, but I do still ship Holmes/Watson enthusiastically in various other Sherlock Holmes adaptations.

In the meantime (i.e., from when I dropped the idea of t*lc like a hot potato to the day I decided to exit this fandom for good), I did a lot of research.

Research related to what the fandom used to be like throughout different eras when the show was still on air (through sources such as old posts on Tumblr/other social media platforms, Sarah Z and hbomberguy's videos on t*lc and the actual show criticism respectively), and also research about how the rhetoric of most conspiracy theorists looks and sounds. I've read about articles on science vs pseudo-science as well (I come from a science background myself, so those articles were helpful as a refresher for me).

I also read a lot about cult psychology and how it can be used effectively to lure anyone in.

T*lc checks all the boxes of flawed ways of thinking, various logical fallacies used to prove or disprove something, pseudoscience, a typical conspiracy theorist's rhetoric, and a cult group's way of thinking in real life.

When I use these terms, I do not throw them around lightly. I've read a lot about this along with my friend, let's call them Kim. For context, Kim also comes from a science background. They ship johnlock too.

I know the comparison of T*lc with a religious cult in real life has been done to death, and same is the case with the comparison of t*lc with any other outlandish conspiracy theory out there. It's just that I've been bottling up my thoughts and feelings on this thing for way too long. I can't do that anymore. Just bear with me if you find something repetitive.

Kim and I read about all these things on the internet, had a lot of long discussions for months altogether, and now I've personally decided to share our conclusions with anyone out there who stumbles upon this post.

This blog is a few days old, and I'm the only person behind this, so I don't have many followers just yet. I'm not even expecting anything from anyone. If you see this post, I just want you to read it with an open mind and act according to your judgement afterwards.

Now that we have the whole context with us, let's begin.

Part- 2 : What's wrong with their actual meta posts?

T*LC (but NOT Johnlock as a whole) refutation master post.

#anti tjlc #anti mofftiss #anti moffat #anti bbc sherlock #t*lc critical #introduction #a brief context #sherlock holmes #we care about science and sherlock holmes in general #fandom meta

[holyhellpod]

Holy Hell: 3. Metanarrativity: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship? aka the analysis no one asked for.

In this ep, we delve into authorship, narrative, fandom and narrative meaning. And somehow, as always, bring it back to Cas and Misha Collins.

(Note: the reason I didn’t talk about Billie’s authorship and library is because I completely forgot it existed until I watched season 13 “Advanced Thanatology” again, while waiting for this episode to upload. I’ll find a way to work her into later episodes tho!)

I had to upload it as a new podcast to Spotify so if you could just re-subscribe that would be great! Or listen to it at these other links.

Please listen to the bit at the beginning about monetisation and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to message me here.

Apple | Spotify | Google

Transcript under the cut!

Warnings: discussions of incest, date rape, rpf, war, 9/11, the bush administration, abuse, mental health, addiction, homelessness. Most of these are just one off comments, they’re not full discussions.

Meta-Textuality: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship?

In the third episode of Season 6, “The Third Man,” Balthazar says to Cas, “you tore up the whole script and burned the pages.” That is the fundamental idea the writers of the first five seasons were trying to sell us: whatever grand plan the biblical God had cooking up is worth nothing in face of the love these men have—for each other and the world. Sam, Bobby, Cas and Dean will go to any lengths to protect one another and keep people safe. What’s real? What’s worth saving? People are real. Families are worth saving. 

This show plugs free will as the most important thing a person, angel, demon or otherwise can have. The fact of the matter is that Dean was always going to fight against the status quo, Sam was always going to go his own way, and Bobby was always going to do his best for his boys. The only uncertainty in the entire narrative is Cas. He was never meant to rebel. He was never meant to fall from Heaven. He was supposed to fall in line, be a good soldier, and help bring on the apocalypse, but Cas was the first agent of free will in the show’s timeline. Sam followed Lucifer, Dean followed Michael, and John gave himself up for the sins of his children, at once both a God and Jesus figure. But Cas wasn’t modelled off anyone else. He is original. There are definitely some parallels to Ruby, but I would argue those are largely unintentional. Cas broke the mold. 

That’s to say nothing of the impact he’s had on the fanbase, and the show itself, which would not have reached 15 seasons and be able to end the way they wanted it to without Cas and Misha Collins. His back must be breaking from carrying the entire show. 

But what the holy hell are we doing here today? Not just talking about Cas. We’re talking about metanarrativity: as I define it, and for purposes of this episode, the story within a story, and the act of storytelling. We’re going to go through a select few episodes which I think exemplify the best of what this show has to offer in terms of framing the narrative. We’ll talk about characters like Chuck and Becky and the baby dykes in season 10. And most importantly we’ll talk about the audience’s role, our role, in the reciprocal relationship of storytelling. After all, a tv show is nothing without the viewer.

I was in fact introduced to the concept of metanarrativity by Supernatural, so the fact that I’m revisiting it six years after I finished my degree to talk about the show is one of life’s little jokes.

 I’m brushing off my degree and bringing out the big guns (aka literary theorists) to examine this concept. This will be yet another piece of analysis that would’ve gone well in my English Lit degree, but I’ll try not to make it dry as dog shit. 

First off, I’m going to argue that the relationship between the creators of Supernatural and the fans has always been a dialogue, albeit with a power imbalance. Throughout the series, even before explicitly metanarrative episodes like season 10 “Fan Fiction” and season 4 “the monster at the end of this book,” the creators have always engaged in conversations with the fans through the show. This includes but is not limited to fan conventions, where the creators have actual, live conversations with the fans. Misha Collins admitted at a con that he’d read fanfiction of Cas while he was filming season 4, but it’s pretty clear even from the first season that the creators, at the very least Eric Kripke, were engaging with fans. The show aired around the same time as Twitter and Tumblr were created, both of which opened up new passageways for fans to interact with each other, and for Twitter and Facebook especially, new passageways for fans to interact with creators and celebrities.

But being the creators, they have ultimate control over what is written, filmed and aired, while we can only speculate and make our own transformative interpretations. But at least since s4, they have engaged in meta narrative construction that at once speaks to fans as well as expands the universe in fun and creative ways. My favourite episodes are the ones where we see the Winchesters through the lens of other characters, such as the season 3 episode “Jus In Bello,” in which Sam and Dean are arrested by Victor Henriksen, and the season 7 episode “Slash Fiction” in which Dean and Sam’s dopplegangers rob banks and kill a bunch of people, loathe as I am to admit that season 7 had an effect on any part of me except my upchuck reflex. My second favourite episodes are the meta episodes, and for this episode of Holy Hell, we’ll be discussing a few: The French Mistake, he Monster at the end of this book, the real ghostbusters, Fan Fiction, Metafiction, and Don’t Call Me Shurley. I’ll also discuss Becky more broadly, because, like, of course I’ll be discussing Becky, she died for our sins. 

Let’s take it back. The Monster At The End Of This Book — written by Julie Siege and Nancy Weiner and directed by Mike Rohl. Inarguably one of the better episodes in the first five seasons. Not only is Cas in it, looking so beautiful, but Sam gets something to do, thank god, and it introduces the character of Chuck, who becomes a source of comic relief over the next two seasons. The episode starts with Chuck Shurley, pen named Carver Edlund after my besties, having a vision while passed out drunk. He dreams of Sam and Dean larping as Feds and finding a series of books based on their lives that Chuck has written. They eventually track Chuck down, interrogate him, and realise that he’s a prophet of the lord, tasked with writing the Winchester Gospels. The B plot is Sam plotting to kill Lilith while Dean fails to get them out of the town to escape her. The C plot is Dean and Cas having a moment that strengthens their friendship and leads further into Cas’s eventual disobedience for Dean. Like the movie Disobedience. Exactly like the movie Disobedience. Cas definitely spits in Dean’s mouth, it’s kinda gross to be honest. Maybe I’m just not allo enough to appreciate art. 

When Eric Kripke was showrunner of the first five seasons of Supernatural,  he conceptualised the character of Chuck. Kripke as the author-god introduced the character of the author-prophet who would later become in Jeremy Carver’s showrun seasons the biblical God. Judith May Fathallah writes in “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural” that Kripke writes himself both into and out of the text, ending his era with Chuck winking at the camera, saying, “nothing really ends,” and disappearing. Kripke stayed on as producer, continuing to write episodes through Sera Gamble’s era, and was even inserted in text in the season 6 episode “The French Mistake”. So nothing really does end, not Kripke’s grip on the show he created, not even the show itself, which fans have jokingly referred to as continuing into its 16th season. Except we’re not joking. It will die when all of us are dead, when there is no one left to remember it. According to W R Fisher, humans are homo narrans, natural storytellers. The Supernatural fandom is telling a fidelitous narrative, one which matches our own beliefs, values and experiences instead of that of canon. Instead of, at Fathallah says, “the Greek tradition, that we should struggle to do the right thing simply because it is right, though we will suffer and be punished anyway,” the fans have created an ending for the characters that satisfies each and every one of our desires, because we each create our own endings. It’s better because we get to share them with each other, in the tradition of campfire stories, each telling our own version and building upon the others. If that’s not the epitome of mythmaking then I don’t know. It’s just great. Dean and Cas are married, Eileen and Sam are married, Jack is sometimes a baby who Claire and Kaia are forced to babysit, Jody and Donna are gonna get hitched soon. It’s season 17, time for many weddings, and Kevin Tran is alive. Kripke, you have no control over this anymore, you crusty hag. 

Chuck is introduced as someone with power, but not influence over the story, only how the story is told through the medium of the novels. It’s basically a very badly written, non authorised biography, and Charlie reading literally every book and referencing things she should have no knowledge of is so damn creepy and funny. At first Chuck is surprised by his characters coming to life, despite having written it already, and when shown the intimidating array of weapons in Baby’s trunk he gets real scared. Which is the appropriate response for a skinny 5-foot-8 white guy in a bathrobe who writes terrible fantasy novels for a living. 

As far as I can remember, this is the first explicitly metanarrative episode in the series, or at least the first one with in world consequences. It builds upon the lore of Christianity, angels, and God, while teasing what’s to come. Chuck and Sam have a conversation about how the rest of the season is going to play out, and Sam comes away with the impression that he’ll go down with the ship. They touch on Sam’s addiction to demon blood, which Chuck admits he didn’t write into the books, because in the world of supernatural, addiction should be demonised ha ha at every opportunity, except for Dean’s alcoholism which is cool and manly and should never be analysed as an unhealthy trauma coping mechanism. 

