redbrickrose

[redbrickrose]

I’ve seen a lot of people saying that we just wanted Misha to be queer as some kind of way to write off people’s genuine hurt. And as someone who’s been in fandom since the beginning– of course we wanted them to be queer? Of course we did. Fans want to share things with people they’re fans of, and that’s perfectly normal, but it was also in part self-protection to want that, because if they’re not, then their jokes and their feelings were just cruel and painful. It doesn’t mean we were wrong, but no one is or was objective. The homophobes who hated the idea of Dean being bi weren’t any more objective than we were. We all came into everything with our own biases and our own wants and needs for validation and community and support, whether we were on the homophobic side or the gay side or somewhere in the middle. And that’s entirely normal and expected, that’s just what being human is. We all can only see things through our own eyes.

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#I'm not even here anymore #I never come to tumblr #but yes to every single word of this post

[redbrickrose]

Hi friends! So I haven't really been here because I've been over on Twitter (same name) and that is probably going to continue for the time being. I was super reluctant about fandom Twitter for a long time because it's so VISIBLE. Misha can see me without too much effort there and I don't know how I feel about that. However, I have found that in general I find Twitter easier to navigate

Anyway, come say hi on Twitter if you want to, and if your name is different there, let me know.

[redbrickrose]

Here is your official reminder to be showing Lisa Berry, who played Billie, the same love

[redbrickrose]

bless Felicia Day congratulating Cas and Dean on their wedding (x)

[redbrickrose]

Howdy, hellers! I wrote a sweet lil’ song about what Dean Winchester & his angel husband are getting up to in Heaven. (If you’re a finale denialist, more power to you! Just imagine they’re in, like, Heaven, Montana or something.) It’s a lot more saccharine than my usual stuff, but if anyone deserves a soft epilogue it’s those two. Went for a kinda sorta country vibe & ran the whole mix to cassette tape, For Reasons.

I’ve made the song available for free download via SoundCloud, and it’s under a Creative Commons license, so please feel free to use the song & lyrics in your vids & art & gifs if you want! And if you like what you hear, gimme a follow on Spotify & Instagram & Twitter—I have a new full-length record coming out later this year. 👀

Also make sure to follow @theirlovewasreal​ for more sweet Destiel & Saileen fluffiness. <3

Roadhouse

Turn up the lights and let’s call it a night

And send all of our friends on their way

I’ll burn the ice—it’s a small paradise—

And then later let’s misbehave

We don’t need quarters for the jukebox here

So put on “Nightshift” and let’s dance

You got me swingin’ from the chandeliers

Holdin’ on to a second chance

A mountain, a canyon, the palm of your hand

On my shoulder, its ultimate home

Starlight in strands and our toes in the sands

And the endless expanses to roam

We don’t need fuel for the engines here

So gimme the keys and let’s drive

You got me clingin’ to the steering wheel

Never once did I feel so alive

I know there’s no need for sleep here

But lie next to me and surrender to the softness of rest

The way has been hard but the silence is ours now

To fill with all those things long suppressed

I never did say what I needed to say

Or I tried and it all came out wrong

I love you, I love you, of course I do

You had me all along

#i am crying #dean/cas wedding

[redbrickrose]

if you’re a spn fan, if you aren’t a spn fan, read this article.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/deirdre-t/supernatural-and-the-trap-of-queer-tragedy-bo09jlzbx1

“The pervasive reluctance to let queer characters to experience a full spectrum of humanity is alive and well in contemporary media.”

“Supernatural does not exist in a vacuum, as a queer narrative it works in conversation with and in reflection of its predecessors and contemporaries in fiction. This wasn’t just one story that ended in tragedy on its own. This was a show absolutely steeped in the roots of its deeply queer predecessors, from 50’s road narratives to 80’s B horror, and its own mechanisms for exploring their themes drew directly from how queerness was portrayed and interwoven through these foundational genres and stories. Its characters were based on their archetypes, its mythos was fueled by their allegories. This story was in creative conversation with queer history, queer horror, and queer subversion. With its own soul and predestined limitations.”

