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diamondcitydarlin · 2 years

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its a contentious topic but i have to ask do you think ofmd's example has changed or should change the expectations for rep in GO? do you think it might change anything for lokius going forward?

I think OFMD has changed the expectations for a lot of us, tbh, across any kind of media. Main romance even aside, it's significant that the character writing, storytelling utilizes a lot of the same tropes and tone that historically have only been seen in fanfic, like having characters be openly queer and live within the reality of that while not being solely defined by it. It's a piece written exclusively by and for us, it's a piece that prioritizes us and our perspectives before anything else.

But I don't think I can personally agree that Good Omens doesn't do that too, and while I think I can concede that maybe the queerness doesn't play as central a role to the story and character progression as it does in OFMD, it's still a big part of Crowley and Aziraphale's relationship and respective characters. Them being celestial beings that are unbound from human restriction/definitions allows for even more fluidity in their interpretations, to the point that no approach is wrong or contradictory to the canon. No, GO is not perfect, both the book and the show, and no one is obligated by the rules of being a queer person to connect with it or feel like it is any way representative of their own experiences.

But it doesn't change the fact that for many people it is. For me it's the ways in which my attachment to Crowley's character has helped me find comfort in my own genderfluidity (also the rep of this in the characters of Pollution and Beezlebub and likely others I'm not thinking of now), that which I struggled with my entire life. For others, it's the fact that Crowley and Az are functionally a couple who love each other esp by the end, and everyone knows this without a need for them to be physically intimate on screen. It's not avoiding male intimacy because ew yucky gross or to avoid alienating homophobic audiences, in fact I'd argue it's not avoiding it at all and we may indeed see more of it in season 2, it's depicting a form of queer intimacy that doesn't necessitate one approach or another to be 'legitimate' or obvious, and that is just as important in telling these stories.

There are many different ways to be queer, after all, and it's divisive to try to claim only one form of expression as the legitimate way to be gay. We want queer stories, right? Then we have to be inclusive and remember that not all queer stories are going to be OUR queer story and that's okay. That's important. For instance, you may not care about Crowley's genderfluidity one way or another, you might be able to just take or leave that. For me though? It is VERY important, just as it is to many others.

Listen I understand why people are tempted to put GO under a microscope now. I know full-well how many times we've had our stories exploited and dangled in front of us like a carrot with no real intention of actually representing us beyond what can bring in views and profits. That said though, it seems to me people are devoting a lot of their energies to coming after a creator working in good faith to make his story a queer friendly piece and listen to diverse voices (even if he doesn't always get it right) while there are countless cishet male creators, corporations, PR/marketing people out there shamelessly chumming the waters with bait and a lot of these people are still gulping it up without question. How does that make sense? Why are the expectations SO high for someone who I believe has shown is actually invested in attempting to tell these stories and yet still so fucking low for the people who are actually, intentionally queerbaiting? That's not to say Neil shouldn't ever get feedback or criticism on this, but I would love to see the torch and pitchfork mob maybe turn some of their ire on people in power that are intentionally working in bad faith, bc there is no shortage of them.

Which is actually a perfect segue into L*ki show, because man I could not have designed a better example of what I'm talking about with queerbaiting and the constantly moving goal posts and the rules for me and not for thee kinda thing going on here. L*ki show queerbaited in perhaps the most obvious and egregious ways to date; I don't care if you (general you, not you personally anon or you reading this lol) don't agree, because that is absolutely what happened and your opinion does not change the insidious reality. We were led to believe via intentional marketing campaigns this would be a piece that would explore both Loki's genderfluidity and bisexuality and they intentionally put enough content in the show in that vein so that was technically true; yet for some reason there are no fem presenting Loki variants outside of Sylvie and the very IDEA of one is unfathomable to the other variants. Despite the fact that absolutely no concrete time is spent on exploring the full extent of Loki's supposed bisexuality, we're supposed to be content with the fact that he's 'inexplicably' shafted on to a fem-presenting variant of himself because maybe it's queer (if indeed we think we have enough evidence to assume that Loki and Sylvie were established as queer characters, which I would argue they were not. A vague suggestion that they've both had two genders of people interested in them does not a queer confession make as much as we might want it to, and that is by design)

So, all of that is fine I guess but if Neil doesn't make Michael and David put their mouths together at some point and/or do a sex scene then we can just throw all of GO in the garbage I guess?

Make it make sense.

To answer the question, I've done a lot of ruminating and going back and forth on this and for now I'm not confident anything will change. Of course, that could be because even if they DO change and Loki and Mobius get a textual romance plot I'm not sure it would be as fulfilling at this point (at least for me) because I would know it was an insincere afterthought following a trend and not a genuine risk for the sake of telling a good story, as it would've been in season one. I mean, it'd still be fun because Tom and Owen would fucking kill it no matter what garbage content they were given to portray, but idk. I kinda prefer to leave this pairing with the fans who have always treated it with more respect, dignity and appreciation than the creators ever have.

idk, I guess what I'm saying is that I feel like there needs to be more consideration for nuance here. I know it's extra labor that no one should have to do, but I still think we benefit from looking into creators and teams behind the pieces of media we enjoy before setting up our expectations and levels of support. That is to say I think anyone should be able ship and enjoy combos of characters regardless of narrative intent, but I think we need to be honest about the intentions and priorities of the people in charge of writing those characters and stories and maybe be careful about lauding things as 'queer pieces' or potentially queer maybe at some point, that really aren't for all intents and purposes. Equally so, we need to recognize the creators that are making genuine efforts in good faith to tell these stories and not immediately circle the wagons and alienate them the moment they get something wrong. Is it not obvious how this would enable further capitalistic exploitation of queerness over genuine attempts to cater to it?

Anyway, it's a difficult but necessary conversation. We're not all going to agree on what the best queer rep looks like because that's going to be different for all of us and there should be pieces of media for each and everyone one of us, but for me a general rule of thumb in determining motive is how easily or not the show and characters fall into glorified heteronormativity. It happens in Loki when the farthest he's allowed to get from being masc is on a two sec shot of a file and literally nothing else allows us to believe or question he's anything but cishet male, when he's ultimately paired up with his presumably cis het female self despite the show vaguely flirting with his sexuality and establishing his first significant relationship in the plot with a man (and having him play footsie with said man under the table during a coffee date while they give each other meaningful looks and expose their vulnerabilities to each other). Now look at GO wherein characters are textually NB and use NB pronouns, wherein Az and Crowley are inseparable and emotionally intimate with each other and at no point is heteronormativity introduced into their dynamic to define for phobic audiences that they're definitely not gay though, don't worry, wherein Crowley is allowed to lean feminine in his dress and behaviors as an organic part of his character. I would argue even the het pairings in GO aren't entirely heteronormative either as both Shadwell and Newt grow past their own sort of rigid ideals of what it means to be a successful man/masculine as a result of learning from the women they love. I'm saying GO is not a heteronormative culture friendly show, and that's important.

And yeah also, there's literally another season with brand new content and stories about to come out and I think we owe it to ourselves, Neil, and GO as a whole to 'wait and see' what happens within this brand new material. Like Neil says, it may not be enough for everyone or what everyone is looking for in queer rep, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it ISN'T queer rep that is important to others. Like, it's absolutely possible to take the stance of 'well this isn't exactly what I'm looking for in a queer story but it definitely is a queer story that connects with people who experience queerness in a different way to me and that's ok because we're getting more diversified queer media in various shows and some of it is going to be for me and some of it isn't and that's ok'

#long post #sorry for the ramble anon but i am opinionaTED #also not tagging this but i assume it'll probably show up somewhere anyway lol

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roublardise · 3 years

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my "Crowley isn't attracted to women" take

for @spnprideweek - day 2 - mlm

cw: dicussion of homophobia & transphobia all in all I wanted to highlight how canon gay Crowley is bc I love him 💕 thank u spn for Crowley even tho he deserved better

in the last weeks I've realized there's a huuge consensus in the fandom for pansexual Crowley. if you're pan or not and wanna hc Crowley as pan, power to you! but what's bothering me is the non-discussion of it all. the way it seems obvious for everyone. whereas, to me, Crowley has been canonically gay all this time.....

disclaimer: I'm aware Mark Sheppard alledgely said he saw Crowley as pansexual, however I can't even take these words for canon without context. Especially not when a year later he'd say Crowley's sexuality didn't matter. The way Mark Sheppard talks about characters' sexuality is more a "why are people making a big deal let them be" than "the character doesn't care." Moreover, actors pov can't be taken as canon imo. Jensen Ackles thought Dean straight for so long when Dean's been bi all this time as well. Sometimes actors are biased by their own experiences & stereotypes!

disclaimer #2: on god I don't wanna start discourse lmao. I just wanna share my silly thoughts about a tv show & question the way Crowley's sexuality is written in this silly homophobic tv show. don't @ me about what's making you think Crowley is indisputably pansexual bc I assure you I already know your points

That being said, here's why I think Crowley is a bear, a gay man, a trans gay man actually, a homosexual, who isn't attracted to women & some food for thoughts about why the unquestioned consensus towards pan Crowley could have roots in both homophobia & panphobia.

I don't think we can think of Crowley as your usual demon. We know too much about Crowley's life as a human, and the numerous ways in which he acts un-demony, almost humanly after. Considering him simply like a demon with no concept of gender preference who would be pan “by default” wouldn’t be right with his character. But we also can't question his sexuality in the exact same way we would a human's.

It also can't be thought in the same way as angels': as once-humans demons do have a concept of gender. Crowley especially cares a lot about his gender presentation and the way he's addressed. Not only does he literally sell his soul for a bigger d*ck as a human ; as a demon he uses the same vessel where other demons are shown to move once they had to leave one ; and for the few hours Crowley's possessing a woman, he clearly states he should still be referred to as king.

This will all be used for homophobic & transphobic jokes in the show, but I'll get back to that later on. Gender does matter to Crowley's identity, and I think it could be extended to his sexuality.

I've seen numerous descriptions of it all saying Crowley's sexuality was "ambiguous" and I guess it is, as he never explicitly used any label. However "ambiguous" doesn't mean bi or pan. It doesn't mean anything besides the fact we can't draw a clear-cut conclusion of his sexuality.

Imo we can actually draw a clear-cut conclusion of Crowley's sexuality but yeh, I'm getting there.

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Let's take a look at canon events around Crowley & sexuality!