Chuck is mostly impotent in the story of Sam and Dean, but his very presence presents an element of good luck that turns quickly into a force of antagonism in the series four finale, “Lucifer Rising”, when the archangel Raphael who defeats Lilith in this episode also kills Cas in the finale. It’s Cas’s quick thinking and Dean’s quick doing that resolve the episode and save them from Lilith, once again proving that free will is the greatest force in the universe. Cas is already tearing up pages and burning scripts. The fandom does the same, acting as gods of their own making in taking canon and transforming it into fan art. The fans aren’t impotent like Chuck, but neither do we have sway over the story in the way that Cas and Dean do. Sam isn’t interested in changing the story in the same way—he wants to kill Lilith and save the world, but in doing so continues the story in the way it was always supposed to go, the way the angels and the demons and even God wanted him to. 

Neither of them are author-gods in the way that God is. We find out later that Chuck is in fact the real biblical god, and he engineers everything. The one thing he doesn’t engineer, however, is Castiel, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Real Ghostbusters

Season 5’s “The real ghostbusters,” written by Nancy Weiner and Erik Kripke, and directed by James L Conway, situates the Winchesters at a fan convention for the Supernatural books. While there, they are confronted by a slew of fans cosplaying as Sam, Dean, Bobby, the scarecrow, Azazel, and more. They happen to stumble upon a case, in the midst of the game where the fans pretend to be on a case, and with the help of two fans cosplaying as Sam and Dean, they put to rest a group of homicidal ghost children and save the day. Chuck as the special guest of the con has a hero moment that spurs Becky on to return his affections. And at the end, we learn that the Colt, which they’ve been hunting down to kill the devil, was given to a demon named Crowley. It’s a fun episode, but ultimately skippable. This episode isn’t so much metanarrative as it is metatextual—metatextual meaning more than one layer of text but not necessarily about the storytelling in those texts—but let’s take a look at it anyway.

The metanarrative element of a show about a series of books about the brothers the show is based on is dope and expands upon what we saw in “the monster at the end of this book”. But the episode tells a tale about about the show itself, and the fandom that surrounds it. 

Where “The Monster At The End Of This Book” and the season 5 premiere “Sympathy For The Devil” poked at the coiled snake of fans and the concept of fandom, “the real ghostbusters” drags them into the harsh light of an enclosure and antagonises them in front of an audience. The metanarrative element revolves around not only the books themselves, but the stories concocted within the episode: namely Barnes and Demian the cosplayers and the story of the ghosts. The Winchester brothers’s history that we’ve seen throughout the first five seasons of the show is bared in a tongue in cheek way: while we cried with them when Sam and Dean fought with John, now the story is thrown out in such a way as to mock both the story and the fans’ relationship to it. Let me tell you, there is a lot to be made fun of on this show, but the fans’ relationship to the story of Sam, Dean and everyone they encounter along the way isn’t part of it. I don’t mean to be like, wow you can’t make fun of us ever because we’re special little snowflakes and we take everything so seriously, because you are welcome to make fun of us, but when the creators do it, I can’t help but notice a hint of malice. And I think that’s understandable in a way. Like The relationship between creator and fan is both layered and symbiotic. While Kripke and co no doubt owe the show’s popularity to the fans, especially as the fandom has grown and evolved over time, we’re not exactly free of sin. And don’t get me wrong, no fandom is. But the bad apples always seem to outweigh the good ones, and bad experiences can stick with us long past their due.

However, portraying us as losers with no lives who get too obsessed with this show — well, you know, actually, maybe they’re right. I am a loser with no life and I am too obsessed with this show. So maybe they have a point. But they’re so harsh about it. From wincestie Becky who they paint as a desperate shrew to these cosplayers who threaten Dean’s very perception of himself, we’re not painted in a very good light. 

Dean says to Demian and Barnes, “It must be nice to get out of your mom’s basement.” He’s judging them for deriving pleasure from dressing up and pretending to be someone else for a night. He doesn’t seem to get the irony that he does that for a living. As the seasons wore on, the creators made sure to include episodes where Dean’s inner geek could run rampant, often in the form of dressing up like a cowboy, such as season six “Frontierland” and season 13 “Tombstone”. I had to take a break from writing this to laugh for five minutes because Dean is so funny. He’s a car gay but he only likes one car. He doesn’t follow sports. His echolalia causes him to blurt out lines from his favourite movies. He’s a posse magnet. And he loves cosplay. But he will continually degrade and insult anyone who expresses interest in role play, fandom, or interests in general. Maybe that’s why Sam is such a boring person, because Dean as his mother didn’t allow him to have any interests outside of hunting. And when Sam does express interests, Dean insults him too. What a dick. He’s my soulmate, but I am not going to stop listening to hair metal for him. That’s where I draw the line. 

 Where “the monster at the end of this book” is concerned with narrative and authorship, “the real ghostbusters” is concerned with fandom and fan reactions to the show. It’s not really the best example to talk about in an episode about metanarrativity, but I wanted to include it anyway. It veers from talk of narrative by focusing on the people in the periphery of the narrative—the fans and the author. In season 9 “Metafiction,” Metatron asks the question, who gives the story meaning? The text would have you believe it’s the characters. The angels think it’s God. The fandom think it’s us. The creators think it’s them. Perhaps we will never come to a consensus or even a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps that’s the point.

The ultimate takeaway from this episode is that ordinary people, the people Sam and Dean save, the people they save the world for, the people they die for again and again, are what give their story meaning. Chuck defeats a ghost and saves the people in the conference room from being murdered. Demian and Barnes, don’t ask me which is which, burn the bodies of the ghost children and lay their spirits to rest. The text says that ordinary, every day people can rise to the challenge of becoming extraordinary. It’s not a bad note to end on, by any means. And then we find out that Demian and Barnes are a couple, which of course Dean is surprised at, because he lacks object permanence. 

This is no doubt influenced by how a good portion of the transformative fandom are queer, and also a nod to the wincesties and RPF writers like Becky who continue to bottom feed off the wrong message of this show. But then, the creators encourage that sort of thing, so who are the real clowns here? Everyone. Everyone involved with this show in any way is a clown, except for the crew, who were able to feed their families for more than a decade. 

Okay side note… over the past year or so I’ve been in process of realising that even in fandom queers are in the minority. I know the statistic is that 10% of the world population is queer, but that doesn’t seem right to me? Maybe because 4/5 closest friends are queer and I hang around queers online, but I also think I lack object permanence when it comes to straight people. Like I just do not interact with straight people on a regular basis outside of my best friend and parents and school. So when I hear that someone in fandom is straight I’m like, what the fuck… can you keep that to yourself please? Like if I saw Misha Collins coming out as straight I would be like, I didn’t ask and you didn’t have to tell. Okay I’m mostly joking, but I do forget straight people exist. Mostly I don’t think about whether people are gay or trans or cis or straight unless they’ve explicitly said it and then yes it does colour my perception of them, because of course it would. If they’re part of the queer community, they’re my people. And if they’re straight and cis, then they could very well pose a threat to me and my wellbeing. But I never ask people because it’s not my business to ask. If they feel comfortable enough to tell me, that’s awesome.  I think Dean feels the same way. Towards the later seasons at least, he has a good reaction when it’s revealed that someone is queer, even if it is mostly played off as a joke. It’s just that he doesn’t have a frame of reference in his own life to having a gay relationship, either his or someone he’s close to. He says to Cesar and Jesse in season 11 “The Critters” that they fight like brothers, because that’s the only way he knows how to conceptualise it. He doesn’t have a way to categorise his and Cas’s relationship, which is in many ways, long before season 15 “Despair,” harking back even to the parallels between Ruby and Cas in season 3 and 4, a romantic one, aside from that Cas is like a brother to him. Because he’s never had anyone in his life care for him the way Cas does that wasn’t Sam and Bobby, and he doesn’t recognise the romantic element of their relationship until literally Cas says it to him in the third last episode, he just—doesn’t know what his and Cas’s relationship is. He just really doesn’t know. And he grew up with a father who despised him for taking the mom and wife role in their family, the role that John placed him in, for being subservient to John’s wishes where Sam was more rebellious, so of course he wouldn’t understand either his own desires or those of anyone around him who isn’t explicitly shoving their tits in his face. He moulded his entire personality around what he thought John wanted of him, and John says to him explicitly in season 14 “Lebanon”, “I thought you’d have a family,” meaning, like him, wife and two rugrats. And then, dear god, Dean says, thinking of Sam, Cas, Jack, Claire, and Mary, “I have a family.” God that hurts so much. But since for most of his life he hasn’t been himself, he’s been the man he thought his father wanted him to be, he’s never been able to examine his own desires, wants and goals. So even though he’s really good at reading people, he is not good at reading other people’s desires unless they have nefarious intentions. Because he doesn’t recognise what he feels is attraction to men, he doesn’t recognise that in anyone else. 

Okay that’s completely off topic, wow. Getting back to metanarrativity in “The Real Ghostbusters,” I’ll just cap it off by saying that the books in this episode are more a frame for the events than the events themselves. However, there are some good outtakes where Chuck answers some questions, and I’m not sure how much of that is scripted and how much is Rob Benedict just going for it, but it lends another element to the idea of Kripke as author-god. The idea of a fan convention is really cool, because at this point Supernatural conventions had been running for about 4 years, since 2006. It’s definitely a tribute to the fans, but also to their own self importance. So it’s a mixed bag, considering there were plenty of elements in there that show the good side of fandom and fans, but ultimately the Winchesters want nothing to do with it, consider it weird, and threaten Chuck when he says he’ll start releasing books again, which as far as they know is his only source of income. But it’s a fun episode and Dean is a grouchy bitch, so who the holy hell cares?

Season 10 episode “fanfiction” written by my close personal friend Robbie Thompson and directed by Phil Sgriccia is one of the funniest episodes this show has ever done. Not only is it full of metatextual and metanarrative jokes, the entire premise revolves around fanservice, but in like a fun and interesting way, not fanservice like killing the band Kansas so that Dean can listen to “Carry On My Wayward Son” in heaven twice. Twice. One version after another. Like I would watch this musical seven times in theatre, I would buy the soundtrack, I would listen to it on repeat and make all my friends listen to it when they attend my online Jitsi birthday party. This musical is my Hamilton. Top ten episodes of this show for sure. The only way it could be better is if Cas was there. And he deserved to be there. He deserved to watch little dyke Castiel make out with her girlfriend with her cute little wings, after which he and Dean share uncomfortable eye contact. Dean himself is forever coming to terms with the fact that gay people exist, but Cas should get every opportunity he can to hear that it’s super cool and great and awesome to be queer. But really he should be in every episode, all of them, all 300 plus episodes including the ones before angels were introduced. I’m going to commission the guy who edits Paddington into every movie to superimpose Cas standing on the highway into every episode at least once.

