#absolutely no way i could have expressed these thoughts directly post nov 5th during the spn revival

[thegeminisage]

i just read broken road and i enjoyed it immensely. i just see it differently (not exactly negatively) now knowing you once(?) shipped sam and dean. does that have any influence into it🤔 just simply wondering not interrogating u. i’m interested in that essay even

(prev ask)

ok, my essay is under the cut. it's very, very long. everybody please consider this your warning for inc*st ships if you'd rather not get into it

first point: actually, broken road was not in any way secretly influenced by any previous love of sam/dean, if that helps you any. i wrote it in post november 5th mode and you better believe i was not remotely capable of thinking about anything else. thank you for enjoying it! it's very very special to me and the time i spent working on it and posting it are genuinely some of my fondest memories. cringe <3

second point: to just honestly answer your question, since you're not interrogating me and not being an asshole (thank you and i'm not saying that sarcastically, i have gotten sooo many rude asks about this), my answer is, "eh." my favorite was sam/dean/cas (once he started being on the show) because i'm a cas girl first and foremost. and if i come across a fic where the premise looks good i might check it out, but i basically never actively seek it out bc my preference rn is strongly for destiel.

(that said i do like sam and dean's relationship a lot as brothers or as...whatever else, i'm mostly neutral as long as we don't leave cas out of things, AND i'm perpetually bitter about sam getting left out in the cold, so if i wanna read good sam fic, sometimes people who ship him with the other main characters will do a better job than making him the perpetual longsuffering butt of the slash joke. same goes for early seasons spn fic: sometimes the sam/dean writers just do a better job. i very rarely get the hankering though because i like late seasons, such as season 13, who is my best friend. i think sam got pushed to the side SO STRONGLY that sometimes people sometimes subconsciously associate him being written well or mattering at all to dean beyond functioning as dean's accessory and/or proof/the catalyst of dean's traumatic upbringing with w*ncest. because otherwise they see him as a minor character (?!?!), and why are you bringing this minor character up so much if you're not secretly shipping him with dean, The Main Character? god, does anybody remember when SAM was the main character?? sorry there is truly not enough punctuation in this paragraph.)

now for the actual essay: i do get a little irritated/confused with how much pearl-clutching people do about sam/dean. like, this is EASILY the most harmless of the "problematic" ships. they're consenting adults, barring some tropes and genres i would not like to read nor discuss. and before cas came into the scene (and sometimes even after) we got baited just as hard for the two of them. it was weird and unsettling because the nature of inc*st is that it's often weird and unsettling. their dynamic is unhealthy and codependent and that's part of their appeal in whatever form. people who get the heebie jeebies because it's "problematic" are missing the point. there are also weird and unsettling vibes between dean and john, because that was part of the abuse. that actually played into broken road way more than any sam/dean stuff. he was a bad father and he made dean his backup wife and there was probably some emotional inc*st happening CANONICALLY. we all watched that in the show right?? but for some reason talking about that is fine and talking about whatever sam and dean have going on gets you put on block lists. because sometimes sam/dean fics are just for fun and whenever we talk about john we have people in fics punching him out or killing him. like we have to point our fingers at john and go "THAT'S BAD" loudly enough to ensure everyone else that we're above moral criticism. it's like. weirdly thought police-y. (and tbh, that's part of what inspired broken road - i was looking for nuance re: john and couldn't fucking find any because of this weird black-and-white mentality fandom has developed.)

and it's so hypocritical sometimes! i remember deancas stuff used to have "w*ncest fans dni" banners all over it, in the guise of protecting and standing with survivors, but when actual survivors would say things like "actually those banners just remind me of everything all over again" they would mostly get ignored?? it was so performative, like this kneejerk reaction of promising everybody YOU know what's bad so you won't get ostracized. my tastes don't usually run very dark so most of the sam/dean i wrote or read was way less unhealthy than, say, whatever lestat and louis have going on in iwtv. but nobody's making blocklists of iwtv enjoyers because that would be insane? there's just a little bit of cognitive dissonance happening i think.

like, obviously, yes, in real life inc*st pretty much always speaks to something having gone extremely wrong in someone's life and a dynamic being extremely unhealthy at best, but in fiction it is possible for it to be consensual, even if it is a little fucked up or the people involved are a little damaged.