His character introduction is him enjoying making a homophobe man kiss him for a deal

It is rumoured that he was a demon's lover (Lilith's)

He heavily flirts with Bobby

He french kisses Bobby for a deal and takes a pic

He never kisses a woman on screen (tell me if I forgot anyone!)

He flirts with every single man he sees, and even more strongly when it's making the other uncomfortable

The other parent of Crowley's son is never mentioned nor even brought up

He has two orgies that we know of

He has sex with a demon who's possessing a woman (Lola) when he was addicted to human blood

He dates, has sex with, and asks Dean to rule Hell with him. He's in love with Dean

On late spn he drinks fruity drinks

He flirts with and implies he had sex with an angel (Naomi)

He flirts with Death (Billie)

He's into BDSM

I'm not gonna go into details with all the sexual stuff he says bc there's a lot.... But it's always about gay sex. (once again, if I'm forgetting smth pls tell me nicely)

Now, with all that I'd like to question specifically the elements people use to say Crowley is canonically attracted to women.

He has two orgies that we know of

There’s the one Crowley has while he’s himself possessing a woman ; iirc it’s a foursome with two other men and one woman. Crowley still counts as a King, as the show makes sure we know, admitedly this dialogue implies we should still think of him as a not-very-manly-man.

Honestly, if one is convinced Crowley is attracted to women based on this scene.. okay. Personally I don’t see it because the orgy is unplanned, it’s an opportunity Crowley takes. Is he even attracted to the two other men?? Who knows. We don’t even know if Crowley even touches the other woman, there’re so many ways to have group sex. Even if he did, having sex with one woman doesn’t make it impossible for him to be homosexual.

The second orgy is with Dean. Crowley describes it then: “We've done extraordinary things to triplets.” It’s interesting how before I went to check, I thought it was clear the triplets were women. But not at all! I’ve been tricked by heteronormativity myself. So this is up to interpretation. Even though the way the show doesn’t make sure we know the triplets were women is pretty telling (as I’ll talk about later).

It is rumoured that he was Lilith's lover

Well, this is a rumour. In this relationship Crowley would know Lilith as a demon possessing a woman, and Lilith would know Crowley as a demon possessing a man as well. Who's even to say they met in their vessels to sleep together. That's the kind of cases in which the ambiguity of Crowley human/demon situation makes it impossible to draw any kind of conclusion towards Crowley's attraction to women. Also if anything Lilith is clearly a lesbian lmao.

He has sex with Lola when he was addicted to human blood

Same thing here, the relationship is one of demon/demon. Though we do now they do meet in their vessels to sleep together. Besides that, the sex happens while Crowley is at a low point. She's the one bringing him human blood, which makes the sex more of a transaction than anything. It does fit a very grey area of consent which would be fair to question.

We can't know for sure whether the demon possessing the woman was a woman as well, but let's say she was: 1/ Crowley having sex once or twice with a woman doesn't prevent him from being homosexual. 2/ What is he seeing if not a demon's true form? 3/ Wasn't he in a self-destructive mental state?

It's a stretch, imo, to assume Crowley was attracted to her.

He flirts with and had sex with Naomi / flirts with Billie

This one is so ridiculous to me bc Naomi is an angel and as a demon, Crowley sees her true form. We don't even know who was her vessel when they had sex.

The flirt thing is interesting however, bc iirc Naomi and Billie are the only "women" we see Crowley actually flirt with. During the orgies or the demon sex there's no flirt involved. It's interesting bc, as Cas would say: "Naomi's vessel is a woman. Naomi is an angel."

Same case for Billie who's a reaper then Death. Spn is pretty unclear about how the whole thing works but we know reapers are kind of angels. In any case, I won't go as far as saying Billie has any connection to gender.

Moreover, the way Crowley flirts with them is pretty light next to everything else Crowley says to men. It's pretty personal, I'm aware, but I do relate a lot with the way Crowley flirts with them VS how I flirt with men just because (and I'm a lesbian).

Anyway! Both Naomi and Billie are supernatural creatures, which brings the count of women Crowley flirts with to... zero.

-> What I take from all that is that Crowley is attracted to men for sure ; to angels and demons ; and doesn't care about the genitalia involved in the sex he has. We have nothing about the kind of relationships he had as a human. His gender presentation matters a lot to him. The only long-term commitment he has is with Dean. I wouldn't even say he had a committed relationship with Gavin's other parent bc we don't know anything about them.

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But what's my deal with homosexual Crowley? One can wonder, if Crowley doesn't care about bodies, doesn't that mean he can still be written as pan?

No! First because sexual attraction isn't about genitalia (even if transphobes would argue the contrary but they're transphobic so...). And second, well....

I would refer to this point as "how do I know Crowley isn't attracted to women? bc Dean is"

I'm convinced that if the show wanted to write Crowley as anything other than a gay man, it would have been way more obvious.

This is a show who wrote Dean catcalling a faceless woman on the street, for no other reason than to remind the viewers Dean was attracted to women & to balance it with the following homoerotic scene.

One could say spn doesn't have lots of women characters to begin with, but that's my point exactly: when spn wants to show attraction towards women, they do find women for people to be attracted to. Hell, they even give Gavin some girlfriend but never ever bring up the topic of Gavin's other parent. Even though an entire episode is dedicated to learning about Crowley's past.

What's important to understand Crowley's sexuality isn't the people he slept with ; it's the people he doesn't show interest in.

The absence of something is the presence of the thing, blablabla. It's a way to look at homosexuality that heteronormativity makes hard to see because, unconciously, we don't tend to question attraction towards the expected gender. One would ask for a 10 pages essay on why a character is gay, but one would need only a 2 sec kiss to assure a character's heterosexuality or attraction towards the expected gender.

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In Crowley's case, his attraction to men is a huge part of his character right from the beginning (thanks god, at least no one's questioning that). Spn as a show that hears what the fans are saying and twists writing accordingly, is perfectly aware of that. Yet rather than pushing women at him along the course of the show to remind everyone how Not Gay Crowley is - the opposite happens.

Yeh, Lola, Naomi, Billie, they all happen in the later seasons. But even then, the show somehow can't write Crowley as attracted to a human woman.

What happens then is: not only does Crowley fall for Dean ; he engages in some BDSM play with Lucifer : and he switches from drinking only the finest Scotch to fruity cocktails.

The BDSM thing as well as the drink thing are choices rooted in stereotypes, that's how spn is! But it does canonize Crowley's homosexuality. They're depriving him of his "masculinity" as the show goes on, because they purposely write him as homosexual. I don't think spn would have ever written a bi or pan character that way.

We learned a few days ago that Crowley died in a gutter. He died in a gutter for a bigger d*ck. I'm just gonna refer to Oscar Wilde & Mika on this : "some of us in the gutter are looking up at the stars."

The "referred to as king" scene isn't about Crowley being a demon and so not caring about gender - it's the opposite. Other demons are the ones poiting out Crowley's vessel. This is a transphobic joke. It's the demon edition of the "gay boy in a dress" transmisogynistic trope.

Viewers aren't supposed to be on Crowley's side ; we're supposed to be giggling with the other demons while Crowley is being emasculated. Crowley gets a woman vessel because he's a not-very-manly-man, because he's a trans man, because he's homosexual.

And I know that bc Dean is written as bi, and all they're doing is reaffirming the way he does like women while being extra subtle with his love for men.

Meanwhile Crowley is losing influence and power, loses his authority as he loses his throne in Hell, gets humiliated by Lucifer, until all his character revolves around is his love for Dean. The way Crowley is then protrayed as some lovesick ex who can't move on is, imo, a straight man fantasy. Crowley's love is both used as predatory and as a tool to validate Dean's Peak Masculinity.

Spn has been burying their gays all along, and Crowley was right there being punished for not only being in love with Dean but for not being attracted to women. For never being able to be a "normal" guy. For never being able to be seen as a "normal" guy. For checking every homophobic stereotypes in the books. Crowley as a human dies because he's a trans man. Crowley as a demon dies because he's homosexual.

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That's what leads me to be uncomfortable with the way the fandom seems to have a consensus towards pansexual Crowley. (Once again: idc about people's personal hc of Crowley as pan, I just want to think critically about the way no one thinks twice about it & accepts it as canon so easily. Hell, just bc I dared to ask what started the pan Crowley confirmation I got accused of erasing his pansexuality. All I did was ask a question.)

To me, it feels like erasing everything his character went through because he was gay. And it seems to be taken from a reasoning which is going to assume Crowley is attracted to women.

I mean: the reasoning would go "oh, Crowley clearly has a non-straight sexuality -> he's attracted to men -> he's pan" His attraction to women being accepted by default, without needing any backup. And when I look at the canon I see nothing implying he'd be attracted to women. Taking Crowley's attraction to women for granted is following an heteronormative thinking.

Being into people isn't all about who one sleeps with. It's about love. And when we look at what spn shows about Crowley's close relationships, the only meaningful one he got is with Dean. When Rowena wants payback for Crowley making her kill Oskar, she goes for his son.

And it's SO interesting to me because if angels can't be in love because they don't have a soul - can demons? as they're beings with a destroyed soul? And if so, how powerful of Crowley to still fall in love with Dean Winchester.... the power of gay love :) (Crowley 🤝 Cas)

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To conclude all this with some more stuff to think about if, like me, you love questioning everything:

While it's not wrong per se to hc Crowley as pan, it can be worth questioning what's making us so sure we collectively just vibe with it? To me there's a few things: - As I was saying: heteronormative bias - Crowley being a non-fully-human character - Crowley being masculine (despite the show's attempts to erase that) - Crowley being into BDSM - Crowley flirting and making sexual remarks in every context

These, unconsciously, gives a vibe of a character who's "outside" of the gender norm, not making big deal of their sexuality, not even questioning it. This creates this idea of "ambiguity" around Crowley's sexuality. The way Crowley particularly seems to be really chill about sex, is a demon (so what does he know about gender?), and heavily flirty, ... is what most people will link to pansexuality. That doesn't mean thinking of Crowley as pan is being problematic™ ; this means in western medias that's what fills the "pansexual character" imagery (like basically: the Jack Harkness type).

However, when we look at it like that, none of these elements are defining of pansexuality. None of them are excluding him from homosexuality. If not stereotypes.

That's where it gets personal ; but it does make me feel like the huge consensus towards a pansexual Crowley (when there is no clear-cut evidence of it) is erasing the complexity of homosexual experiences. As I said at the begining: I'm happy if pansexual people can relate to Crowley ; everone's free to headcanon. But saying Crowley is canonically pansexual is a stretch - and a take rooted in homophobic stereotypes.