“Fan Fiction” starts with a tv script and the words “Supernatural pilot created by Eric Kripke”. This Immediately sets up the idea that it’s toying with narrative. Blah blah blah, some people go missing, they stumble into a scene from their worst nightmares: the school is putting on a musical production of a show inspired by the Supernatural books. It’s a comedy of errors. When people continue to go missing, Sam and Dean have to convince the girls that something supernatural is happening, while retaining their dignity and respect. They reveal that they are the real Sam and Dean, and Dean gives the director Marie a summary of their lives over the last five seasons, but they aren’t taken seriously. Because, like, of course they aren’t. Even when the girls realise that something supernatural is happening, they don’t actually believe that the musical they’ve made and the series of books they’re basing it on are real. Despite how Sam and Dean Winchester were literal fugitives for many years at many different times, and this was on the news, and they were wanted by the FBI, despite how they pretend to be FBI, and no one mentions it??? Did any of the staffwriters do the required reading or just do what I used to do for my 40 plus page readings of Baudrillard and just skim the first sentence of every paragraph? Neat hack for you: paragraphs are set up in a logical order of Topic, Example, Elaboration, Linking sentence. Do you have to read 60 pages of some crusty French dude waxing poetic about how his best friend Pierre wants to shag his wife and making that your problem? Read the first and last sentence of every paragraph. Boom, done. Just cut your work in half. 

The musical highlights a lot of the important moments of the show so far. The brothers have, as Charlie Bradbury says, their “broment,” and as Marie says, their “boy melodrama scene,” while she insinuates that there is a sexual element to their relationship. This show never passed up an opportunity to mention incest. It’s like: mentioning incest 5000 km, not being disgusting 1 km, what a hard decision. Actually, they do have to walk on their knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. But there are other moments—such as Mary burning on the ceiling, a classic, Castiel waiting for Dean at the side of the highway, and Azazel poisoning Sam. With the help of the high schoolers, Sam and Dean overcome Calliope, the muse and bad guy of the episode, and save the day. What began as their lives reinterpreted and told back to them turns into a story they have some agency over.

In this episode, as opposed to “The Monster At The End Of This Book,” The storytelling has transferred from an alcoholic in a bathrobe into the hands of an overbearing and overachieving teenage girl, and honestly why not. Transformative fiction is by and large run by women, and queer women, so Marie and her stage manager slash Jody Mills’s understudy Maeve are just following in the footsteps of legends. This kind of really succinctly summarises the difference between curative fandom and transformative fandom, the former of which is populated mostly by men, and the latter mostly by women. As defined by LordByronic in 2015, Curative fandom is more like enjoying the text, collecting the merchandise, organising the knowledge — basically Reddit in terms of fandom curation. Transformative fandom is transforming the source text in some way — making fanart, fanfic, mvs, or a musical — basically Tumblr in general, and Archive of our own specifically. Like what do non fandom people even do on Tumblr? It is a complete mystery to me. Whereas Chuck literally writes himself into the narrative he receives through visions, Marie and co have agency and control over the narrative by writing it themselves. 

Chuck does appear in the episode towards the end, his first appearance after five seasons. The theory that he killed those lesbian theatre girls makes me wanna curl up and die, so I don’t subscribe to it. Chuck watched the musical and he liked it and he gave unwarranted notes and then he left, the end.

The Supernatural creative team is explicitly acknowledging the fandom’s efforts by making this episode. They’re writing us in again, with more obsessive fans, but with lethbians this time, which makes it infinitely better. And instead of showing us as potential date rapists, we’re just cool chicks who like to make art. And that’s fucken awesome. 

I just have to note that the characters literally say the word Destiel after Dean sees the actors playing Dean and Cas making out. He storms off and tells Sam to shut the fuck up when Sam makes fun of him, because Dean’s sexuality is NOT threatened he just needs to assert his dominance as a straight hetero man who has NEVER looked at another man’s lips and licked his own. He just… forgets that gay people exist until someone reminds him. BUT THEN, after a rousing speech that is stolen from Rent or Wicked or something, he echoes Marie’s words back, saying “put as much sub into that text as you possibly can.” What does Dean know about subbing, I wonder. Okay I’m suddenly reminded that he did literally go to a kink bar and get hit on by a leather daddy. Oh Dean, the experiences you have as a broad-shouldered, pixie-faced man with cowboy legs. You were born for this role.

Metatron is my favourite villain. As one tumblr user pointed out, he is an evil English literature major, which is just a normal English literature major. The season nine episode “Meta Fiction” written by my main man robbie thompson and directed by thomas j wright, happens within a curious season. Castiel, once again, becomes the leader of a portion of the heavenly host to take down Metatron, and Dean is affected by the Mark Of Cain. Sam was recently possessed by Gadreel, who killed Kevin in Sam’s body and then decided to run off with Metatron. Metatron himself is recruiting angels to join him, in the hopes that he can become the new God. It’s the first introduction of Hannah, who encourages Cas to recruit angels himself to take on Metatron. Also, we get to see Gabriel again, who is always a delight. 

This episode is a lot of fun. Metatron poses questions like, who tells a story and who is the most important person in the telling? Is it the writer? The audience? He starts off staring over his typewriter to address the camera, like a pompous dickhead. No longer content with consuming stories, he’s started to write his own. And they are hubristic ones about becoming God, a better god than Chuck ever was, but to do it he needs to kill a bunch of people and blame it on Cas. So really, he’s actually exactly like Chuck who blamed everything on Lucifer. 

But I think the most apt analogy we can use for this in terms of who is the creator is to think of Metatron as a fanfiction writer. He consumes the media—the Winchester Gospels—and starts to write his own version of events—leading an army to become God and kill Cas. Nevermind that no one has been able to kill Cas in a way that matters or a way that sticks. Which is canon, and what Metatron is trying to do is—well not fanon because it actually does impact the Winchesters’ storyline. It would be like if one of the writers of Supernatural began writing Supernatural fanfiction before they got a job on the show. Which as my generation and the generations coming after me get more comfortable with fanfiction and fandom, is going to be the case for a lot of shows. I think it’s already the case for Riverdale. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the woman who wrote the bi Dean essay go to work on Riverdale? Or something? I dunno, I have the post saved in my tumblr likes but that is quagmire of epic proportions that I will easily get lost in if I try to find it. 

Okay let me flex my literary degree. As Englund and Leach say in “Ethnography and the metanarratives of modernity,” “The influential “literary turn,” in which the problems of ethnography were seen as largely textual and their solutions as lying in experimental writing seems to have lost its impetus.” This can be taken to mean, in the context of Supernatural, that while Metatron’s writings seek to forge a new path in history, forgoing fate for a new kind of divine intervention, the problem with Metatron is that he’s too caught up in the textual, too caught up in the writing, to be effectual. And this as we see throughout seasons 9, 10 and 11, has no lasting effect. Cas gets his grace back, Dean survives, and Metatron becomes a powerless human. In this case, the impetus is his grace, which he loses when Cas cuts it out of him, a mirror to Metatron cutting out Cas’s grace. 

However, I realise that the concept of ethnography in Supernatural is a flawed one, ethnography being the observation of another culture: a lot of the angels observe humanity and seem to fit in. However, Cas has to slowly acclimatise to the Winchesters as they tame him, but he never quite fit in—missing cues, not understanding jokes or Dean’s personal space, the scene where he says, “We have a guinea pig? Where?” Show him the guinea pig Sam!!! He wants to see it!!! At most he passes as a human with autism. Cas doesn’t really observe humanity—he observes nature, as seen in season 7 “reading is fundamental” and “survival of the fittest”. Even the human acts he talks about in season 6 “the man who would be king” are from hundreds or thousands of years ago. He certainly doesn’t observe popular culture, which puts him at odds with Dean, who is made up of 90 per cent pop culture references and 10 per cent flannel. Metatron doesn’t seek to blend in with humanity so much as control it, which actually is the most apt example of ethnography for white people in the last—you know, forever. But of course the writers didn’t seek to make this analogy. It is purely by chance, and maybe I’m the only person insane enough to realise it. But probably not. There are a lot of cookies much smarter than me in the Supernatural fandom and they’ve like me have grown up and gone to university and gotten real jobs in the real world and real haircuts. I’m probably the only person to apply Englund and Leach to it though.

And yes, as I read this paper I did need to have one tab open on Google, with the word “define” in the search bar. 

Metatron has a few lines in this that I really like. He says: 

“The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”

“You’re going to have to follow my script.”

“I’m an entity of my word.”

It’s really obvious, but they’re pushing the idea that Metatron has become an agent of authorship instead of just a consumer of media. He even throws a Supernatural book into his fire — a symbolic act of burning the script and flipping the writer off, much like Cas did to God and the angels in season 5. He’s not a Kripke figure so much as maybe a Gamble, Carver or Dabb figure, in that he usurps Chuck and becomes the author-god. This would be extremely postmodern of him if he didn’t just do exactly what Chuck was doing, except worse somehow. In fact, it’s postmodern of Cas to reject heaven’s narrative and fall for Dean. As one tumblr user points out, Cas really said “What’s fate compared to Dean Winchester?”

Okay this transcript is almost 8000 words already, and I still have two more episodes to review, and more things to say, so I’ll leave you with this. Metatron says to Cas, “Out of all of God’s wind up toys, you’re the only one with any spunk.” Why Cas has captured his attention comes down more than anything to a process of elimination. Most angels fucking suck. They follow the rules of whoever puts themselves in charge, and they either love Cas or hate him, or just plainly wanna fuck him, and there have been few angels who stood out. Balthazar was awesome, even though I hated him the first time I watched season 6. He UNSUNK the Titanic. Legend status. And Gabriel was of course the OG who loves to fuck shit up. But they’re gone at this stage in the narrative, and Cas survives. Cas always survives. He does have spunk. And everyone wants to fuck him.  