“A gritty Americana horror show, a show that “isn’t about that” and doesn’t have room for something as frivolous, girly, or queer as romance, could break free of its own falsely mythologized masculinity and violence— its expectations, its narrative shields— to allow a more genuine story to be told. The one that had organically grown in the cracks where culture meets fiction, where queer roots had against all odds managed to blossom, and the sunlight it had finally reached would not require darkness to follow. This story could weaponize its own cultural underpinnings to highlight and subvert the controls of both the real world and the storytelling it ordains.

Supernatural was not building toward a tragic end, it was actively commenting on the ultimate uselessness and sin of demanding tragedy in a story about love, self-acceptance, and truth. In a story where queerness has broken free of its textual and historical restraints, the characters can escape the tragedy prescribed by this freedom.

So yes, while not all queer stories need to end happily, this one did. Its very nature demanded it.

Supernatural’s ending wasn’t just a betrayal of its themes, characters, narrative, and audience. It was a betrayal of its own history.”

#supernatural #supernatural scorched earth finale

[redbrickrose]

shout out to ace and aro kids who are constantly bombarded with the opinion that sex and romantic love are directly connected to living a happy life.

#worst holiday! #terrible when you are in a relationship because pressure and expectations #terrible when you are not for obvious reasons #However! #I recommend taking the opportunity to buy YOURSELF a nice present #this year I bought myself fancy linen sheets #they are great #but you don't have to get that fancy #chocolate is good #wine is good #sex toys are good #:shrug: #single-at-heart arospec relationship anarchist disasters deserve nice things too #this has been a PSA

[redbrickrose]

I’m just – spn really took Kripke’s self-insert and made him a whiny, tyrannical god figure obsessed with blood family, masculinity and violence and controlling the narrative, had the Winchesters and their found family battle him, and in triumph have them prove that the story was never his to dictate. oh and also the only organic force of free will in the universe was gay love. spn really did that. and I don’t care that ultimately the finale got Kripke’d, they made their damn point and we know how to separate truth from the lies of men in power. canon contradicts its own ending while in the same breath saying “fuck you Kripke” with all of its conviction

#supernatural scorched earth finale

[redbrickrose]

i was reading a master’s thesis on a piece of fanfiction tonight, and it clarified for me why it is that farscape feels like fanfic, but in the best sense of the word.

what shippish fic does, according to the thesis, is deliberately mis-read, and re-interpret a text as romance. in a basic sense, it subverts that text. but fic also often goes another level up, to subvert the structure of romantic stories as well (the thesis mentions pamela regis’s “eight essential elements” that make up the structure of a romance). fic can be deeply dense with plot. it can reproduce the entire canonical work, just with a different romantic focus. but by labeling their plot-dense work “a character a/character b story”, a writer is announcing that on some level the point of it is the character a/character b part. that’s why we have the distinguishing concept of “gen” fic, for fic where pairings are not the point, even if it depicts romantic relationships. so there is something arguably, basically subversive (or at least distinct) about the fanfiction project of “i can eat my story cake and have my romance too and i can make them work together even and i’ll prove it.” instead of telling a story or telling a romance, fanfiction will tell a story that is also unabashedly a romance.

so the thing abut farscape is that if you try to read it as a serial plot show like bablyon 5 or episodic philosophy/adventure like star trek, it’s not going to work. but if you try to approach it like friends and other sitcoms or soaps, where the characters and relationships are the point but there’s no coherent story about them, it also won’t work. it won’t even work if you try to approach it like outlander and its ilk, which although they’re also fanfic-y (if not my taste) and story-like, they unambiguously center the romance.