Imo Crowley may have been created with all these traits pushing towards a pan reading of his character. However, as the show went, he was clearly written as a homosexual man. The changes in his portrayal took a turn to be specifically homophobic. He gets imagery that only strictly homosexual characters got (such as drinking fruity cocktails like Aaron. Meanwhile Dean, on the same scene, is allowed beer & whiskey.)

We're used to taking spn's homophobic rep and jokes to make it our own. Yet it seems, when it comes to Crowley, the fandom doesn't see it.

Sometimes people aren't attracted to the gender heteronormativity expects them to be attracted to.......... sometimes people are gay and it's not an umbrella term.

#crowley spn #spn crowley #crowley #trans crowley #spn meta #supernatural #spn #so..... i went off once again #homophobia #transphobia #i just kept adding stuff to it lmao and i would STILL have stuff to say but this is enough #long post #spnprideweek

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ineffable-endearments · 3 years

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Okay. Now I'm going to submit some theories about how I think Crowley and Aziraphale specifically are going to go in the future of Good Omens.

Again, this post is not really...specific theorizing about plot events. It's big-picture stuff.

With that said, this post will get a bit heavy at times, in the sense that it will contain opinions that not everyone will like. It drifted into rambling about queerbaiting and all that stuff. I'm not going to spam anyone's dashboard with drama over it, but it's very possible someone else might try. It's also not really a negative post, depending on what you want to hear, I suppose. But if you're only in the mood to read fluff today, you'll probably want to pass it up.

Oh! Also it's very long, and sexuality is discussed in a vague way that doesn't involve any story elements or body parts.

For starters, I don't think Good Omens 2 - or even 3, if that comes about - is going to have anything explicitly sexual or romantic between the two of them, where "explicit" is things like the characters giving outright definitions of their relationship or outright discussing exactly what goes on between them, either on or off-screen. I also don't think there's going to be kissing or "hooking up" (come on...that person on Twitter shouldn't have even asked). Those actions are too blatant for what Neil has already said about the series. While they technically leave some room for interpretation, they probably don't leave enough.

I DO think it's quite possible other characters will continue to define the relationship FOR them and Crowley and Aziraphale will continue to not deny it.

As far as the queerbaiting debate, "is Good Omens queerbaiting"...it's gonna depend how you define it. I always learned that queerbaiting was basically where the creators intentionally make it look like a character is gay or otherwise queer but then swap that character development out for a cis identity and hetero relationship at the end. The point is that the "bait" leads to queer audiences being actively hurt. That's the behavior that seems awful to me, and I don't see Neil and company doing that.

However, I think it's far and away the most likely option that it will be left up to interpretation whether Crowley and Aziraphale are, you know, a buddy duo or a romantic couple or some sort of ineffable queerness all their own off-screen. So if your definition of queerbaiting is "the characters seem gay to us, but homophobes can tell themselves they're not," then yes, I think that debate will follow us to our graves if we let it.

I am a cisgender, possibly straight (?? demi/bi? I might never find out) woman. There is absolutely no way I could ever tell anybody, ESPECIALLY not gay guys and nonbinary people - the people Crowley and Aziraphale tend to resemble the most - how to feel about their treatment in the story. All I can offer is that I'm one flawed individual and there are things I have the emotional capacity to handle and things I don't. Crowley and Aziraphale as both a canon construct and a fandom pairing mean an absurd amount to me, and I can't hang around in spaces where people are constantly talking about how my own interpretations of them are not enough, or how the story is written with ill intentions. I don't want to stop anybody from venting about it, but I am going to be removing myself from those situations.

I like to imagine 1990 NeilandTerry, or TerryandNeil, as a sort of two-headed God who came up with Crowley and Aziraphale, set them loose on Creation, and now are watching them get up to way more ridiculous stuff in the brains of their fans than they'd ever imagined in the first place. I like to imagine them watching, amused and bemused, as their creations fall in love in thousands of universes, and saying, "Well, we didn't specifically Plan for this, but we did promise free will."

This is psychoanalytical toward a public figure and is therefore a bit dangerous, so please take it with an entire mountain of salt, but I sometimes think perhaps Neil sees some of his and Terry's friendship in Crowley and Aziraphale, and suspect that he wants to reserve the possibility that they could be platonic because he and Terry were platonic, while at the same time leaving room for the fans to have their own interpretations, too. Because if there's one thing that comes up really frequently with Neil, it's his belief in imagination and how much stories matter to people. He can have his little corner of the universe where A and C reflect himself and Terry, and we can have...literally anything we want, as long as we're willing to extrapolate just a little bit from canon. It's not even that much extrapolation! It's just "Yes, they love each other, so what exactly does love mean to you?" and if love means kissing, well then, if we can think it, we can have it.

Given that Neil has written LGBT+ characters before, I think he has non-bigoted reasons for wanting Aziraphale and Crowley to remain undefined, and given even the small chance that those reasons may involve the grieving process for a dead friend, I believe it is unkind to argue with him about it or hold his reputation hostage over it.

With that said, do I want canon kissing/hooking up/all that stuff we put in fics? Listen, I can't deny that I do! Personally, I'd be over the moon. I'd probably be so happy I'd have to go to the hospital to get sorted out. Even the thought of it makes me giddy and light-headed, because that physicality is a part of my own experience of love.

However, there are a lot of people who would feel left behind if that happened. Ace and aro people in the fandom whose love for their friends and partners is just as strong as mine, but who are sex-repulsed or just don't want to see kissing on-screen. The loss of Crowley and Aziraphale as a pairing who are extremely easy to interpret as queerplatonic would be hurtful to them, and I do not want to see them hurt like that. I don't think Neil does, either.

So, once again, the "best for everyone" option becomes a really strong canon relationship based in both narrative function and profound affection, which has genuinely thoughtful queer undertones and leaves open the logical possibility for romantic or sexual encounters but does not insist that they must happen. People, especially fans who are super invested, tend to have an easier time imagining scenarios that take place off-screen (e.g. kissing, sex) than they have erasing scenarios that they've already seen in canon (e.g., if someone wished they could continue viewing it as an ace relationship but they were shown "hooking up"). Also, while relationships are super emotional and extremely subjective, I'd argue that in a long-term adult partnership, the non-sexual connection is more important than the sexual one. As a fan, I'd prefer to extrapolate "they love each other so maybe they'd have sex" rather than "they're sexually attracted to each other so maybe they'll intertwine their whole existences together."

It probably isn't necessary to add, but I will anyway: I'm aware that Good Omens is sort of sacrificing social leverage - the ability to whack homophobes over the head with canon if they try to deny the show's queerness - and is thus not really contributing to making specifically gay relationships more widely seen and accepted. However, I don't think all stories have to invest heavily in every social issue they touch on for them to still be meaningful. I also do think Good Omens is an excellent example of a relationship that is extremely profound without being heteronormative.

I don't think the next season is going to be a rom-com. It will likely not even be a "love story," where the definition of "love story" is "a story that follows the development of a relationship and employs certain plot beats to make its point." Remember that conflicts and breakups are key to love stories, so if it IS a love story, then we're going to have to watch the relationship get challenged in ways some of us might have thought were already resolved in season 1! And while that could be thrilling and ultimately very good, it would also be likely to undercut some of the careful headcanoning and analysis we've already done. Any sequel is going to do that to some degree, but a second love story would probably do it a lot, with interpretations that people are even more protective of.

I'm sort of thinking the next season is likely to be a fantasy-heavy mystery, only because those are the two concepts Neil's introduction led with - an angel with amnesia who presents Crowley and Aziraphale with a mystery. Crowley and Aziraphale's connection to each other can still absolutely be a major theme! It can still be the thread stitching the plot together! It just probably, in my opinion, won't escalate and escalate and escalate like it did in season 1. And it will probably be woven in there among a lot of other plot threads that are, in many moments, louder. Still, I'd love to be left with the impression of these two existences, the light and the dark, subtly becoming more intimate, subtly growing more comfortable in this shared place they've chosen in the universe, gradually starting to behave like they know they aren't alone in the world anymore, all while other things happen to and around them.

Nonsexual physical intimacy - a really great hug, or leaning together on the sofa, or a forehead touch, or something like those, something that could happen in a lot of different kinds of relationships but is undoubtedly based in deep trust and affection and a desire to be close...that's the dream, for me. Oh, how lovely it would be.

Of course, I could be just absolutely, embarrassingly wrong about all this. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

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babelziggurat · 4 years

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ANGEL HEART AND THE FALL OF LANGUAGE

The frames above correspond to one of the deleted, never-seen scenes in Alan Parker movie “Angel Heart” —1987, based on William Hjortsberg’s Mephistophelean novel “Falling Angel”—, in which the private detective Harry Angel, hired to track the whereabouts of a man called Johnny Favorite, writes one word in blood on the wall of the apartment of the old blues guitarist and Vodou devotee Toots Sweet, after killing him with a barber’s razor by cutting his genitalia off and sticking them into his mouth.

One word: TELOCA.

What the hell is “TELOCA”?

Initially, the word does not make sense in any recognized language and, after a deep search on the net, no one seems to have interpreted it in connection with the movie.

A first attempt is to take it as an anagram, as Rosemary did with Hutch’s message in Polanski’s classic Satanic film “Rosemary’s Baby” (when she rearranged the letters discovering, with terror, that they composed the phrase “all-of-them-witches”).

Thus interpreted, “TELOCA” gives us “ALECTO”. In Greek mythology, Alecto (Ἀληκτώ: “the implacable or unceasing anger”) is one of the Erinyes, or Furies, Tisiphone’s sister (the avenger of murder). According to Hesiod, Alecto was the daughter of Gaea fertilized by the blood spilled from Uranus when Cronus castrated him.

In spite of its mysterious echoes the meaning is however unsatisfactory: the right key, but the wrong keyhole.

The track seems to be in an ancient biblical book which is not part of the biblical canon as used by Christians or Jews, apart from Beta Israel: the strange Book of Enoch, which has driven so many people insane.

Ascribed by tradition to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, actually modern scholars estimate the older sections to date from about 300 BC.

According to some Jewish traditions, there was once an ancient language in the time before the days of the construction of the Tower of Babel: the language of lost Paradise. It was created by God to communicate with angels, and it was also spoken by the angels of the Apocalypse and the end of times as well as by Satan and his demons, for all of them were once angels, too.