Season 11 episode 20 “Don’t Call Me Shurley,” the last episode written by the Christ like figure of Robbie Thompson — are we sensing a theme here? — and directed by my divine enemy Robert Singer, starts with Metatron dumpster diving for food. I’m not even going to bother commenting on this because like… it’s supernatural and it treats complex issues like homelessness and poverty with zero nuance. Like the Winchesters live in poverty but it’s fun and cool because they always scrape by but Metatron lives in poverty and it’s funny. Cas was homeless and it was hard but he needed to do it to atone for his sins, and Metatron is homeless and it’s funny because he brought it on himself by being a murderous dick. Fucking hell. Robbie, come on. The plot focuses on God, also known as Chuck Shurley, making himself known to Metatron and asking for Metatron’s opinion on his memoir. Meanwhile, the Winchesters battle another bout of infectious serial killer fog sent by Amara. At the end of the episode, Chuck heals everyone affected by the fog and reveals himself to Sam and Dean. 

Chuck says that he didn’t foresee Metatron trying to become god, but the idea of Season 15 is that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all their lives. When Metatron tries, he fails miserably, is locked up in prison, tortured by Dean, then rendered useless as a human and thrown into the world without a safety net. His authorship is reduced to nothing, and he is reduced to dumpster diving for food. He does actually attempt to live his life as someone who records tragedies as they happen and sells the footage to news stations, which is honestly hilarious and amazing and completely unsurprising because Metatron is, at the heart of it, an English Literature major. In true bastard style, he insults Chuck’s work and complains about the bar, but slips into his old role of editor when Chuck asks him to. 

The theory I’m consulting for this uses the term metanarrative in a different way than I am. They consider it an overarching narrative, a grand narrative like religion. Chuck’s biography is in a sense most loyal to Middleton and Walsh’s view of metanarrative: “the universal story of the world from arche to telos, a grand narrative encompassing world history from beginning to end.” Except instead of world history, it’s God’s history, and since God is construed in Supernatural as just some guy with some powers who is as fallible as the next some guy with some powers, his story has biases and agendas.  Okay so in the analysis I’m getting Middleton and Walsh’s quotes from, James K A Smith’s “A little story about metanarratives,” Smith dunks on them pretty bad, but for Supernatural purposes their words ring true. Think of them as the BuckLeming of Lyotard’s postmodern metanarrative analysis: a stopped clock right twice a day. Is anyone except me understanding the sequence of words I’m saying right now. Do I just have the most specific case of brain worms ever found in human history. I’m currently wearing my oversized Keith Haring shirt and dipping pretzels into peanut butter because it’s 3.18 in the morning and the homosexuals got to me. The total claims a comprehensive metanarrative of world history make do indeed, as Middleton and Walsh claim, lead to violence, stay with me here, because Chuck’s legacy is violence, and so is Metatron’s, and in trying to reject the metanarrative, Sam and Dean enact violence. Mostly Dean, because in season 15 he sacrifices his own son twice to defeat Chuck. But that means literally fighting violence with violence. Violence is, after all, all they know. Violence is the lens through which they interact with the world. If the writers wanted to do literally anything else, they could have continued Dean’s natural character progression into someone who eschews the violence that stems from intergeneration trauma — yes I will continue to use the phrase intergenerational trauma whenever I refer to Dean — and becomes a loving father and husband. Sam could eschew violence and start a monster rehabilitation centre with Eileen.

This episode of Holy Hell is me frantically grabbing at straws to make sense of a narrative that actively hates me and wants to kick me to death. But the violence Sam and Dean enact is not at a metanarrative level, because they are not author-gods of their own narrative. In season 15 “Atomic Monsters,” Becky points out that the ending of the Supernatural book series is bad because the brothers die, and then, in a shocking twist of fate, Dean does die, and the narrative is bad. The writers set themselves a goal post to kick through and instead just slammed their heat into the bars. They set up the dartboard and were like, let’s aim the darts at ourselves. Wouldn’t that be fun. Season 15’s writing is so grossly incompetent that I believe every single conspiracy theory that’s come out of the finale since November, because it’s so much more compelling than whatever the fuck happened on the road so far. Carry on? Why yes, I think I will carry on, carry on like a pork chop, screaming at the bars of my enclosure until I crack my voice open like an egg and spill out all my rage and frustration. The world will never know peace again. It’s now 3.29 and I’ve written over 9000 words of this transcript. And I’m not done.

Middleton and Walsh claim that metanarratives are merely social constructions masquerading as universal truths. Which is, exactly, Supernatural. The creators have constructed this elaborate web of narrative that they want to sell us as the be all and end all. They won’t let the actors discuss how they really feel about the finale. They won’t let Misha Collins talk about Destiel. They want us to believe it was good, actually, that Dean, a recovering alcoholic with a 30 year old infant son and a husband who loves him, deserved to die by getting NAILED, while Sam, who spent the last four seasons, the entirety of Andrew Dabb’s run as showrunner, excelling at creating a hunter network and romancing both the queen of hell and his deaf hunter girlfriend, should have lived a normie life with a normie faceless wife. Am I done? Not even close. I started this episode and I’m going to finish it.

When we find out that Chuck is God in the episode of season 11, it turns everything we knew about Chuck on its head. We find out in Season 15 that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all along, that everything that happened to them is his doing. The one thing he couldn’t control was Cas’s choice to rebel. If we take him at his word, Cas is the only true force of free will in the entire universe, and more specifically, the love that Cas had for Dean which caused him to rebel and fall from heaven. — This theory has holes of course. Why would Lucifer torture Lilith into becoming the first demon if he didn’t have free will? Did Chuck make him do that? And why? So that Chuck could be the hero and Lucifer the bad guy, like Lucifer claimed all along? That’s to say nothing of Adam and Eve, both characters the show introduced in different ways, one as an antagonist and the other as the narrative foil to Dean and Cas’s romance. Thinking about it makes my head hurt, so I’m just not gunna. 

So Chuck was doing the writing all along. And as Becky claims in “Atomic Monsters,” it’s bad writing. The writers explicitly said, the ending Chuck wrote is bad because there’s no Cas and everyone dies, and then they wrote an ending where there is no Cas and everyone dies. So talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. Talk about giant craters in the earth you could see from 800 kilometres away but you still fell into. Meanwhile fan writers have the opportunity to write a million different endings, all of which satisfy at least one person. The fandom is a hydra, prolific and unstoppable, and we’ll keep rewriting the ending a million more times.

And all this is not even talking about the fact that Chuck is a man, Metatron is a man, Sam and Dean and Cas are men, and the writers and directors of the show are, by an overwhelming majority, men. Most of them are white, straight, cis men. Feminist scholarship has done a lot to unpack the damage done by paternalistic approaches to theory, sociology, ethnography, all the -ys, but I propose we go a step further with these men. Kill them. Metanarratively, of course. Amara, the Darkness, God’s sister, had a chance to write her own story without Chuck, after killing everything in the universe, and I think she had the right idea. Knock it all down to build it from the ground up. Billie also had the opportunity to write a narrative, but her folly was, of course, putting any kind of faith in the Winchesters who are also grossly incompetent and often fail up. She is, as all author-gods on this show are, undone by Castiel. The only one with any spunk, the only one who exists outside of his own narrative confines, the only one the author-gods don’t have any control over. The one who died for love, and in dying, gave life. 

The French Mistake

Let’s change the channel. Let’s calm ourselves and cleanse our libras. Let’s commune with nature and chug some sage bongs. 

“The French Mistake” is a song from the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles. In the iconic second last scene of the film, as the cowboys fight amongst themselves, the camera pans back to reveal a studio lot and a door through which a chorus of gay dancersingers perform “the French Mistake”. The lyrics go, “Throw out your hands, stick out your tush, hands on your hips, give ‘em a push. You’ll be surprised you’re doing the French Mistake.” 

I’m not sure what went through the heads of the Supernatural creators when they came up with the season 6 episode, “The French Mistake,” written by the love of my life Ben Edlund and directed by some guy Charles Beeson. Just reading the Wikipedia summary is so batshit incomprehensible. In short: Balthazar sends Sam and Dean to an alternate universe where they are the actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, who play Sam and Dean on the tv show Supernatural. I don’t think this had ever been done in television history before. The first seven seasons of this show are certifiable. Like this was ten years ago. Think about the things that have happened in the last 10 slutty, slutty years. We have lived through atrocities and upheaval and the entire world stopping to mourn, but also we had twitter throughout that entire time, which makes it infinitely worse.

In this universe, Sam and Dean wear makeup, Cas is played by attractive crying man Misha Collins, and Genevieve Padalecki nee Cortese makes an appearance. Magic doesn’t exist, Serge has good ideas, and the two leads have to act in order to get through the day. Sorry man I do not know how to pronounce your name.

Sidenote: I don’t know if me being attracted aesthetically to Misha Collins is because he’s attractive, because this show has gaslighted me into thinking he’s attractive, or because Castiel’s iconic entrance in 2008 hit my developing mind like a torpedo full of spaghetti and blew my fucking brains all over the place. It’s one of life’s little mysteries and God’s little gifts.

Let’s talk about therapy. More specifically, “Agency and purpose in narrative therapy: questioning the postmodern rejection of metanarrative” by Cameron Lee. In this paper, Lee outlines four key ideas as proposed by Freedman and Combs:

Realities are socially constructed

Realities are constituted through language

Realities are organised and maintained through narrative

And there are no essential truths.

Let’s break this down in the case of this episode. Realities are socially constructed: the reality of Sam and Dean arose from the Bush era. Do I even need to elaborate? From what I understand with my limited Australian perception, and being a child at the time, 9/11 really was a prominent shifting point in the last twenty years. As Americans describe it, sometimes jokingly, it was the last time they were really truly innocent. That means to me that until they saw the repercussions of their government’s actions in funding turf wars throughout the middle east for a good chunk of the 20th Century, they allowed themselves to be hindered by their own ignorance. The threat of terrorism ran rampant throughout the States, spurred on by right wing nationalists and gun-toting NRA supporters, so it’s really no surprise that the show Supernatural started with the premise of killing everything in sight and driving around with only your closest kin and a trunk full of guns. Kripke constructed that reality from the social-political climate of the time, and it has wrought untold horrors on the minds of lesbians who lived through the noughties, in that we are now attracted to Misha Collins.