farscape, instead, you have to read as something subverting the structure of its meta-text of adventure science fiction by ���misreading” its white-male-hero tv series as a romance. it’s built to be a love story the same way a 100k slow-burn rewrite of a show is built to be a love story. (a) there is lots of non-relationship stuff happening, but (b) even when the pairing in question isn’t together, the status of their relationship is of high, even utmost importance to the story. farscape gives john and aeryn very little in the way of happiness or resolution for most of the show, but it doesn’t really string the viewer along either. all of john and aeryn’s interactions, even from the pilot episode, are moving them along a single romantic arc. the question is not whether they will, but when and how and why. but what truly marks the john-and-aeryn romance as central is the fact that you couldn’t remove it without completely upsetting the show’s entire symbolic and thematic level. without crichton coming to grips with loving, choosing and becoming that which is alien to him (in both wonderful and horrible ways), what the hell would farscape be about? john and aeryn struggling to come together is the symbolic gravity around which the show revolves, even though it is about many things besides them. 

romance aside, there’s a way that fanfiction often tries to thumb its nose at its source material by adding physicality, emotionality and weirdness that it feels like farscape also does. jacob clifton described the show as something like “the sewer that star trek runs into so it can stay nice and clean” which is, if you think about it, also a pretty apt description of the fanfic relationship to canon. fan fiction makes characters gay, or in love, or have truly transgressive things happen to them because it wants to follow its id regardless of what canon “allows.” or perhaps to spite what canon “allows.” farscape, similarly, wants aliens and ensembles and feelings and sex and farts and it’s going to make a ton of jokes about science fiction so you know it’s taking the  (explosive) piss of its genre context on purpose. it’s aware that it fundamentally exists in relation to other media. it’s critical star trek fan fiction.

#I love this post #never thought of it this way #but Farscape is THE show I have watched in its entirety the most times #John/Aeryn is probably my actual OTP of them all #because it’s so satisfying #there is something so inherently SATISFYING about Farscape #and this makes so much sense

[redbrickrose]

Okay but they didn't have to greenlight the confession, they didn't have to let Cas say I love you, they didn't have to let any of that air

But they did, and then they scrambled to do everything in their power to erase it's existence. They threw out 15 years of character development just to avoid it, and now they can't even talk about it??? Nobody is allowed to acknowledge that it happened??? They greenlit it just so the C* could spend months trying to wipe any evidence of cuts, changes, that they lied, and covered things up??? For something that they approved, for an issue they literally caused themselves???

#this keeps me awake at night #what fucking happened #supernatural scorched earth finale

[redbrickrose]

there's no "secret good supernatural", there is only an unholy, maddening conglomerate of excellent storytelling, wasted potential, creative failure, partial success, and corporate censorship. there were the best of times, there were the worst of times, and it's all supernatural and we just gotta deal with that as we release posts into the tumblr void

[redbrickrose]

so can we all agree that season 15, story-wise, was constructed so that nothing but a happy ending made sense? literally the major conflict was a TV god trying to give the story a shitty ending. it even outlined all the things that would be included in a shitty ending. the whole complicated story was meta commentary on endings and you can't tell me they had THAT finale planned from the start.

it's more like they were warning us about that kind of ending all through the season. like look, here's lamp, here's garth and bess, here's kaia saved, here's adam and seraphina, here's unity, here's love, here's rowena living her destiny. here's what it's supposed to be. now here's ... chuck's idea of this story. know the difference. and oh boy did we

#scream

[redbrickrose]

every time someone tries to call the finale tragic i feel like foaming at the mouth bc tragedy has RULES it has to be EARNED you can’t call every single sad ending tragic!!!! tragic is not a synonym for sad. ppl keep using the word tragic when they mean like. ironic or unfortunate or something like that. but tragedy is different!!!

narratives are moral spaces. in simple terms, it is the greek comedy vs tragedy contrast: a character is rewarded for good deeds with a good ending and punished for bad deeds with a bad ending. the good vs bad deeds do not have to be justified by real world moral markers, but they have to have a moral paradigm within the story. so, like, on supernatural, murder isn’t morally bad, but fratricide specifically is, etc. also, the actual deeds of these characters have to be the focal point for the narrative to be able to judge the characters for their actions.

if dean actually succumbed to the mark of cain in the end of s10 and killed cas and/or sam, that would have been tragic. cas’s s6-7 storyline is tragic. if the show ended in s5 with sam having sacrificed himself, it would have been tragic (obv from the point of view of making sam’s previous actions to be unforgivable by the narrative).