In his classic novel “City of Glass” —the most perfect picture [Vorstellung] ever written of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—, the private detective created by Paul Auster writes in his report these words about the man he’s chasing:

“This fellow, Dark, based his conclusions on a reading of the Tower of Babel story as a prophetic work. Drawing heavily on Milton’s interpretation of the fall in “Paradise Lost”, he followed his master in placing an inordinate importance on the role of language. But he took the poet’s ideas one step further. If the fall of man also entailed a fall of language, was it not logical to assume that it would be possible to undo the fall, to reverse its effects by undoing the fall of language, by striving to recreate the language that was spoken in Eden? If man could learn to speak this original language of innocence, did it not follow that he would thereby recover a state of innocence within himself?

“We had only to look at the example of Christ, Dark argued, to understand that this was so. For was Christ not a man, a creature of flesh and blood? And did not Christ speak this prelapsarian language?

“In Milton’s Paradise Regained, Satan speaks with “double-sense deluding,” whereas Christ’s “actions to his words accord, his words / To his large heart give utterance due, his heart / Contains of good, wise, just, the perfect shape.”

"And, because of Christ, did the fall not have a happy outcome, was it not a felix culpa, as doctrine instructs?

"Therefore, Dark contended, it would indeed be possible for man to speak the original language of innocence and to recover, whole and unbroken, the truth within himself.” (…)

In 1581 this kind of original language or “language of lost innocence” prior to the destruction of the Tower of Babel —the second Fall of Man—, which by association with the Book of Enoch came to be called Enochian, was glossed, through visions and strange ceremonies, by John Dee, an English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occult philosopher and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, and by his friend Edward Kelly, an alchemist with a sinister reputation who lived in Prague during the Renaissance whom King Rodolfo arrested and imprisoned in the Křivoklát Castle.

Nowadays it is supposed that Enochian is used by some Satanists and practitioners of black magic, although Anton LaVey did not include it in his Satanic Bible and discourages its use.

The name Edward Kelly was, not by chance, the nom de plume of the magician Aleister Crowley, "the Beast 666" —and "the wickedest man in the world"—, and amazingly it is also the name used by one of the most ominous characters in “Angel Heart”: the millionaire father of Margaret Krusemark, Ethan Krusemark, who introduces his own daughter into black magic and voodoo, organizing afterwards the ceremony in which Johnny Favorite murders a young soldier with an ancient Babylonian dagger, eating his heart. Eventually, the old Krusemark shall be thrown alive by Angel himself into a gigantic pot of boiling broth à la Cajun.

So have you finally found the Yellow Sign, Sam Spade?

When searching for the word “TELOCA” in Enochian, according to (allegedly) John Dee and Edward Kelly’s writings, we find out:

TELOC = Death

TELOCA = Damned

TELOCAHE = Damnation

TELOC VOVIM = Of Him who has fallen

Below, three frames of “Angel’s Heart” deleted scenes.

1. Death scene of Herman Winesap (“Don’t worry, Johnny, no one will mourn one less lawyer in the world.”)

2. Harry’s journalist girlfriend is burned alive in some house

3. Unknown deleted scene in which body of Epiphany Proudfoot is shown burning

“How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise.” —Oedipus Rex, Sophocles • via Bibliothèque Infernale on FB

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incarnateirony · 5 years

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Thoughts.

So I finally watched Good Omens. First of all I know some people were waiting for me to like, do breakdowns on the use of lore, sigils and whatnot -- I’m sure I’ll poke at it eventually, but so much of it reads of typicality, alongside strong artistic liberty, that when it comes to actual sigils there’s very few and I’ll need a good screen of them.

But that isn’t about that. This is actually about Good Omens and the audience response to queer content and queer coded content. I’m going to warn you, some of this shit is going to incense the fuck out of woke tumblr. It’s going to be a lot of hard pills to swallow, mostly in regards to parts of the LGBT community -- of which I’m a part -- moving around our own goal posts, inconsistencies in the placements of our goalposts, and the impacts of het culture. If you come into my mentions screaming away at me expect an ignore or a block.

No, this isn’t anti-Azri/Crow. It’s very pro Azri/Crow. And yes, I’m going to drag other fandoms I’m in, into it. But I’m also gonna drag general discussion into it.

First I’m going to source a link to a recent set of tweets someone made that I consider very insightful (x) and then highlight a bulk of it.

“When we call something queerbaiting, we're essentially saying: "source material X doesn't count as real or valid queer representation." Here is a thread on why we need to be cognizant about which real-life queer people & stories we're erasing when we expand our use of that term. First: actual queerbaiting, in which art-creators hint at queer representation in order to attract viewers and then insist their art was 100% hetero all along, sucks a lot. I am not advocating getting rid of the term. Nor am I saying it's not valid to feel jerked around when a show uses the promise of a specific queer relationship on their publicity circuit, and then doesn't follow through on it in the actual source. (Or follows through only to write out a character, a la #TheMagicians) However: when we narrow our definition of "real and valid queer representation" until the ONLY thing that counts as queer rep is on-screen queer *romance* or on-screen queer *sex*, we are telling a significant portion of the real-life queer community that they don't count. When we use the "queerbaiting" label to describe a millennia-long, loving asexual same-gender relationship (aka #GoodOmens) we are telling asexuals in loving life-long relationships that they don't count as queer. We are also telling sexual queers whose primary, life-organizing relationships are queerplatonic (me, this is me) that their queerness is defined only by who they fuck, not by who they choose to build a life with. I want a space where ALL kinds of queer stories get told: romances yes, but also stories of queer friendship; queer mentorship; queer animosity; queer competition and cooperation; queer found family; queer provocation and queer mistakes. None of that happens if we tell everyone whose queer content doesn't fit into the narrow box "Lead A & Lead B kiss and/or fuck onscreen" (even if A&B make a life together; even if A&B kiss & fuck other same-sex people) that their art is exploitative & doesn't count as queer rep. “

Why am I choosing to highlight this while implicatively mentioning my adjacent fandoms? Well, because blogs I follow that either haphazardly dismiss, say, Destiel as valid until (personally met goalpost, generally when arguing with the hetnorm or anti community wanting a kiss) are all on the Azriphale-Crowley bandwagon.

And let me say, I adore the Azriphale-Crowley bandwagon. I’m ON that bandwagon. Holy shit am I on that wagon, but we need to inspect our dialogue for people who are on one but not the other.

We can say, for example, “Well, Neil Gaiman and the actors have been supportive! So THAT’S why it’s fine!” I mean -- aren’t people always banging on about post-affirmation not being enough, or just vague support being enough, or this-or-that not being enough? Like people don’t flame Rowling over that? I mean, even if we handwave away that Neil Gaiman had literally uncontested authorship instead of 203492 hands in the author and ownership pot top-to-bottom which the average show doesn’t have -- which gives the liberty to say whatever the fuck he wants because it is wholly his product and under his contract and design -- do you notice that it’s actually a very, very small audience crowing about that? And rarely if ever the same ones that do about other pairings that could be considered similar? Like we haven’t gotten those moments from authors in other shows (Robbie Thompson “Destiel isn’t canon?” comes to mind) that we yell queerbait at then and decide isn’t enough. Because someone else moved a goalpost out.

Ah-- but they’re... confirmed asexual and agender and immortal! Okay... and... so is, for example, if we’re going to tilt this way, Castiel. And ace people can have queer relationships with bi or yes, even straight people. Mindblowing, I know, but that’s it, that’s reality.

So why on gods green earth am I seeing this disparity between blogs about the same content, banging on at different volumes of what we expect?

It’s something I’ve written about before, the loudest example being my Problem With DreamHunter post. Before any DreamHunter fans pick up the pitchforks, don’t worry. It, also, is in support of DreamHunter, but simply addresses the cultural problem in there not being a problem with DreamHunter. The blend of intersectional issue disparity between MLM and WLW, and also the simple fact that the fandom wasn’t positioned to have antis or rival ships screaming at it: het culture and shipping culture.

I’ve banged on about this before: in our race for representation, we often trample over content that’s perfectly good and valid and great in many ways, because we want to be able to win an argument against an asshole, we want to be able to bludgeon the gay so inarguably into somebody’s brain that they yield to the might of it, or at least, we imagine it reaches that point. Anti-shipping culture can be so loud that even slow burn het pairings that kiss will have antis explaining their way around it (eg, Mulder and Scully, off the top of my head). Anti queer culture will talk down men or women even making out on screen as experimentation. This cycle will continue.

So again, let me state: Good Omens is a masterpiece. I am utterly enthralled by it, but it does leave me sitting flummoxed about the uneven bars we put out there as marker posts based on trying to race to the finish of arguments.

I’m sure some hack job that doesn’t know how to rub brain cells together beyond “it’s straight” and, beneath the surface, “I don’t like it so I’m going to piss and moan about more expansive methods of thought than hard niching the complexity of human relations” is going to roll in here, thinking yelling “Jensen Ackles thinks it’s straight!” in supreme reductionism of things like authorship, be it intent OR death of the author, or whatever else is out there in this medium -- I’m sure they’ll show up, make the same repetitive ass of themselves as always, and roll on, completely missing the point that I’m not obligated to your arbitrary bullshit, and that nobody is.

I don’t HAVE to point out every single time a dickhat on a loop yells that, that Jensen Ackles himself spoke of the intangibility of the deepness of their connection with Castiel as an angel, and that a cishet dude from texas probably doesn’t understand the finest details of LGBT identity complexity despite being an ally while fumbling over talking about the difficulty of putting a label on it. I don’t have to explain that the actor doesn’t actually get to determine that. Viewership or author, take your pick. I don’t have to explain the “it’s never happening and wasn’t intended” never came from the authors every time some bumblefuck says it -- that it came from one account with a blurb that said he doesn’t speak for that writing room whatsoever. I don’t have to review the times that Jensen Ackles has almost verbatim mirrored the Good Omens creatives about the beauty of it being you being able to make your own interpretation even if it wasn’t his, and encouraging that. I don’t fucking have to, you entitled sniveling shits.

And no, it’s by no means about, say, Dean and Cas. It’s just about the dialogues I’m tired of seeing tilt unevenly even between typically well grounded and centered people.

So anyway Azriphale and Crowley are EternityMates and that’s the fucking tea. Call it queerplat or call it queerromantic I can see either, even if I do tilt towards the former. Destiel is queerromantic and you can fight me. Come at me. Except nobody really will over Good Omens, just Supernatural, because like magic, Good Omens isn’t geared for a fuckton of other bloated ships or antis who hate either of them by structure alone. And that, itself, is a point to be made, too.