Number two: Realities are constituted through language. Before a show can become a show, it needs to be a script. It’s written down, typed up, and given to actors who say the lines out loud. In this respect, they are using the language of speech and words to convey meaning. But tv shows are not all about words, and they’re barely about scripts. From what I understand of being raised by television, they are about action, visuals, imagery, and behaviours. All of the work that goes into them—the scripts, the lighting, the audio, the sound mixing, the cameras, the extras, the ADs, the gaffing, the props, the stunts, everything—is about conveying a story through the medium of images. In that way, images are the language. The reality of the show Supernatural, inside the show Supernatural, is constituted through words: the script, the journalists talking to Sam, the makeup artist taking off Dean’s makeup, the conversations between the creators, the tweets Misha sends. But also through imagery: the fish tank in Jensen’s trailer, the model poses on the front cover of the magazine, the opulence of Jared’s house, Misha’s iconic sweater. Words and images are the language that constitutes both of these realities. Okay for real, I feel like I’ve only seen this episode max three times, including when I watched it for research for this episode, but I remember so much about it. 

Number three: realities are organised and maintained through narrative. In this universe of the French Mistake, their lives are structured around two narratives: the internal narrative of the show within the show, in which they are two actors on a tv set; and the episode narrative in which they need to keep the key safe and return to their own universe. This is made difficult by the revelation that magic doesn’t work in this universe, however, they find a way. Before they can get back, though, an avenging angel by the name of Virgil guns down author-god Eric Kripke and tries to kill the Winchesters. However, they are saved by Balthazar and the freeze frame and brought back into their own world, the world of Supernatural the show, not Supernatural the show within the show within the nesting doll. And then that reality is done with, never to be revisited or even mentioned, but with an impact that has lasted longer than the second Bush administration.

And number four: there are no essential truths. This one is a bit tricky because I can’t find what Lee means by essential truths, so I’m just going to interpret that. To me, essential truths means what lies beneath the narratives we tell ourselves. Supernatural was a show that ran for 15 years. Supernatural had actors. Supernatural was showrun by four different writers. In the show within a show, there is nothing, because that ceases to exist for longer than the forty two minute episode “The French Mistake”. And since Supernatural no longer exists except in our computers, it is nothing too. It is only the narratives we tell ourselves to sleep better at night, to wake up in the morning with a smile, to get through the day, to connect with other people, to understand ourselves better. It’s not even the narrative that the showrunners told, because they have no agency over it as soon as it shows up on our screens. The essential truth of the show is lost in the translation from creating to consuming. Who gives the story meaning? The people watching it and the people creating it. We all do. 

Lee says that humans are predisposed to construct narratives in order to make sense of the world. We see this in cultures from all over the world: from cave paintings to vases, from The Dreaming to Beowulf, humans have always constructed stories. The way you think about yourself is a story that you’ve constructed. The way you interact with your loved ones and the furries you rightfully cyberbully on Twitter is influenced by the narratives you tell yourself about them. And these narratives are intricate, expansive, personalised, and can colour our perceptions completely, so that we turn into a different person when we interact with one person as opposed to another. 

Whatever happened in season 6, most of which I want to forget, doesn’t interest me in the way I’m telling myself the writers intended. For me, the entirety of season 6 was based around the premise of Cas being in love with Dean, and the complete impotence of this love. He turns up when Dean calls, he agonises as he watches Dean rake leaves and live his apple pie life with Lisa, and Dean is the person he feels most horribly about betraying. He says, verbatim, to Sam, “Dean and I do share a more profound bond.” And Balthazar says, “You’re confusing me with the other angel, the one in the dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you.” He says this in season 6, and we couldn’t do a fucken thing about it. 

The song “The French Mistake” shines a light on the hidden scene of gay men performing a gay narrative, in the midst of a scene about the manliest profession you can have: professional horse wrangler, poncho wearer, and rodeo meister, the cowboy. If this isn’t a perfect encapsulation of the lovestory between Dean and Cas, which Ben Edlund has been championing from day fucking one of Misha Collins walking onto that set with his sex hair and chapped lips, then I don’t know what the fuck we’re even doing here. What in the hell else could it possibly mean. The layers to this. The intricacy. The agendas. The subtextual AND blatant queerness. The micro aggressions Crowley aimed at Car in “The Man Who Would Be King,” another Bedlund special. Bed Edlund is a fucking genius. Bed Edlund is cool girl. Ben Edlund is the missing link. Bed Edlund IS wikileaks. Ben Edlund is a cool breeze on a humid summer day. Ben Edlund is the stop loading button on a browser tab. Ben Edlund is the perfect cross between Spotify and Apple Music, in which you can search for good playlists, but without having to be on Spotify. He can take my keys and fuck my wife. You best believe I’m doing an entire episode of Holy Hell on Bedlund’s top five. He is the reason I want to get into staffwriting on a tv show. I saw season 4 episode “On the head of a pin” when my brain was still torpedoed spaghetti mush from the premiere, and it nestled its way deep into my exposed bones, so that when I finally recovered from that, I was a changed person. My god, this transcript is 11,000 words, and I haven’t even finished the Becky section. Which is a good transition.

Oh, Becky. She is an incarnation of how the writers, or at least Kripke, view the fans. Watching season 5 “Sympathy for the Devil” live in 2009 was a whole fucking trip that I as a baby gay was not prepared for. Figuring out my sexuality was a journey that started with the Supernatural fandom and is in some aspects still raging against the dying of the light today. Add to that, this conception of the audience was this, like, personification of the librarian cellist from Juno, but also completely without boundaries, common sense, or shame. It made me wonder about my position in the narrative as a consumer consuming. Is that how Kripke saw me, specifically? Was I like Becky? Did my forays into DeanCasNatural on El Jay dot com make me a fucking loser whose only claim to fame is writing some nasty fanfiction that I’ve since deleted all traces of? Don’t get me wrong, me and my unhinged Casgirl friends loved Becky. I can’t remember if I ever wrote any fanfiction with her in it because I was mostly writing smut, which is extremely Becky coded of me, but I read some and my friends and I would always chat about her when she came up. She was great entertainment value before season 7. But in the eyes of the powers that be, Becky, like the fans themselves, are expendable. First they turned her into a desperate bride wannabe who drugs Sam so that he’ll be with her, then Chuck waves his hand and she disappears. We’re seeing now with regards to Destiel, Cas, and Misha Collins this erasure of them from the narrative. Becky says in season 15 “Atomic Monsters” that the ending Chuck writes is bad because, for one, there’s no Cas, and that’s exactly what’s happening to the text post-finale. It literally makes me insane akin to the throes of mania to think about the layers of this. They literally said, “No Cas = bad” and now Misha isn’t even allowed to talk in his Cassona voice—at least at the time I wrote that—to the detriment of the fans who care about him. It’s the same shit over and over. They introduce something we like, they realise they have no control over how much we like it, and then they pretend they never introduced it in the first place. Season 7, my god. The only reason Gamble brought back Cas was because the ratings were tanking the show. I didn’t even bother watching most of it live, and would just hear from my friends whether Cas was in the episodes or not. And then Sera, dear Sera, had the gall to say it was a Homer’s Odyssey narrative. I’m rusty on Homer aka I’ve never read it but apparently Odysseus goes away, ends up with a wife on an island somewhere, and then comes back to Terabithia like it never happened. How convenient. But since Sera Gamble loves to bury her gays, we can all guess why Cas was written out of the show: Cas being gay is a threat to the toxic heteronormativity spouted by both the show and the characters themselves. In season 15, after Becky gets her life together, has kids, gets married, and starts a business, she is outgrowing the narrative and Chuck kills her. The fans got Destiel Wedding trending on Twitter, and now the creators are acting like he doesn’t exist. New liver, same eagles.

I have to add an adendum: as of this morning, Sunday 11th, don’t ask me what time that is in Americaland, Misha Collins did an online con/Q&A thing and answered a bunch of questions about Cas and Dean, which goes to show that he cannot be silenced. So the narrative wants to be told. It’s continuing well into it’s 16th or 17th season. It’s going to keep happening and they have no recourse to stop it. So fuck you, Supernatural.

I did write the start of a speech about representation but, who the holy hell cares. I also read some disappointing Masters theses that I hope didn’t take them longer to research and write than this episode of a podcast I’m making for funsies took me, considering it’s the same number of pages. Then again I have the last four months and another 8 years of fandom fuelling my obsession, and when I don’t sleep I write, hence the 4,000 words I knocked out in the last 12 hours. 

Some final words. Lyotard defines postmodernism, the age we live in, as an incredulity towards metanarratives. Modernism was obsessed with order and meaning, but postmodernism seeks to disrupt that. Modernists lived within the frame of the narrative of their society, but postmodernists seek to destroy the frame and live within our own self-written contexts. Okay I love postmodernist theory so this has been a real treat for me. Yoghurt, Sam? Postmodernist theory? Could I BE more gay? 

Middleton and Walsh in their analysis of postmodernism claim that biblical faith is grounded in metanarrative, and explore how this intersects with an era that rejects metanarrative. This is one of the fundamental ideas Supernatural is getting at throughout definitely the last season, but other seasons as well. The narratives of Good vs Evil, Michael vs Lucifer, Dean vs Sam, were encoded into the overarching story of the show from season 1, and since then Sam and Dean have sought to break free of them. Sam broke free of John’s narrative, which was the hunting life, and revenge, and this moralistic machismo that they wrapped themselves up in. If they’re killing the evil, then they’re not the evil. That’s the story they told, and the impetus of the show that Sam was sucked back into. But this thread unravelled in later seasons when Dean became friends with Benny and the idea that all supernatural creatures are inherently evil unravelled as well. While they never completely broke free of John’s hold over them, welcoming Jack into their lives meant confronting a bias that had been ingrained in them since Dean was 4 years old and Sam 6 months. In the face of the question, “are all monsters monstrous?” the narrative loosens its control. Even by questioning it, it throws into doubt the overarching narrative of John’s plan, which is usurped at the end of season 2 when they kill Azazel by Dean’s demon deal and a new narrative unfolds. John as author-god is usurped by the actual God in season 4, who has his own narrative that controls the lives of Sam, Dean and Cas. 