(warning for discussion of rape fic from here down) i'm not actually totally anti-censorship though. i do firmly believe there are some types of fiction people shouldn't write! i wouldn't read parent/child anything, or any kind of rape fic unless it's tastefully engaging with the aftermath of something like that. sam/dean just seems so, so tame to me in comparison to some of the other stuff fandom has come up with. in 2014-2016 people used to write a thing called hydra trash party, which was just porn of bucky barnes being gang-raped by hydra agents. ie nazis. and half the time he was headcanoned as jewish. like??? can you even GET more tasteless than that??? i hated that shit (and i still do, deeply). i talked about how much i hated it all the time and people would come after me like "well who are YOU to censor other people? what if the authors are survivors working through their own trauma? you can't ask authors to disclose that kinda stuff if they want a license to write graphic nazi rape porn!" i got literal hate mail about it. equal but opposite energy of those dni banners - both people claiming it was "about survivors" to justify doing, uh, whatever they wanted. it's just fucking wild to me that in less than a decade my stance of "i don't care what people write if everybody is a CONSENTING ADULT," while not changing at all whatsoever, moved from being too prudish to being too problematic.

another side tangent (sorry, you did ask) is that i was a slash writer on FFN in the video game and anime fandoms during the late 00s (ironically, quite a lot of straight men there) and holy mother of god...the kind of shit comments i would get for putting two dudes kissing in the same fic, even though it was PLASTERED with disclaimers. i felt like the mob was after me sometimes lol. and that's sort of the way i felt once those w*ncest asks started. i remember back in the peak of post nov 5 stuff if i like, reblogged art or gifs from certain blogs people would write in to tell me that person was a sam/dean shipper so i'd take down my (gen, non sam/dean) post. i felt paranoid (and still feel paranoid) reblogging GEN sam & dean content because i'm worried people will take it the wrong way. i actually deleted one from my drafts earlier today - i'd been thinking about it but then i got your ask and decided against it, lol. what a way to live! especially in fandom, which is (and i hate to politicize it this way but it's true) a queer-adjacent space that's supposed to be free of the kind of judgment you'd get for not being a normie irl.

on FFN, one of the many pairings i wrote for actually involved an underaged teenager and and an adult. but as i was the same age as that teenager at the time, and had a crush on that adult character and toootally wanted to marry him, i couldn't see what was wrong with pairing them together. like i quite literally did not know better. it's a pairing that actually disgusts me now, lol. if people now could send me asks about what i did back then to try and "gotcha" me (they can't because it's all been deleted) i'd be really pissed about it, because you can't continue to punish people after they've learned and grown. everyone's been so terribly kind about broken road, and there's this real fear of losing or tainting something so special and wonderful just because people have a problem with the fics you read or wrote a decade ago. it sucks. i do think there's a line (like, maybe don't write nazi rape porn, also whatever was going on with that j2 haiti fic), but i also think we've got to try at least a little not to reinvent puritanism on fandom websites of all places. that's wack.

and man, i know i said it already, but i just keep coming back to w*ncest being SO TAME? like it doesn't compute that someone would get icked out over CONSENSUAL sam/dean and meanwhile ship for example rowena/ketch like he didn't torture her or sam/lucifer because they like mark pellegrino like lucifer isn't sam's fucking rapist. and not even get "in trouble" for it. it boggles the mind.

and like, idk. i initially got my hackles up at your ask because it's 1 of a million, and i could dodge the questions by taking down the one sam/dean/cas fic on my profile ig, but that fic is how i met a good friend of mine and she'd be sad if i were to take it down, so i don't want to have to, and i shouldn't have to. you know??

my final thought: i've been writing fanfic for 20 years. 20 years ago when i started writing fic sam/dean would have been unacceptable because it's two men. 10 years ago it was fine because they were the ONLY two men, and every woman in supernatural got bullied off of the show, and people writing het got hatemail. now it's unacceptable again because of the inc*st. 10 years from now, who knows what will happen? so i try to base my morals on what i feel i can live with as a person rather than what a bunch of people on the internet (i'm not including you in that) tell me what i can or can't do, or should or shouldn't do.

i really hope this answer doesn't like, ruin broken road for you, or anyone else. i don't think of myself As A W*ncest Shipper at all, but neither do i deny that i used to be, and i certainly don't have any problem with (again) keyword CONSENTING keyword ADULTS in fanfic now, even if they do happen to be siblings ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i just hope that like someday we find a middle ground where we can live and let live but also have enough sense not to write nazi erotica. if that's problematic of me, so be it 😔✊

#liz answers asks #anonymous #really really really long. sorry. this has been bothering me for literal years #absolutely no way i could have expressed these thoughts directly post nov 5th during the spn revival #without people hunting me for sport lol #so if nothing else at least i got to get it off my chest