And before some doodlefuck trolls along, no, there’s no such thing as incestromantic. Spare us the time and block me now if your knee jerk counter-troll is going to be subtextually along those lines, because I promise you’ll just get blocked when you try to roll into town with it. Since the Supernatural fandom seems to house corners of douchebags that don’t know how to control their primitive douchebag impulses and they do come into address in this post.

Moral of the story: Stop listening to homophobes, antis, or people with agendas. Listen to the content and what has actually been said. On all sides.

If you consider, for example,

the Ineffible Husbands canon with no admission of anything beyond friendship, with the hets loudly banging one scene over with “well the others are ace or whatever” as your reason (fair), a few lunches, basic dedication and a few well placed songs, and a few supportive notes from the general creatives,

But the Hunter Husbands not canon with talked-around love yous and need yous, intentional deletion of Castiel’s agender ace aspects, in spite of there being no evident banging or kissing in the show that hasn’t been a highlight of a problem since like season what six?; talk arounds of their meals together, infinite longer and classic romantic crafted dedication, innumerable well placed songs and yes, a few supportive notes from the creatives that are buried by yourself or others beneath intentionally obfuscated arguments and spun context,

You are, whether you want to gullet it or not, part of the moving goalpost problem. Whether it’s you running to meet a phobe or an anti, or just being coded into it by the screaming around you, there is no world in which one is representation and the other is not. It’s just fuckin’ not.

It’s not.

I don’t care what you yell and scream because it’s popular in your circles. It’s fuckin’ not.

It’s not.

Either both are rep or neither are rep. Personally, I adore both of them, and anyone that has a problem with that can eat me.

Good Omens is not a goddamn motherfucking breakthrough in representation. It’s the same very valid very real form of queer coding half this site screams at because someone got loud enough to scream about it early on, generally inspired by antis riding their ass, just it’s the first and second lead instead of second and third lead, and there’s no ‘rival’ in first and second leads as being intentionally dragged into vaguery. It’s. Fucking. Not. It’s literally. The same. Fucking. Level.

Now, I HAVE been banging on that it’s the level our content SHOULD be acceptable at (well, almost; frankly I’d consider Destiel better, as the show’s overall intimacy threshold is far lower while Good Omens has parallel overtness to the coupling in the actual canon, meaning Good Omens’ playing field, for fair treatment, would be indebted to matching volume -- not saying sex since ace but louder admissions and engagements that are just as clear.)

Unpopular? Good, I don’t care. I’m tired of people screaming about completely conflicting crap.

It’s where we SHOULD be taking ownership of our content. So if there’s any breakthrough, it’s the LGBT community themselves having some sort of spark of awareness that they can and should be able to own content at that volume, largely because the fandom isn’t swamped by asshats on the other side all yelling for their own crappy agendas clogging up your heads. There’s a few queerbait shouters. And you laugh them off, by and large, and accept it as canon and rep. Funny how that works without antis up your ass.

Sincerely,

A tired queer and newborn Crowley stan.

#not spn #but kinda spn #definitely good omens #but more lgbt commentary

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mittensmorgul · 6 years

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Hey Mittens, how are you doing? hope you're having a great day! 💜 Hmm, what do you think about Cas' sexuality? both his sexual drive and orientation? it really makes me confused sometimes... 😓

hi hi! I’m fine, just still super busy catching up with everything after a week of gish...

Cas’s sexuality is really hard to define, though. There’s been so much written on the subject postulating on... all of it. How he identifies himself, who he’d find attractive, and how... I mean, he’s not even corporeal in his original form, let alone human, so that complicates everything even beyond trying to fit him into a human gender, you know?

All I can tell you is how *I PERSONALLY* read him based on canon we have up to this point. This isn’t to invalidate how anyone else sees him, but strictly my personal take. So I’ll kindly invite anyone who wants to argue with *my personal read of a fictional character* to address their complaints to the department of “that’s very nice for you” at “it doesn’t change how *I* see him” Inc.

If this is potentially problematic for anyone reading this, I seriously encourage you to NOT click the read more button there. I was asked for *MY PERSONAL OPINION* and I give it. This isn’t “the one true reading of Castiel.” This is MY PERSONAL OPINION.

Okay, now that that’s abundantly clear,

Let’s start with his gender identity, because I know a lot of people read him (and all angels) as gender-neutral after 12.10, and basically... I came to the opposite conclusion based on what was actually said in canon. So obviously this is still easy to interpret through individual lenses of understanding here. I’m not sure of the show will ever make this more emphatically clear, but my takeaway from this exchange:

CAS: Benjamin is always very careful. Long ago, he found a powerfully devout vessel in Madrid, and her faith, it... she gave him everything – her trust and her body.DEAN: Wait. So Benjamin's a woman.CAS: Benjamin is an angel. His vessel is a woman. But it – it's – it's more than that. She's not just his vessel.SAM: She's... She's his friend.

Is that Cas CLEARLY referred to Benjamin repeatedly with male pronouns.

Angels in Supernatural have always been identified with either male or female pronouns, regardless of the apparent gender of their vessels. Take Raphael, who we saw first in a male vessel, and then in a female vessel. He was always referred to with MALE pronouns, except for when Crowley expressed some confusion in 6.22:

CROWLEY: You know, Castiel y-you've said all sorts of shameful, appalling, scatological things about Raphael. I-I've found him, her, to be really quite reasonable.

But everyone else, from Dean to Cas to Balthazar, always referred to Raphael as male despite his vessel. Same thing with Hannah after she took a male vessel. From the very beginning of angels on Supernatural, we’ve heard them mention “my brothers and sisters,” as if there’s a differentiation to be made that goes beyond the gender of their vessels, you know?

It’s not that I think angels don’t have a gender, it’s that their gender doesn’t always match the apparent gender of their human vessel at any given time.

But... Cas has always identified himself as male. Regardless of his vessel, whether Jimmy or Claire or the woman in 1901 or now literally his very own body. That’s not his vessel anymore, it’s his body. So Cas might be somewhat of a special case among angels anyway, especially now that Lucifer and his specially-made body are dead.

So that’s how I see his gender, that he does and always has identified himself as male. (whatever that means for an angel, but even with his very own human body, he seems comfortable identifying with that body now)

As Cas said back in s6, he’s utterly indifferent to sexual orientation, and I believe he kind of is. I mean, I think for a long time before he began to fall he repressed (or didn’t even experience) any sort of physical or romantic attraction. He was terrified by even the mention of sexual activity back in 5.03, and perplexed by his reaction to pornography in 6.10, but I think that’s a reductive way to view the whole “why is he slapping her rear” scene, because there’s a heck of a lot more going on there than just the porn... far more than I want to delve into here just to justify my personal read on Cas’s sexuality.

(Meaning, I believe there was nothing sexual or romantic about that kiss with Meg, because it literally had nothing to do with sex or porn, it had to do with punishment and control)

I think Cas is curious about human feelings, including romantic and sexual attraction, and he dabbled with that when he WAS human, but his single experience was not exactly... ultimately fulfilling, you know? Getting tortured and murdered first thing in the morning isn’t a great morning after...

I personally see him as somewhere on the demisexual and demiromantic spectrum. I think he could experience attraction if he had a, let’s say, profound bond with someone. I don’t think he just casually experiences sexual or emotional or romantic attraction to random people, you know? But based on a deep understanding and connection with someone, yeah... so demi. And I don’t think gender really matters to him.

But again, this is just how I see him (and how I typically write him).

Please don’t come at me with pitchforks if you’re positive that angels are agender and asexual or genderfluid pansexuals, or whatever. Go you for having an awesome read on a fictional character that makes you happy! This is mine! *high fives everyone and shoots finger pistols*

#castiel winchester #angels and souls #vessels and meatsuits #on the nature of angel grace #spn 9.03 #just because I mention it and I know people block mentions of it #spn 6.10 #spn 12.10 #spn 6.22 #right now i think for him it's more that there's other stuff taking precedence over dealing with this you know?#kinda been a bit busy to really delve into it to any great degree...#nour7xx

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orionsangel86 · 7 years

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13x12 - Episode Review - What is Fifth Base Anyway?

So the people at Google must have been confused when they discovered the number of searches for “fifth base” drastically went up overnight… Steve Yokey you cheeky bugger I love you! (Show of hands everyone who did this? Go on, admit it!)

This episode was really good. One of the stronger ones of an already very strong bunch as season 13 continues to exceed in quality. It had jokes, it had deep emotional revelations, it had Cas once again using his SuperPower of sassing the fuck out of things to get what he wants. Yeah it was pretty awesome! So let’s delve into the main points.

The Red Herring Love Spell

We were all expecting this to be an episode similar to 12x11 based on how it was marketed to us. Dean is under a love spell! It’s up to Sam and Rowena to save him! That seemed to be the gist of the PR team’s focus. As ever, PR is not Showrunning and this turned out to be one giant red herring.

The love spell lasted all of five minutes. So why bother? WHY was a love spell even PART of this plot?! Seriously? Someone tell me how this episode couldn’t have followed the EXACT same narrative with the sisters using some other spell to force people to do things for them? The fact is, that love spell was pointless for the plot but excellent for getting people thinking about LOVE. Specifically, Dean Winchester and LOVE, or at least, what love should be, and what it most definitely is not.

Aside from the fact that the clunky music whenever the love spell was invoked made me cringe, I thoroughly enjoyed how innocent it all seemed. Dean got to play Prince Charming to the princess and provide her with a gift of her choosing. I think it says something about Dean that the love spell encouraged this fairy tale vibe specifically for him, when for Dale at the start it was all about him playing protector and hero through violence and theft. I just thought it was an interesting statement about Dean’s wishes and desires compared to other men. Though I gotta admit, the gift giving, goofiness and oh I dunno, protecting his lover from a gun? It all seemed rather familiar to me… Hmmm…

I mean who else has Dean previously entrusted with powerful one off weapons?

Who else has Dean had to recently protect from a pointed gun much to his own horror rather than the recipient who is unlikely to be harmed by a regular gun anyway?

Who else makes Dean goofy and pull these silly delighted faces?