Okay like for real, I do actually think the metanarrativity in Supernatural is something that should be studied by someone other than me, unless you wanna pay me for it and then shit yeah. It is extremely cool to introduce a biographical narrative about the fictional narrative it’s in. It’s cool that the characters are constantly calling this narrative into focus by fighting against it, struggling to break free from their textual confines to live a life outside of the external forces that control them. And the thing is? The really real, honest thing? They have. Sam, Dean and Cas have broken free of the narrative that Kripke, Carver, Gamble and Dabb wrote for them. The very fact that the textual confession of love that Cas has for Dean ushered in a resurgence of fans, fandom and activity that has kept the show trending for five months after it ended, is just phenomenal. People have pointed out that fans stopped caring about Game of Thrones as soon as it ended. Despite the hold they had over tv watchers everywhere, their cultural currency has been spent. The opposite is true for Supernatural. Despite how the finale of the show angered and confused people, it gains more momentum every day. More fanworks, more videos, more fics, more art, more ire, more merch is being generated by the fans still. The Supernatural subreddit, which was averaging a few posts a week by season 15, has been incensed by the finale. And yours truly happily traipsed back into the fandom snake pit after 8 years with a smile on my face and a skip in my step ready to pump that dopamine straight into my veins babeeeeeeyyyyy. It’s been WILD. I recently reconnected with one of my mutuals from 2010 and it’s like nothing’s changed. We’re both still unhinged and we both still simp for Supernatural. Even before season 15, I was obsessed with the podcast Ride Or Die, which I started listening to in late 2019, and Supernatural was always in the back of my mind. You just don’t get over your first fandom. Actually, Danny Phantom was my first fandom, and I remember being 12 talking on Danny Phantom forums to people much too old to be the target audience of the show. So I guess that hasn’t left me either. And the fondest memories I have of Supernatural is how the characters have usurped their creators to become mythic, long past the point they were supposed to die a quiet death. The myth weaving that the Supernatural fandom is doing right now is the legacy that will endure. 

References

I got all of these for free from Google Scholar! 

Judith May Fathallah, “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural.” 

James K A Smith, “A Little Story About Metanarratives: Lyotard, Religion and Postmodernism Revisited.” 2001.

Cameron Lee, “Agency and Purpose in Narrative Therapy: Questioning the Postmodern Rejection of Metanarrative.” 2004.

Harri Englund and James Leach, “Ethnography and the Meta Narratives of Modernity.” 2000.

https://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/mel-brooks-explains-french-mistake-blazing-saddles-blu-ray/

#transcripts #supernatural #supernatural podcast #<60mins #this is first and foremost a podcast about cas and misha collins

[cyanoscarlet]

20/20 vision ☀️🎁 "He’s being saved again, comes the rueful thought. How many times does that make it, now?" The sheer *clenches fist* BACKGROUND in this line, how DARE you dani. This is the line that spawned my train of thought, I hope you're happy. Reducing me to angstful tears as I think about backstories and the potential in a hospital.

...... Aiyah...... (breaks into nervous sweats)

I’ll preface this with the fact that 20/20 vision, too, was a product of post-duty chaotic-brain-ing while on a coffee high, so thank you again! THANK YOU so much. Forever over the moon over this! <3

List of fic asks here!

He’s being saved again, comes the rueful thought. How many times does that make it, now?

20/20 vision, bungou stray dogs

(In which Chuuya is an ophthalmologist, Dazai is his optometrist, and they slowly fall in love.)

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☀️ -  Was there any symbolism/motifs you worked in? 

Apart from the obvious references to eyes, some of the other passages used in this story are, indeed, metaphors for certain aspects of Dazai and Chuuya’s relationship, as well as Chuuya’s developing feelings for Dazai— many of them I’ve only derived from rereading this fic again and again just now, you’ll note!

Just a few major ones among the many:

The business proposition - Dazai does mean it literally, but yeah, he’s also taken interest in Chuuya himself, and wants them to be in a relationship. Chuuya himself is at first tolerant, then accepting of it, which runs parallel to his growing thoughts and feelings for Dazai. The way he keeps track of how many times Dazai has said this now is indicative of that. He is still hesitant, of course— be it due to confusion or to career-related reasons, but Dazai is and will always be willing to wait for Chuuya, hence the gentle, persistent reminder every time he visits.

Also, yes, the ending part in which Chuuya calls back to this is totally him saying ‘yes’ to Dazai— tantamount to a love confession, if you will. The essence of that whole last conversation, in light of everything that has happened before it, makes the story come full circle in its own way. There is always something sweet about saying ‘I love you’ without actually saying it, and the symbolism of the business proposition works really well for this whole purpose.

The spare glasses - It reflects both Dazai’s long-term familiarity with (everything about) Chuuya at this point, and the fact that no matter what, Chuuya will always have a safe space (home) with Dazai himself, eye problems and friendship and everything in between. You have Chuuya ruminating on his pride and principles and admitting his own faults, and he can just be all of that— that is, himself, when he is with Dazai. And Dazai knows this, too: “You didn’t have to ask, you know.”

The coffee and prescriptions - In the more literal sense, it’s Dazai being his disaster himself + creating trouble (coffee), and Chuuya having to take care of him (prescriptions), albeit a bit more hilariously unwilling on his part. Subconsciously, Dazai is always wanting to keep Chuuya’s attention on him, hence the repeat offenses, but Chuuya is always willing to forgive him those anyway / shower the attention that Dazai wants. Similarly, the wine / coffee discussions represent their individual differences, and what Chuuya thinks of them. They do try their best to meet in the middle, though, coming to an understanding / compromise of sorts— you see this in the ending, too, when they go out drinking.

A note on Kunikida, and his relationship/s with Dazai and with Chuuya - Kunikida, in this story, is Dazai’s old classmate from college, and is currently Chuuya’s colleague in a different department. Although it may appear that Dazai and Kunikida seem a bit more dismissive of each other, they do have a good relationship founded on common ground (science / statistical analysis), which Chuuya does not share with Dazai (literature / writing). You are right in that this makes Chuuya and Kunikida good foils of each other, yet they, too, have a good relationship / understanding despite their differences, both as individuals (Chuuya in Ophthalmology and Kunikida in Internal Medicine) and within their respective relationships with Dazai (Chuuya being more tolerant / forgiving as the newer friend, and Kunikida being more strict / stern, as the older friend).

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On the more headcanon-y stuff (which I really don’t think I’ll be able to write at this point because my brain is already decidedly chaotic as fuck hahaaahah), a couple of lines I’ve picked up that can be expanded on are:

1. Chuuya and 20/20 vision - As you may have probably sensed from his character (and it totally fits him in canon), he never really wanted to be a doctor. He even had a rebellious streak in college for it. He still ends up in med school, though, but he doesn’t have a direct goal / direction in life at this point. This is represented by his worsening visual acuity, which, yes, was directly caused by constantly burning the midnight oil while studying. He’s stuck in a field he doesn’t want, yet tries his best, way too much, that he just gets lost. It is at this low point in his life that he meets Dazai, and his life changes. He gets glasses, tries to make sense of his life (regain 20/20 vision), and where to go from there. And Dazai, god bless him, is always there, always has his back for the whole ride: He’s being saved again, comes the rueful thought. How many times does that make it, now? They fall in love along the way, and it takes very long for them to reach the endgame, but they do, and it is beautiful. Chuuya’s 20/20 vision is his contentment with his life now, and a forever with Dazai. It’s the best view he could ever wish for, and he is very happy with it.

2. Chuuya, Mori-sensei and Promises - A very different version of Chuuya learning from (and in turn, being influenced by) Mori from Fifteen (Pre-canon) Arc. I don’t have a solid one for this tbh, but let’s just say an encounter with Mori greatly changes Chuuya’s outlook and makes him choose Ophthalmology as his specialty, the way he comes to swear loyalty to Mori and the Port Mafia in canon. No real solid connection with Dazai, in this case, but feel free to make of it what you will! I’m not quite imaginative enough for this hahaha.

... Okay, that was long. (sweatdrops)

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🎁 -  Any writing advice for people who want to write something like this? 

First of all, do not drink brewed coffee at lunch time and end up with nearing 48 hours of palpitations later. Also, do not be like Dazai and drink 18 cups of coffee in one sitting, holy crap. I don’t think even Kunikida can save you from that if you do end up going over that literal and proverbial edge.

All that crap aside (which I do mean in earnest!), this idea totally came from a simple desire headcanon of Chuuya in prescription glasses. This, in turn, was influenced by downtime chats with my triage partner for that day, my classmate from med school now doing Ophthalmology residency. There were also other small things that happened to me IRL, like the way the lenses of my false glasses quickly yellowed within days of purchase, and the unexpected offer of free brewed coffee. Bottom line, take cues from real life; it’s a fun goldmine of tales tall and short, and you’ll have fun telling those because they are first and foremost yours. 

Similar to this, take note of the small things around you— pay attention to the way the leaves are swept by the wind, the way she crosses the street, the taste of the coffee you drink. Then describe those in your head— what I find works best for me is both immersing myself in the scenario and staying outside of it, like controlling a video game character / avatar, in a way. That way, I can develop my sentences in a vivid manner yet stay objective. (This is a bit harder to explain, actually.)

Most of all, write what works best for you, no matter what style you use. One quote I remember from English writing class (yet another gen-ed pre-req subject boohoo) states: “Write in white heat; revise in cold blood.” When you are struck by the idea, write it down. Let the ideas take over your fingers and let yourself get carried away. I admit that I really didn’t think through the plot of this very fic myself; I just let myself go until I was done a few hours later. This heat-of-the-moment writing high rarely happens to me (I wish it happened more often!), but I find that what I do come up with when I don’t think things through ends up a final product I quite like, other people’s feedback aside. The editing later is another story; don’t be afraid to critique your own work and adjust accordingly, if you feel that it will make the story better. (This part I have a decidedly much harder time with, but it’s still good advice, so I’m putting that down here, as well.)

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Okay, that got reeeeeaaaaallyyyyyy long, now. Aegis really be pushing me to my limits every time we talk, and it’s making me grow and learn more about writing and about myself. I’m really, really grateful for this ask. I hope you all enjoyed reading this, too!

List of fic asks here!

#dani answers #eternal-aegis #fanfic ask #fic meta #fic discourse #bungou stray dogs #dazai osamu #nakahara chuuya #soukoku #skk #dachuu #long post

[rathbian]

edit: uh apparently i didn’t add a readmore whoops mb

I didn’t think I needed to say this but ad hominem attacks don’t lend well to discourse. Even worse are baseless accusations while ignoring disclaimers and evidence. Worse still is blatantly discrediting testimony from the people who y’all supposedly defend, whether now or from ages ago. Ain’t my wheelhouse so I can’t refute much but I suppose if we’re going to stoop so low as personal attacks, anything’s fair game, huh.