looking at the last season, i can only think of billie and chuck in terms of a tragic ending, but billie doesn’t exactly fit bc her whole storyline was turned into a villain story at the last moment, so we didn’t really witness her crimes in a way that would deserve a tragic punishment. her death was simply bad writing. chuck, on another hand, had a more or less consistent point of view in the season, and so him losing everything in the end does fit with the tragedy template… but he Knew that. how do you give a character a tragic ending if he has already thought through every possibility of it happening and has already picked out the most cinematic options? i honestly don’t even know if he actually thought dean would kill him or just wanted dean to say an iconic line. maybe chuck really banked on ending up human by then. tragedy doesn’t come for the omniscient, so i can’t quite say that that’s what happened there either.

tl;dr: tragedy is all about fucking around and finding out. the spn finale was simply bad.

#supernatural scorched earth finale

[redbrickrose]

stupid stupid STUPID that sam’s endgame was what it was for like a myriad of reasons that i will restrain myself from getting into (saileen men of letters/hunter leader witchy sam endgame supremacy) but like. oh its SO fucking stupid that we saw it all in a dumbass montage. like….no! no. the whole fucking point was the dean and sam and cas wanted to break free from the story - from chuck’s story, which is ultimately the supernatural we know. there never SHOULD have been a definitive ending for any of them, but sam’s was the stupidest because they SHOWED US A FUCKING PLAY BY PLAY TIME SKIP. like he was still stuck in the dumbass role he had been assigned at the very start and we saw it all, there was no free will and no choice and no privacy from the audience. in a meta sense he did not escape the viewer and the cosmic story, or chuck and the writers. the ending had to be private in order to be satisfying. we shouldve gotten HINTS at what’s coming: getting back the people that dean and sam loved, setting up for a future, but it thematically never should have shown us any sort of time skip. it renders the entire metanarrative of them escaping the story and choosing for themselves meaningless. when dean asks cas what he’s going to do next in season seven and he says, “i don’t know. isn’t that amazing?” THAT had to be the energy of the ending we’re left with. they know enough that they’ll be surrounded by the ones they love and they’ll be choosing what happens next, but we dont see it our hear it described. they escape from the story and the audience and the roles and the entire concept shuts closed with a private, hopeful future

#I AM SO ANGRY. #sometimes I feel like I've started to calm down #and then something sets me off #and I'm just lying here staring at the ceiling #and absolutely seething #i will never know peace #chuck won #the only thing that makes sense is CHUCK WON #supernatural scorched earth finale

[redbrickrose]

I am fascinated by the possibility of the sort of cosmic scale personal growth story that could've emerged from Billie becoming the new God in the endgame (in the, "right person for the job", insert that post about librarian versus writer here, way. Not the actual show's, "I'm suddenly a bad guy" way.

I love the idea of this character, starting off as a reaper, and progressively moving up through the cosmic ranks. Initially her job, purpose, and core values revolve around the natural order. She ascends to become death, and she has new perspective. She is "witness to a larger picture". She sees and understands that it's more complicated and nuanced than her previous mode of existence let her know. And then, she elevates completely to the position of God, finally able to see the entire picture, and all of its pieces.

Only to see that the components, the inner workings of everything, is a shoddy mess put together by a self-interested, narrow-minded, and tunnel visioned god who only cared about his own story and his own amusement. It can't just be left alone, it needs to be repaired, crafted into something new, a new order that suits the world that is, not the world she thought was.

#yes!!! #Billie should have been God #and as amazing as the confession scene was #Cas should have weaponized the deal against Chuck #not Billie #because lbr #they WERE only in that situation because Dean couldn't control his temper and lashed out #and narratively that is...not great #anyway #so many missed opportunities #they did Billie so dirty

[redbrickrose]

We all want the CW to pay. To suffer for the years of abuse, silencing, and murdering of LGBTQ characters. We need to show them just how important that audience is, and how unacceptable we find what they've done.