*looks into the camera like on the Office*

Yeah, but see these are not really examples of true love, even though they are all things done with Cas. What IS true love in season 13 is something that subtextually KEEPs getting referred to in EVERY EPISODE. That in 13x01 – 13x05 Dean was deeply lost in grief. Deeply mourning over the loss of Cas – someone who he is truly in love with. Love makes you do crazy things? Yeah, and as Billy said in 13x05 (Yokey’s last episode FYI) Dean wanted to die. Cas’s death had brought him to that level. The fact that now it is SAM who is feeling low, feeling powerless because of the loss of Mary and Jack, and Dean is able to remain focussed and have HOPE that they will save them, continues to be astonishingly hypocritical of Dean given where he was when Cas was dead. But it does keep drawing our attention to that fact, and for that I love it.

Bonus point for “I think you may be right, I think its time we go ahead and call Cas…” … “I’m in love” because Yokey could have written Sam saying ANYTHING at that point but he chose to remind the audience about Cas at that exact moment… as Dean announces he is in love, because the two are connected (and because it then wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to assume that Sam’s initial reaction is “Oh… so you finally admit it?”)

(FYI this crappy gif is my own. Don’t judge. It’s the first I’ve ever made.)

Sam’s mild amusement here just fits the “oh so you finally admit it? We can call Cas and start the wedding preparations?” interpretation and NO ONE can stop me seeing it that way! :D

Bonus Point two for the mentions of “Soulmates” (which relate to Angels in the show) and “Cosmic” (which again, tends to relate to angels and Cas).

Bonus point three that this is an episodes marketed as Dean being in love! LOOK AT ALL THIS HETEROSEXUALITY! It seems to scream at our general audiences, and yet, as always in SPN, if the GA are seeking heterosexuality, they are to be disappointed. They got a 5 minute mini love spell plot and Dean once again is without even a hint of an actual true female romantic partner. Nope, sorry heteros seeking a woman for Dean. You won’t find that here!

Basically, it’s not too much of a stretch to interpret this entire love spell mini plot as exposition for the TRUTH regarding Dean and “true love”. Because we all know it. It’s right there in the subtext. I just wish they’d make it text already.

Review continues under the cut as per usual...

Addressing Long unspoken Trauma – FINALLY

Officially my favourite part of the episode (unofficially my second fave part after “fifth base”), the conversations between Sam and Rowena about their trauma at the hands of Lucifer had me welling up. This is the first time in SPN history that Sam has actually opened up to ANYONE about his Lucifer trauma. Read that again. Be amazed that it has taken this long. Send Dabb and Yokey a fruit basket for this.

One thing season 13 has been excellent at doing, is making things textual that were previously only implied. This seems to be a continued trend following on from the reveal in 12x22 that Dean is effectively Sam’s parent (A fact meta writers have been talking about for YEARS.)

I don’t really have much to say about it actually, because it’s all just THERE in the text. It has left me kind of speechless.

SAM: Its not gonna change anything, you’re still gonna feel helpless. What Lucifer did to you…

ROWENA: I told you I don’t… before he crushed my skull, Lucifer showed me his face. His true face. I’m scared Sam. All the time.

SAM: I’ve seen it too. What he really looks like behind… behind whatever vessel… yeah it still keeps me up at night.

ROWENA: How do you deal with it?

SAM: I guess I don’t deal with it, not really. I mean I…Ive pushed it down, and the world kept almost ending and so I keep pushing it down and I dunno… I don’t really talk about it, not even with Dean, I mean I could… he would listen but, it’s not something I really know how to share.

…..

SAM: Even if you do get the book, and even if you get your power back. It won’t matter. You won’t ever be able to change what happened, you won’t be able to change how helpless you felt, or how helpless you feel. You’re still gonna get scared. That feeling, that feeling never goes away.

ROWENA: Never?

SAM: Never.

…

Honestly it’s perfect. Yokey has decided that enough is enough. We need to discuss this. We need to talk about the fact that our main characters have a shit load of trauma. It’s about GODDAMN TIME.

(x)

I just want to scream about the shots for a second though because god bless Amanda Tapping for being so excellent at capturing emotions. I am starting to think she is one of the best directors for it. The intimate long close ups on the actors faces as they open about this stuff, it just works. The soft music in the back ground pulls no focus away from the gravity of Sam’s words. It’s intense, and harrowing and kudos to Jared here because I think he must have been ITCHING for a moment like this for Sam for YEARS (and for god sake someone ask him about this scene at a con instead of more bloody prank questions PLEASE.)

I also love that it’s Rowena who Sam opens up to about this stuff, because she has that in common with him. I know that it can be argued that Cas has also experienced trauma at the hands of Lucifer, but since Cas is an angel it’s not the same. I doubt Lucifer’s true face would affect Cas, since Cas is already an angel with the ability to see and cope with seeing things that human minds struggle to comprehend.

I think Rowena and Sam is our new Dean and Crowley. They are enemies, but they have a mutual respect for one another and I see this as a really good thing both for Sam and Rowena. Because Crowley was changed thanks to his bond with Dean (love for Dean), he was able to find redemption in that. Rowena could also now find redemption, especially considering her newly powered up status. For Sam I think it was a smart choice to give Rowena the pages at the end. It wasn’t just about the bond they formed over shared trauma, it was Sam knowing that Rowena is right, that Lucifer will always find a way back, and Sam knows that eventually he will have to face him again, and he needs all the help and power he can get, so a powered up Rowena is a powerful ally to have against the creature that tortured and broke both their spirits.

Am I shipping them? No, not really. I still think Rowena is a villain. I never shipped Drowley, though I acknowledge it’s existence in the show as basically a hairsbreadth away from canon. (it’s technically just as close to canon if not more so than Destiel and strongly implied that they hooked up in various episodes). But if the show did go there with Sam and Rowena I wouldn’t mind it as such. I just don’t think it would be endgame. But sure, it could work for a while. I see them more like frenemies with mutual interests. Besides, I’m a Saileen girl all the way and will continue to hope for Eileen’s resurrection this season.

Narrative Mirrors – Witches and Winchesters

Ah narrative mirrors, don’t we love them? I especially love them when they highlight the Winchester family dynamics and just how screwed up they all are. Our witchy sisters fall extremely easily into this category. Jamie and Jenny or “J2” as I now plan to call them (I see what you did there Yokey). So J2 are motivated to do whatever it takes to bring back mum. Whatever it takes even though they are hardly competent witches and only seem to have one spell mastered – the love spell. The older sister uses her charm to encourage the victims to do whatever they wish for, whilst the younger sister is the smarter of the two, more skilled in magic (I wonder who they are supposed to represent?)

They have one purpose, and will stop at nothing until that purpose is fulfilled:

JAMIE: I’m sorry, I know I’m the big sister and I’m supposed to be the strong one or whatever.

JENNY: Yeah?

JAMIE: I just really miss her.

JENNY: I do too.

JAMIE: I know, and I like, really believe in us

JENNY: Jamie, I just want her back so bad

JAMIE: And we’re going to get her back, even if we have to cast every spell in this book and curse the souls of like a million people to make it happen.

Doesn’t this sound rather familiar? Like from 13x09:

DEAN: You were right, about mom you were right, this whole time we should have been looking for her

SAM: I was just hoping, I didn’t know. And anyway it doesn’t matter, now that we do know.

DEAN: We find her, no matter what it takes.

Which always made me kinda uncomfortable. There is a reason that Billy didn’t want Dean knowing their mum was still alive. Because Billy knows that the Winchesters would break the Universe to bring her back. “House of Cards” she called it. What’s the betting that thanks to Sam and Dean this “house of cards” is going to come tumbling down just as Billy predicted? Because I would put money on it.

At the end of the episode, we realise that Sam and Dean are in exactly the same place as J2. Jamie – the older sister, trying to support and reassure her younger sister, the one who “wants mom back so badly”. Jamie, unlike her sister, is totally focused on completing their task, whereas Jenny has her doubts. Just like Sam and Dean. We know that Dean is back to “We’ll figure it out” and “you and me” even though Sam is NOT on board with this, but like Jenny, Sam will follow Dean into a hornets nest if it means doing what they set out to do and save mum.

The girls mum came back wrong though, a zombie. When Mary was first resurrected she certainly wasn’t what the boys expected either, and now she is lost again, whose to say just what state she will be in when she is finally freed? Perhaps the message for the boys here is to actually let her go? As in, let go of the memory of Mary that they had sat on a pedestal (Dean in particular) and start to accept the woman their mother actually is, and let her do her thing, because otherwise it may kill them all.

And isn’t this moment just a perfect visual representation of the toxic co-dependency that is the Winchester brothers? Stab stab stab. One of them even has a hammer… LOL.

(Yup its another one of my crappy gifs.)

The Sassiest Angel in the Garrison

Oh Cas, I have missed your beautiful face…

(x)

(Dipper agrees with me)

Now I think everyone knows by now that I hate Lucifer. As in, I find the character extremely irritating and just want him off our screens dead and buried, and that Mark P can go annoy some other shows audience. The ONLY thing that makes watching Lucifer remotely bearable for me, is Castiel - wonderful, perfect, funny, grumpy, brilliant Castiel, sassing the fuck out of him. Bearing in mind all their scenes but one took place behind bars, I was as always captivated by Cas and the brilliant genius he is.

So far in season 13, Castiel hasn’t actually spent much time using his powers, his grace, to actually get anything done. What he has done, is be incredibly smart and used that tactician brain of his to talk himself out of any situation. Everything Castiel does has a purpose. He is generally a creature of few words (except when it comes to Dean) and therefore, whenever he does speak, it is usually with a great deal of thought. (There was a brilliant meta on the word “assbutt” and how it is the worst insult he could possibly throw at Lucifer and yet everyone still ridicules him for it. Don’t knock the word assbutt. Cas knew exactly what he was doing!)

And so Cas isn’t just being a sassy little bitch in this episode. He’s being a sassy little bitch with purpose. Lucifer may be powered down, but he still has power. Cas knows this. Cas knows that the best way to get Lucifer activating what little power he has is to make him angry. So what does Cas do? He sass’s him, over and over. Pissing him off until eventually, it works.

“Turns out rage is a good motivator”

Such a badass. Bye bye little Dipper.

This is why you should never underestimate Castiel. He will always get the better of you. He will always come out on top in the end.

“This is me, learning from my mistakes” he says whilst stabbing Lucifer at the end of the episode. I thoroughly enjoyed that moment of course, even if we know already it doesn’t stick. Since Lucifer is alive next episode. *sigh*.

Lucifer has been continuously hinting all episode that he want’s Cas’s grace. It seems possible due to pics from next week, that he may actually get what he seeks.