In completely, totally unrelated matters, let’s actually discuss a little bit about Kaito Momota and why supporting him completely uncritically or, at least, speculating that he could be a mlm or trans guy is harmful. Under the cut will be an explanation of why wholly uncritical support for his characterization is an issue and why supporting him in that way detracts from one’s credibility when discussing matters of bigotry and representation in fictional media.

I understand damn near everyone knows this by now, I know it’s old and tired but we need to discuss the original Japanese scene from the Daily Life segment chapter 2. Because I hold no credibility on my own for saying he’s transphobic/homophobic from his comment to Shinguuji, I will defer to a handful of other sources. Various trustworthy dictionaries(please use Google for this) refer to okama(オカマ) as a derogatory term for trans women and effeminate and gay men when used against someone. You can find the line he says here at about the 01:08:01-01:08:09 marks. Further context of this scene is described here and here, both sources by trans people and fluent Japanese speakers who have done their research into this topic.

Because of these sources, I have reason to believe that he said a transphobic and homophobic line, on top of all of his other moments of accusing men of not being manly enough for his standards which is a sentiment borne of misogyny and homophobia. This alone, would be enough but I’m certain that there exist some camps of people who will defend him with varying excuses so I’ll take a moment to refute a few hypothetical defenses for him. Should you find another point of refutation I’d be happy to argue against it, so please let me know.

“If the intent of this line was to be homophobic/transphobic, the translators would have kept it in.“ - I will give on the point that Kaito is not intended to be a bigoted character, at least, in Kodaka’s eyes. Intent, however, does not equal impact. In writing him as an archetypal shounen hero with the associated machismo and bullheadedness and having the narrative laud him over and again for having these views, he comes off as a character whose chauvinistic ideologies are praised or, at least, excusable. Even in NISA’s English version, one can at tell that even his misogyny and homophobia remained, albeit, tamely or localized in the bonus mode. I may not be a conspiracy theorist but it’s not far-fetched to claim translator bias colored the way he was localized as well, considering NISA’s lack of hesitation in translating slurs and the like for Miu, to make him seem more affable due to his archetype. Despite that, because a number of his actions and words are so deeply rooted in this view, it could not be removed entirely from him. Knowing this, we can come to the conclusion specific line was essentially lost in translation, as he was watered down but still capable of exhibiting the toxic behavior associated with his character type on top of clear bias. 

”The NISA English version is the only one that most of the fandom has been exposed to so it’s okay to only base Kaito’s characterization off of that.” - An understandable point insofar as not everyone has access to the original version of the game. This is, then, up to the fandom to do just a little bit of research when people are trying to bring up this version of the game to educate others of the original intent of the game, seeing as translation errors abound through attempts at localization. Though NISA’s version is the generally accepted translation, it will not change that it is a derivative work and that the source material's faults cannot remain without scrutiny. To do so is to allow misinformation and misinterpretation to run rampant. I do not find fault in those who do not yet know but those who either are unwilling to accept his flaws ingrained in his behavior or unwilling to listen or learn when someone tries to show context are willfully ignorant of his bigotry.

“It was left uncriticized by the narrative so it’s Kodaka’s fault/the fault of Japanese culture so we can remove that from his character traits.“ - Aside from the rather dubious assumption that Japan as a society is so backwards that Japanese people cannot be trusted to know what is bigoted or not, nothing will change that he had said what he said and did what he did within the canon of NDRV3. We cannot extricate Kaito from those by blaming the author for his traits without acknowledging that all the other traits written into his character are also simply the fault of the author as one should not be selective in acknowledging canon. Things which were written by an awful person remain awful and to ignore that is to shy away from the true nature of the material at hand, to enjoy uncritically is the same as condoning such things. As a personal plea, I ask of you to think critically: why go through these lengths to excuse a character’s bad traits that would be looked upon as offensive? Why ignore homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny in favor of making this character look better or for the sake of a headcanon?

Why is it so important to know that Kaito is indeed bigoted and just why is it bad to headcanon him as attracted to men or is trans? I will acknowledge the possibility of internalized homophobia and transphobia. However, recognize that his actions stem from that bias and that the narrative will not speak against him on these matters as it only calls out his foolhardiness and reckless abandon. If you can recognize these, you should also think a little bit about why making headcanons about a character having internalized bigotry that is not recognized as awful would run parallel to the incredibly harmful stereotype of assuming that bigots are really just in the closet. Internalized bigotry, especially when left without criticism, does not make for the greatest headcanon material.

I will not police those who are fans of his, as it is not a crime to enjoy characters who would be considered awful. I will neither make assumptions about nor judge those who like him without context as I’m not one for attacking others on a personal scale and I’m sure that people will give their reasons unwarranted anyway. However, trying to preach about bigotry affecting real people through representation while not only excusing bigotry from a character but also disregarding those who this bigotry would affect is hypocritical, I’d say. Objectively, it’s still harmful to headcanon a bigot as a part of the group that they’re bigoted against because in contributes to the idea that the real oppressors are members of their own community. It’s a belief that warps real people’s perceptions of other real people and making a headcanon out of it has similar effects to negative stereotyping in coding. To use a colloquial phrase, is this who y’all stan?

#kaito momota #danganronpa #i'll be kind and provide a readmore this time #in other news #don't attack folks over irrelevant topics #please don't bring anything other than evidence or relevant discussion #doing so neither benefits your case nor detracts from your discourse partner's #also it's just uh an asshole move #rath rambles #panic at the discourse #long post #rath writes

[theoptimisticpatriot]

Mind the Values Gap

This review of ‘Mind the Values Gap,’ published by UK in Changing Europe, was written for Political Quarterly and will be published in its next edition. 

Minds the Values Gap, a report published by The UK in a Changing Europe, highlights the poor alignment of the values expressed within the major parties by their MPs and their activists, with those voters who support them. Voters as a whole tend to the left on economic values, and to the authoritarian on social values. Although the data imply that it is the social authoritarianism that defines both Leave voters and Labour–Conservative switchers, this response argues that issues of national identity, democracy and sovereignty are neglected in that analysis.

once brexit supposedly revealed a Britain and an England divided down the middle, the search has continued to try to understand the political dividing lines. Mind the Values Gap. The Social and Economic Values of MPs, Party Members and Voters sits neatly in this canon.1 Going beyond the values of voters to examine their alignment—or lack of it—with the values of Labour and Conservative MPs, their party activists, and their party’s voters, it asks how those alignments might affect the ability of each party to put together a winning electoral coalition in the future.

If the Conservatives, elected on promises not just to ‘Get Brexit Done’ but to ‘level up the economy’, find that the latter is hard and made more difficult by the former, the challenge will be to find additional means of keeping their new ‘red wall’ voters on side. For Labour, having opted for a leader who looks more electable than Jeremy Corbyn, the wicked question is whether it will make any other changes to bring the party more into line with the voters it now needs to win. Despite the apparent resurgence of two‐party politics in England, Mind the Values Gap suggests neither party looks to have a comfortable fit between its own internal values and of those of its current voters, let alone those they will have to win in the future. This challenge will dominate much of the tactics and strategy of both major parties over the next few years. But, in summarising the paper and its argument, we can also explore how much insight this analysis of values gives into the real world of politics and voter behaviour.

The analysis builds on the placement of voters and party members on the now familiar axes of left–right economic views and liberal–authoritarian social views. An advantage of these scales is their repeated use in the British Election Study (BES) and other surveys over many years. The very ubiquity of this data can obscure a more fundamental question of whether it deserves the weight it is given in providing an insight into attitudes. This is explored further below.

Mind the Values Gap’s first conclusion is that May’s Law—first postulated in 1973 and suggesting that party voters and MPs will share more closely aligned values than party voters and activists—no longer applies reliably (‘if it ever did’, as the paper observes). On the left–right economic scale, Labour MPs and their voters are reasonably well aligned, with their activists only somewhat further to the left. Amongst Conservatives, however, MPs are significantly to the right of members and activists, who themselves are to the right of Conservative voters. Indeed, on four out of the five questions used to construct the economic scale, Conservative voters have more in common with every part of the Labour ‘bloc’ then they have with Conservative MPs or activists. Only on whether the state should redistribute from the better off to the less well‐off are Conservative voters better aligned with the party they vote for. Labour voters, while somewhat more supportive than the average voter, are also less enthusiastic for this particular measure. It should be noted that support for the proposition that, for example, ordinary people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth, does not imply consent for state action to produce a different outcome. This reminds us that, perhaps unhelpfully, the left–right spectrum bundles up views of how the world works with policy questions about how governments should act.

On social values, both Labour and Conservative MPs are more socially liberal than either of their groups of voters (although, as might be expected, Labour MPs, activists, and voters are all more liberal than their Conservative equivalents). Conservative MPs are significantly more socially liberal than the average Tory voter. Although the paper’s focus is on the alignment of the different elements of each party and its voters, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that the political system as a whole, at least as represented by its MPs, is distinctly out of step with the electorate on social values.

At a time when neither of the major parties really reflects the views of the ‘average’ voter on social issues, it is perhaps not surprising that many voters express a lack of confidence in the political system. Similarly, on economic issues, the average voter is more closely aligned with Labour, but there is a huge gulf between even 2019 Conservative voters and the Conservative MPs that they elected. The picture that emerges is less one of political parties compromising their views to meet those of the electorate than of voters being forced to compromise their values in order to choose a party.

The dilemma facing voters is highlighted by the report’s focus on two key groups of voters: EU Leavers/ Remainers and the 2019 Labour–Tory switchers. On the economic axis Remain and Leave voters are only slightly divided, though Remainers sit just to the left and Leavers just to the right of the average voter. This makes the average Remainer less radical economically than Labour and the typical Leaver much more centrist than Conservative MPs or activists. Assessed by social identity, Labour emerges much more clearly as the party closest to Remainers and for the Conservatives, the same for Leavers.

The voters who switched from Labour to the Conservatives in 2019 have authoritarian values that are closely aligned with Conservative voters as a whole, even though they are to the left of centre (though by less than Labour voters) on economic issues. This might be taken to imply that the decisive issue in both the referendum and the 2019 election was social rather than economic values. But this is where we need to look more carefully at the values scales.