The 100 fandom had Clexa. Supergirl has Supercorp. Supernatural had Destiel. The most "inclusive" network has been queerbaiting and hurting it's LBGT fandom for years.

Here's how we get back at them:

How do you hurt a network? Money. Plain and simple. All the steps we've been trying to do to hit them - unfollowing official accounts, stepping off hashtags so they can't track engagement - all good. But we need to be doing all of that when they're paying the most attention. We need to go one step further and coordinate an attack at a time when it will really have an impact.

Let's hit them where it really hurts - advertising.

Every year there are four key periods spaced throughout the year where Nielsen data is collected which essentially takes a census of how many people are watching. They use that to decide which are the popular shows and therefore which shows the networks can charge advertisers more to advertise in. Sweeps week (or these days, sweeps month) is the reason why we have midseason finales, why the Big Episodes are usually in February, May, July, November. In scripted TV, that's why series finales/midseason finales are in May and November.

Here's what I'm proposing. In the next sweeps which will occur this Feb 2021, we organise a mass boycott. Not only do we all stop watching the CW, but we encourage everyone else we know to skip their favourite CW shows for one week. 1-7th February. Get everyone you know to ignore the CW. Delete the app. Unfollow all accounts and not tweet about any of their shows. Tweet only our new cross fandom hashtag which is a protest not against anything that happened in Supernatural or any particular show, but against the systemic practices of queerbaiting, "bury your gays" and all other forms of queer silencing and erasure. (potential hashtag: #queerstrike or queer&allystrike which we can also call #q&astrike)

If we do this right, it will be painful for the CW because this is like being well behaved all throughout the year and then setting fire to the school when the school inspector is in. This is one of the few times of the year when they NEED to prove to the industry that they have an audience. A dramatic drop in audience figures would be CRIPPLING for their business model. All 5 networks agree that these periods are the most important, they can't turn around and say "hey so we pissed off a big portion of our audience so they're on strike but please can we have a do over next month?" Advertisers don't care about any of the fandom drama, all they care about is whether or not the network can get eyeballs on their screens when they need them. If they can't, then they've failed at the one thing they're asking for.

Aren't we already doing this anyway? Yes, but there are a lot of shows people like on the CW like so asking the fandom to boycott every single show they have indefinitely is unsustainable. Eventually people will drift back. Plus there are lot of people and actors who work hard on the shows aired on the network and we don't want to hurt their future careers by suggesting that they can't make shows people want to watch. This isn't about them, it's about the network. That's why this coordinated attack, a sudden drop as the result of a movement against the CW and not the shows, is the most effective strike.

Plus, it's only one week which is enough to make an impact on them but not massively disrupt our lives thereby encouraging maximum participation. Live your normal lives, go about your usual viewing habits, and for this one week, switch off. Get your mum/dad/sister/bestie/anyone else who usually doesn't care but cares about you and say could you do this for me.

One week for us. Millions and millions of dollars for them.

Why one week and not the whole month? Hey if we could get people to do the whole month then I'd say let's go for it but momentum is very hard to keep up for that period of time and they purposefully write these shows so that the big twists happen in these time periods. We have to be realistic. The most important thing is that we have an impact, that we make a sizeable dent that they can't ignore.

People love a cause so let's try and get as many casual viewers as possible knowing that they'll win massive ally points if they stand with us on this. And they don't even have to do anything! Just watch Netflix for a week and tweet out our hashtag and boom, they're helping us out.

Spread it around, shout it from the rooftops, let them know we're coming. Let them underestimate us once more and see where it gets them.

#theysilencedthem. They silenced us. Show them what out silence sounds like.

Tagging everyone cause let's spread this far and wide. Trust me, this will hurt them. More than a petition, more than a hashtag, a coordinated effort like this will HURT them. And they deserve it.

@misha-moose-dean-burger-lover @casthewise @duckyboos-blog @whelvenwings @rauko-is-a-free-elf @inexhaustablesourceofmagic @i-do-know-and-idc @heller-jensen @joharvele @ltleflrt

[redbrickrose]

TV Tropes from Cas’ page that make me crazy

#i will never know peace