Cas has blood on his collar, which he doesn’t have at the end of 13x12. So is Cas about to become human again? Or at least graceless? It’s possible. @tinkdw wrote this post about it (yes I stole her screencap). We were discussing this in our group chat yesterday and thanks to the themes that would come from another human!Cas story I can certainly get behind it, even if I hate the idea that it isn’t his choice yet again. This time, having Lucifer steal his grace seems worse than the first time. But as I mentioned above, Castiel has already shown several times this season that his grace is in no way where his strengths lie. I just hope that it is still his choice in the end to give it up, or not regain it, however that story may pan out.

But yeah maybe prepare ourselves for a human Cas whose grace was stolen by Lucifer plot? I mean if it doesn’t happen great, but if it does... don’t say we didn’t warn ya okay? I know how sensitive we all get about Cas stuff - this is literally the first any of us had thought of this. Besides, he’ll still be amazing even if Lucifer does take his grace, He’ll get in a few more stabs before the end. No doubt.

Other Awesome Stuff

The “fifth base” scene. Yeah this was certainly risqué of Yokey. I was screaming about this to Tink in the chatty bubbles, trust a gay writer to throw in a gay joke aimed at our currently in the closet bisexual lead character and have him act all awkward like he doesn’t know what it is… *glances at Sam* What? Nope, I’ve never… There’s NO SUCH THING AS FIFTH BASE. Sure Jan. Just as I scoff at the idea of Dean not knowing basic French, the idea that Dean DOESN’T know what fifth base is, is absurd. These are purposely input into this episode to raise our eyebrows and DOUBT them.

Baring in mind the way Rowena asks that question “Did THEY get to fifth base?” not “Did YOU get to fifth base” strongly implies actually that Rowena was asking if Dean was pegged. Let’s get that clear. Once again, we have a bottom!dean joke in the subtext of the show. (At some point we need to round up EVERY reference to Dean’s ass and compare it to the other characters just to make this point.)

Oh gosh I haven’t even got to “What’s by is by” yet. The top result in google for this supposed saying is a destiel fanfic written as coda for this episode. There is NOTHING else. It doesn’t exist. What is Yokey playing at exactly? Bygones be bygones maybe? But she had to say it like that? After a reference to anal? To DEAN? Yeah I know everyone is probably already yelling about this on tumblr but still. This is a very huge WTF from me to Yokey that he would ever think we WOULDN’T pick up on this. He did it on purpose. It has a reason, just like everything else. The reason being “Dean is Bi”.

......

(x)

The final scene with Rowena is spectacular. It’s also oddly erotic but maybe that’s just me. Rowena is finally unbound, powerful, free, and probably quite deadly. Here’s hoping she raises a hell of a storm. I have always loved Rowena’s character so for me this idea of her being “unbound” and basically immortal is really interesting. I just hope this paves the way to her helping the Winchesters defeat the big bads to come. Because I see her becoming more of an ally as time goes by. I hope she continues to have a big part to play in the story, and after this final scene I am practically sure she will.

....

Castiel speaking about Jack like he’s a proud parent gives me life. He truly loves the kid. It’s beautiful.

....

Why does Lucifer attract so many dick jokes nowadays? I’m actually almost getting tired of them. For shits and giggles I’m gonna accept it at face value that Lucifer, unlike Crowley, is not well endowed. It makes sense. The tantrums, the violence. Little man syndrome. Pfft.

I’m also going to take it at face value that Cas is most likely huge. Yeah, that smirk is telling.

We all know he’s a big boy. ;-)

....

Hats off to Brenda. The biggest star of the episode. Never failed to make me laugh every time I watched.

You go Brenda. You were awesome.

Overall

Solid episode with lots of great moments. Now all I need is Cas to find the boys and get really pissy with them when he realises they didn’t ONCE figure out that Colonel Sanders was impersonating him. I mean sure, Dean has super low self esteem and was clearly grumpy with Cas at the start of the episode for only really checking in with Sam, not coming home after taking off, clearly CHOOSING the road over being at home with HIM... But that doesn’t excuse him being blind to Asmodeus’s impersonation. Bring on next week. I hope Dean grovels.

#supernatural #episode review #13x12 #destiel #spn meta #spn speculation #dean is bi #castiel #dean winchester #sam winchester #rowena #lucifer #season 13 #spn spoilers #my reviews #my meta

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elizabethrobertajones · 7 years

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13x08 watching notes

You guys, I literally can't cope with Sam dressing like this much longer. I am being personally attacked. WHo EVEN SELLS ORANGE PLAID.

expectations: best case scenario, some literally unholy lovechild of 7x20 and 12x12.

Heists mean side characters and good heists mean fun side characters. From the promo stuff it looks like we have a couple of quirky side characters, who aesthetically vaguely reminded me of the Doctor Who bank heist episode from the Clara period of the show, just because quirky side characters to bolster a heist episode. It's probably quite easy to beat the mood and justification of ridiculousness from Doctor Who, especially peak Moffatt era nonsense, out of the water, but this is Glynn so I'm expecting good characters, good characterisation, but pooossibly some random plot hole or some sort of back and forth of characters/scenes that's hard to follow that doesn't necessarily hurt the episode but does make it a headache later :P

[note with hindsight: *just hands Glynn a trophy for it and walks off*]

It's essentially the same thing you forgive under Dabb vs cars (aka not a problem unless you make it one), but it doesn't really lend itself to writing a heist either so this is in no way the same level of "Uhoh" as a Buckleming episode but it is a hmmm I hope people aren't arguing in circles about some way the plot worked and ignoring the good stuff when I get online comment :P

I wasn't sure how this fit into the overall picture of wtf the demons were up to before yesterday, but with the promo scene with Bart, selling him as essentially the new (I mean... potentially since season 6) king of the crossroads but maybe not styling himself that way, we may or may not get another overt canon dive like 12x12 showed us how Crowley got his upgrade, to tell us how long this guy has been around behind the scenes (and SENSIBLY staying off the Winchesters' radar), but this character very literally is Crowley2.0 as people have been calling him in the sense that he is what Crowley was when we met him both with the actual job title AND narratively, and in this case probably very content with his job as it is especially with the danger at the very top, and I hope for his sake he doesn't get ambitious, because it would be great to have a character like this survive just for story stability - yeah even though he's another white dude might as well just lump it unless this episode immediately replaces him with someone better but intent on doing the *exact same* job properly - just to have some stability and a second player in the Hell storyline. Especially if they maintain an uneasy relationship with him that he really is the last resort for help Crowley really wasn't since like season 10.

It establishes another position of power in Hell's hierarchy and it's a fairly safe job where a smart demon can accrue a lot of power - Crowley was shown to have a whole bunch of resources and a lot of it predating becoming King of Hell, specifically because it was stuff gathered as a crossroads demon/through controlling that flow of trade. TBH it's better placed than whoever is trying to lead the demons because they have all the resources. I think in 11x23 Crowley said his minions took everything and ran? This dude would be one of the key placed people to do that because he has all the stuff and connections to all the souls collected in deals. Whether that comes up or not I'm just going to assume he did :P

Anyway in the story it creates another character where we basically already know everything about how they function, because Crowley, both on a random world building and originally how Crowley was in the narrative sort of level. It sucks he's getting replaced on a "I did actually quite like him most days" level, and it's definitely a "get 2 people to do the same job 1 man was doing" thing but then the writing had been so bad to Crowley for a couple of years since they ran out of things for him to do that maybe stripping back to basics to get the narrative role he used to offer without all the baggage is sensible >.> If a character takes on so much of a life of their own they can't do the stuff they used to offer without it being an issue like removing any tension about giving them magic things they couldn't obtain themselves, or offering sincere opposition and attempts to kill them from the throne of Hell, then unfortunately for Crowley, this is a great choice. Asmodeus represents all the shit I didn't like that they kept making Crowley do, Bart represents the side of Crowley introduced by Edlund and maintained at least until Edlund left the show (Crowley was his baby even more than Cas was - he just dipped in to write the best Cas episodes but he introduced and pushed Crowley as a character... funnily enough at the end of season 8 both their natures were changed dramatically and permanently). Based on 1 promo scene, I have to admit, Bart is all the bits of Crowley I liked best, while coming across as a bit of a cheap knock off in the way he tries to butter up to the Winchesters, a bit too knowing, a bit too under-informed, while Crowley ran loops around them just in their opening conversation.

OMG it's sleeting so I am going to roll the dice and get a lift to yoga from the same person who plain forgot to pick my mum up and take her wherever they were going for about 2 hours last week when I wisely decided to get the bus. See now I have extra time, the episode is downloaded, but... I don't have enough time. Nooo way :P

Other generic pre-ep thoughts: this concept is goofy but I seriously don't trust it to stay that way because you never trust this show to stay that way. We haven't seen Asmodeus in a non-BL episode and while he is essentially their pet character he's still plot relevant. I'm not exactly on the side of "we HAVE to get Casmodeus before this is all said and done" as in I'd really love it but it seems so easy to bungle in a BL episode. On the other hand, just because Cas is locked up doesn't mean we can't see Misha in an episode while this state of affairs continues (and just because there's no spoilers doesn't mean it's not happening) and Glynn having a crack at Casmodeus sounds like a perfect set up for the kind of stuff we'd want to see out of it, and be a curveball to throw in here.

I'm just going to assume we're not seeing Mary again for a while and this is all set in the main universe.

I assume Jack isn't in the episode but we may or may not get a lead on him at the end, or else be left on "well we have a lead/half a lead on him" because I sort of feel like if he literally breaks the universe next episode after this he'll be pretty easy to find again :P

This may all be some way to force some conversations about how Dean and Sam feel about Jack on the other side of the turning point, especially if it's our last chance for them to be in the limelight until the other side of Wayward Sisters midseason fun. And if Jack has broken the universe next episode, we need to have their current stances laid out before they go rushing in to deal with that. So this could be a fairly light episode for character discussion.

HI back from yoga

the recap immediately gets into Jack stuff so hey maybe he is in the episode, maybe it's just explaining better why he is not in this episode because the reason why NOT is just as important.

Then just way too much having to recap last episode to get us up to date on what Sam and Dean have been through with all that. I like that they included that Ketch said he was his own twin considering Dean says "twinsies" in the promo scene, as, of course, this may be a really important theme. Twins that aren't actually twins. Cas and the Empty, Ketch and "Alexander", Dean and Crowley2.0, Dean being fed up of things that look like other things and the shapeshifter & ghoul...

Anyway. "NOW" - Cambridge, England. Okay then. Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuure. *rubs a Union Jack on it to make it more British*

This is your weekly reminder to read these notes in a shrill British accent.