There is a strong literature, based largely on BES and other data, that explores left–right and liberal–authoritarian values. The analysis provides a valuable insight into two of the ways that voters might look at the world. Such studies also can also be used to highlight the challenges faced by political parties in reaching all parts of their electoral coalition. Paula Surridge has shown, for example, that Labour’s biggest problem is in reaching voters who are economically to the left but socially conservative. This conclusion, drawn from the same BES data, is entirely in line with the paper being discussed here.2

However, it is less clear that these two axes, though readily available and easy to analyse, provide the comprehensive and rounded view of voters’ world views that they are sometimes implied to represent. One omission which might be important both post‐Brexit and after a general election won by the party promising to ‘Get Brexit Done’ are voters’ views on national identity, democracy, sovereignty and governance. Given that ‐many voters who voted Leave actually wanted to leave the European Union, it might seem perverse to put more weight on their economic and social values than on the questions about the nation, sovereignty, parliamentary democracy, and governance that were (implictly at least) on the ballot paper.

In 2013, the Future of England Survey highlighted how English voters had come to adopt a far more hostile attitude towards the EU than voters in Scotland and Wales.3 They were much more likely to perceive the EU as having a major influence on the way the country was governed. Those who emphasised their English rather than their British identity were the most eurosceptic (and were also the most likely to resent the Barnett formula and to believe that devolution had been detrimental to England’s interests).

In the EU referendum, self‐declared national identity on the Moreno scale showed a dramatic correlation with Leave–Remain voting. The Future of England Survey polling suggests that 73 per cent of the ‘English not British’ and the ‘more English than British’ voted Leave while 66 per cent of the ‘more British’ and ‘British not English’ voted Remain.4 In the BES ‘word cloud’ of Leave voter motivation, immigration dominated with other words concerning sovereignty and nation—including sovereignty itself, ‘control’, ‘laws’, and ‘borders’—featuring strongly.5 In the context of the referendum, the sovereign ability to control immigration was a key political issue; it is one that cannot be crudely reduced to the by‐product of a social or cultural value.

The Conservative victory was delivered almost entirely amongst voters who identified as English or more English than British, and the Conservatives dramatically extended their lead amongst these groups between 2015 and 2019 (see Table 1).Source: British Election Study, wave 19.

Table 1. The political salience of national identity was evident in the 2019 election

National identity also influences the internal politics of political parties as I showed in a survey conducted with the ConservativeHome website in 2017.6 Albeit with a self‐selected group of activists, the survey showed that English‐identifying Conservative activists held far more negative views about the Union and devolution than those who prioritised their British identity.

Further surveys by the BBC/YouGov (2018) and the Centre for English Identity and Politics (2019) show that the more voters emphasise their English identity, the more they are likely to perceive distinct English interests, as could be glimpsed in the 2015 Conservative campaign posters with a hapless Miliband in Salmond’s pocket. These voters want political parties to stand up for English interests within the Union, to prioritise England over the Union, and to support either an English Parliament or a full‐blooded English Votes for English Laws.

As yet, there is not a consistent database to allow the construction of an axis of national identity, sovereignty, and democracy to compare with the left–right, liberal–authoritarian scales. But the fragmentary data we have has suggested that such a scale would offer a third insight into the alignment of voters and their position on the economic and social axes. Those voters to the left of the economic scale will tend to be those who are most distinctly English rather than British, and those who are more British than English. The equally English and British will be somewhat to the right of those poles of the spectrum. On social values, the most socially conservative are the English, and views become steadily more liberal as we move towards the British end of the scale.7 A nation, sovereignty, and democracy scale would explore the extent to which voters’ stronger identities were national, Union or European, where they thought the focus of political action should lie, and the range of issues that should be determined by different levels of local, national, Union, and international governance.

As well as providing a more rounded view of voter outlooks, the addition of a nation and sovereignty dimension sheds additional light on recent voter behaviour and the challenges facing political parties. In practical politics, parties don’t just offer choices of economic and social values, but also different views of the nation and democracy. If the parties’ economic and social values don’t appear to align well with those of the voters, then issues of democracy, sovereignty, and national identity may come to the fore. Both ‘Take Back Control’ and ‘Get Brexit Done’ spoke clearly to what was an ultimately decisive section of the electorate and in a context where the ‘other side’—Remain in the referendum or Labour during the 2019 election campaign—was barely attempting to address the same issues or concerns. Faced with decisions where few voters could find a party that reflected all their economic, social, and national democratic values, it would not be surprising if the one apparently clear‐cut issue—national democracy and sovereignty—emerged as definitive for a critical mass of voters. In the future, the major parties will need to negotiate this three‐dimensional political landscape with their voters and, so far as possible, keep their members and activists motivated and determined.

It is important to remember that the categories of voters summoned up by studies like Mind the Values Gap don’t actually exist as people. They are constructions that stem from the correlation of values data with voter behaviour. This is well understood in political science, but in popular translation the impression is sometimes given that there are distinct tribes—Leavers and Remainer, or swing voters, for example—that represent distinct groups of people united by their adherence to certain different sets of values. The values data itself does not suggest that any such clear‐cut tribes exist. On both social and economic values there is a distribution across the spectrum. In popular political commentary, this notion of a divided nation has fed the idea that parties, of necessity, have to appeal to one side over the other, or be left uncomfortably appealing to both.

Even evidence that our Remain or Leave identities are stronger than our party affiliations does not mean that these are actually separate value tribes. At the time of the referendum, we were not divided in this way, and the middle ground was almost certainly held by nervous Leavers and reluctant Remainers, not the ‘true believers’ on either side. The post‐referendum divide does not reflect changing values amongst voters. Polarisation was driven by hardcore Leavers and Remainers who refused to countenance any middle ground strategy. Coupled to the failure of Westminster democracy to deliver either Brexit or a route to an alternative, the strengthening of identities around Brexit itself and the anticipation of its outcomes was inevitable, but is likely to fade once Brexit itself is no longer a defining electoral choice.

Mind the Values Gap suggests that ‘ideally those voting for a party would broadly share its values’. A better way of framing this statement might be that ‘ideally a political party would reflect the values of those they ask to vote for it’. On the evidence here, voters have recently had to compromise with the political parties; the future winners might be parties who are prepared to compromise with the electorate. This does not mean that parties have to abandon all their core values in order to appeal to new voters. The underlying data in Mind the Values Gap show that each party needs to extend its envelope of values only a fairly short distance from its current voter base to capture the middle ground on economic and social issues. In other words, relatively large numbers of voters appear to be within reach if the parties want to aim for them. (And it may be a mistake for either party to assume its only targets are recent switchers. Labour, for example, must do far more than win back the working class seats lost since 2010.)

As we have seen in recent elections, parties do not have to align entirely with voters to gain their support. Of equal or greater importance is the skill with which the parties can define electoral issues on their strongest ground and neutralise the importance of issues that lie in more hostile values territory. This is what Leave and the Conservatives have managed in the recent past.

All things being equal, Labour stands to benefit if the economy is the key dividing line. Labour certainly did better than expected in 2017, when many voters assumed that Brexit was a done deal. But unless Labour can turn public unease with an unfair economy into a popular programme, the Conservatives may be able to neutralise the issue by simply acknowledging, as Michael Gove has done recently, that the economy does not work for many people.

In turn, Labour can defuse the social values gap by playing to issues on which its MPs and members are relatively comfortable. If Corbyn’s Labour could promise 10,000 more police, it may now be time for ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ to be revived by a more patriotic Starmer. If the Conservatives fail on ‘levelling up’, or the economy simply struggles to recover from Covid‐19 and Brexit, the party still has a fertile agenda of populist social conservatism and patriotism to mine. Conservatives should certainly want to fight a culture war around issues of immigration, ‘interfering judges’, and political correctness. It remains to be seen whether Labour’s members will allow the leadership to skirt such a conflict.

Even if Brexit itself loses electoral salience, a huge panorama of national democratic issues will remain in place, including English devolution, the future of the Union and shared or contested ideas of national identity and belonging. It is not yet clear how each of the parties will define their appeal to key sections of the electorate. Labour shows few signs of wanting to target those left of centre English identifiers. Leading figures argue that Labour cannot win power without winning seats in Scotland, implying that Scottish Labour MPs would impose policies on England for which England had not voted. That idea is likely to be only slightly less toxic than the threat of dependence on the Scottish National Party was in 2015. The Conservatives new ‘muscular unionism’, including spending additional money in Scotland and Wales rather than in England’s deprived regions is not what those same English identifiers want to see. Neither of the national stories currently on offer from the major parties—a traditional British unionist story to which all have to assent, or a cosmopolitan internationalism that eschews national pride—looks about to unite a diverse nation at either the English or the Union level.

The underlying question of the Mind the Values Gap study is whether party members will allow their leaderships to take the measures needed to win. This will depend rather less on what the members believe or want and rather more on how much they want to win. After all, few Conservative members, and even fewer MPs, would have taken Michael Heseltine as defining their economic and social values as Boris Johnson has done. They elected Johnson because they thought he could win. The architects of New Labour were well aware that they had taken over a party tired of defeat; they had not won hearts and minds. Labour members bruised by recent failure may well tolerate a leader who spoke more of security, justice, and national values if they thought it would bring victory.

Biography

John Denham is Professorial Fellow and Director of the Centre for English Identity and Politics at the University of Southampton and a former Labour MP and Cabinet minister.

Early View

Online Version of Record before inclusion in an issue

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Will You...

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by daalex

Previously on Intertwined Destiny: Hades and Persephone had a heart to heart discussion, ending the night with passionate love making and proclamations of his feelings for her, with a thin line of anxiety woven in between. Internally, Hades debated on how he wished to propose to Persephone. However, those internal feelings manifested a very real piece of jewelry on her hand during the middle of the night.

The pair have awoken, albeit late from their delightful endeavors during the night before. The ring is still there. Persephone hasn't seemed to notice yet, and Hades is worried that he may have gone about this all wrong.

Words: 3744, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Series: Part 18 of Intertwined Destiny

Fandoms: Lore Olympus (Webcomic), Ancient Greek Religion & Lore

Rating: Not Rated

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: F/M

Characters: Hades (Lore Olympus), Hades (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Persephone (Lore Olympus), Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)

Relationships: Hades/Persephone (Lore Olympus), Hades/Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)

Additional Tags: Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Love, Tenderness, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings, Marriage Proposal, Not Beta Read, Canon Related

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2Rst2Lb