Whoever this is outside looks like she's up to something.

This mueseum:

https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/130991708770/justanotheridijiton-jerry-wanek-on-supernatural

I'm not gonna read into that immediately because its been completely dressed up for the vampire!Dean episode and it's been polished up for this episode. But we get a long look at the stained glass roof and that was a centrepiece for the vamp episode.

*she continues to be up to something*

Wow, great security. Bust open a door and no alarms go off? It's the 2nd door that doesn't work, after Dean failed to get the automatic door to open for him in 13x05.

Mmmm drawers of old scrolls and spooooky writing.

Just... shove it in your handbag.

Oh yep she's a demon, that's surprising.

This is a great way to do a robbery, tbh. Ethics about possession aside, you can burn a vessel and let them take whatever physical damage or legal ramifications of being found in the room where something was stolen, but if you run into problems, just possess the next person. Especially someone with clearance, if you couldn't find them earlier...

I suppose her not being able to open the door earlier was an omen for her not having all the information - not knowing that Bart was going to stab her as soon as he had what he wanted from her, and that she wasn't working for Asmodeus's whim at all, but Bart was going rogue with it. This is another suggestion of the dramatic irony at work - Dean couldn't open the door, he had no faith, and it seemed like to HIM that no one was helping him. But of course Cas had already come back, the automatic door had opened in that sense, but he didn't know so he's encountering this block. This demon powers through it as well without setting off any alarm bells and she should have had some about the whole double cross coming. Likewise, Dean's surprised by Cas's return.

Bart establishes himself as a Crowley-alike instantly, by having a random demon minion to double cross, and to go to the Winchesters. He already has Dean on speed dial which means his number must get circulated among the demons, or Bart has sought it out already from their sources. Whether he's had it a while and just decided to pounce...

I guess it's also like the opposite of Cas phoning him and we don't hear that side of the conversation - I mean we hear Dean on the phone here, but we're staying on Bart's side of the camera, and he's enticing him in with what he needs to find Jack. Again, more dark mirrors of stuff that's already happened... Dean getting a lot of phonecalls he needs to follow his faith on.

Dean immediately on screen in his bi plaid doing that thing with the gun that's... suggestive. Sitting there obessesively cleaning his gun.

Sam emerges, in a shirt that is going to be a Problem.

*mutes Sam*

Sam was the one who talked to Cas. I wonder if Asmodeus phoned Sam up rather than the other way around. Like, don't be suspicious, just check in every day and see how they're doing... Just phone one of the brothers at random.

Anyway we already know, of course, that it's not Cas, and here we are with more dramatic irony, the same problem as Casifer before they knew, and it's underlined by Sam being the one to talk to Casmodeus instead of Dean. Fewer opportunities based on what we see on screen for Dean to work it out.

And now we see the other side of the phonecall, tracking back in time to show us the same thing over again, but now we have Dean's POV on it too and he's not at this disadvantage, at least, with the way it's all been set up. He gets to snark back etc although Bart has the right word to stop Dean hanging up on him.

I do like the snark about Hell street locations :P

Sam's like "a demon!" whispered even though it's obvious and I think Dean clued into it which means once again Sam's being the GA, or a filter for them, and even though he says it silently, he's still spelling out what he thinks it is when it's blatantly obvious to us what it is as we watched the cold open and his side of the start of the phone call already.

"if I had a way to find *your boy*" - that parenting theme again, and he's addressing it to Dean since that's who he thinks he's solely on the phone to.

We get a look at a ton of shop fronts and I suppose they're all made up?

The Smile Diner is already incongruously happy - more irony, just that it's all smiles for what would be an understandably tense meeting.

Anyway: "BANGTOWN beauty & barber" "Fine art bartending LEARN TO BARTEND", a restaurant...

A Chinese-owned phone shop "Ketaiya" which I suppose is selling phones, as it says "iphone8.8" in the window but also would fit an idea of calling home, as shops like this exist for most immigrant populations, as a place where they can make cheap phonecalls home. In this part of the country I'm most used to seeing Arabic, Slavic or Eastern European versions of this but I assume it's the same deal. We get cage imagery over the front of this shop, obviously as protection for it as it has a bunch of iphones in it, but the idea that Cas can't call them because he's in prison is right there, and it makes him the lil green mascot in the window.

And then the smile cafe is the next thing along. :)

"He could work for Asmodeus" smart, but wrong *as far as we know*, and Sam is like "what if he's telling the truth", so this scepticism seems to be flipping their roles from last episode, buuut on the other hand Dean is being defensive and practical and Sam is again entertaining things villains tell them.

"After Crowley I told myself no more demons" it STILL sounds like bitter but civil exes. And you'd bet that "after Crowley" is not "in the last month since he died" but "since that time we had a wild elopement"

but hanging a lampshade on exactly what Bart is doing for them in the narrative, and of course that Dean is going to be predisposed to see him as a Crowley2.0 exactly as we do, so that adds even more depth to the promo scene.

Sam like "you said we need a miracle, maybe this is it" and then Dean calling out that demons don't give miracles - they give deals they can SELL as miracles. Who of the two of you has been jerked around more by demon deals? Oh yeah the one of you who sold your soul because your father's demon deal spiritually broke you already. (I mean yeah Sam has had it PLENTY hard in other ways but Dean and crossroads demons is a very different story to Sam)

"Let's hear the guy out." "And after that we kill him."

I continue to be enraged that Dean is wearing sensible black and at least MUTED purples and Sam's wearing the orange jacket and a plaid with like, hazard day glo orange strips sewn into it.

:) Smile Diner :)

it's horrifying, but it has homemade burgers. I have no clue if this is something they scouted out or repainted but the brickwork having yellow lines is like WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING in film language, like DO NOT ENTER police tape coding. IRL it would be whimsical, especially with all the smilies. On screen, it it horrifying. There's red signage and green neon boxing the window I think they're gonna sit in, and red and green are the poison codependency colours I think? According to Zerbe? I don't know if that's the dynamic here but it's certainly not GOOD, especially boxed in by yellow and black hazard warnings.

There's a pretty bridge and a sunset/rise in the sign. It's incongruous to the smile theme at least because it doesn't directly relate to smiling, and is just a random image. I would assume it's symbolic in some way... Cas is of course the sun, this does mimic the Gas n Sip logo (especially as it has a maroon version), and the road seems to lead away from the sun across the bridge. They're not helping Cas going in here, that's for sure :P

Lots of potted plants in here, and one behind Bart.

"The famous Winchesters!" "Some random demon." Dean is in a power play with him and now they're face to face rather than at a disadvantage over the phone, he's gonna win this one. Watch.

Bart offers a nickname to them, which could be a power play to say hey I'm so powerful we get on nickname terms because I allow you and you should be grateful or whatever, but his name sounds like an old powerful demon name (he and Asmodeus both have old school "us" endings to their names) and so he's actually neutering the part that makes his name sound powerful and impressive. He may be preempting Dean's infamous nicknaming habit, but Dean does it to be dismissive or to humanise. And he's not gonna get the latter treatment :P

Again, offering them to sit and then trying to get Dean on his side with pie - gesture after gesture of power, being the one in control, and knowing them, and the pie is the first sign he's done his Winchester Homework, which bad guys notoriously get wrong or misread. In this case, he's got Dean down as the stupid dumb muscle who can be bribed with pie, and I assume missing aaall the complexity of why demons fear him so much.

He labels Dean a "disrupter" when Dean has been tasked with maintaining the natural order. Dean has only ever tried to STOP bad stuff happening, and though he's ACCIDENTALLY helped unleash a bunch of stuff, it's never been because he WANTS to. He's helped cause a lot of the disruption in Hell with his actions, but that's because Hell is bad and he wants to stop it doing bad things. In general Dean's big victories have been to try and secure the natural order staying as it is, with his two biggest victories being Swan Song and settling things with God and Amara.

I love how the framing here has all that green light behind the Winchesters, but aside from a line of green behind Bart's head, he's got this innocent white flowery wall and some roses behind him.

Again, Sam snatches up the spell, Dean doubts immediately, I guess if not that the spell is real that why a demon would just GIVE it to him without ulterior motives. Just be upfront about the ulterior motives :P

He re-introduces himself as first a cross-roads demon and then THE cross-roads demon, a clarification again. He doesn't say king of the crossroads, but he does smirk at Dean, and says helping people is what he does... Yeah, to a degree. They have to PAY for it. But it's that smarmy salesman charm, this time mixed with someone who looks like a thug boss, the sort who dresses nice but has goons.

I mean we KNOW he does, but his look is very typical of nice suit, close-cropped hair, and just generally heavy set like he's used to being intimidating more than relying on his words, when you go to cast this guy.

Dean says they don't listen to/help demons, just kill them, and for one thing Bart's got to know about Crowley, but he says "How Dean of you" like he knows Dean is the one who just threatens to/will kill demons and not think about it. I mean Dean could be showing he's learned from experience. But of course then, the great meta about him negging Dean, by switching focus to Sam, who's already been established even before they get in the diner that he's going to be more willing to listen, that he's the "smart one" aka the one more likely to make a bad decision by listening to people he shouldn't while trying to help.

And, of course, Dean eats his pie, and we already made the parallels to other scenes like this in diners, but Ishim stands out the most, throwing money at Dean to shut up and buy himself some pie. In this case the pie is already here, and Dean's allowed to be suspicious but also eat the pie because hey, it's here.

Bart treated Dean like he was the stupid pie guy so Dean, who doesn't trust him an inch, acts like the stupid pie guy, while not giving any ground. He is not bribed by the pie, but Sam can't believe Dean's eating it.

There's a world of metaphor there about Dean and seduction. Because of course Bart came on strong to Dean, but Dean wasn't buying that either, the coded second layer of the conversation about him being Crowley2.0 and thinking maybe he can find a way to unlock Dean's interest in dudes... by offering pie of course. Doesn't work like that, you have to earn it. And the coming on too strong is the first weakness he has in not measuring up to Crowley, despite how it all seems like he has the ~perfect plan~ in place.

They're STIIIILL in these shirts

Wow, that's some old Biblical stuff. Guess that explains why Dabb tweeted that, pretty quickly. I don't know much about the Queen of Shiba but the idea she's a nephilim is kind of amusing.

I'll have to leave that to the experts but anyway, more douchey guys, although this time King Solomon is keeping tabs on someone like a dick, so um. Welcome to the club of symbolism this part of the season? I assume this is the same guy from the Song of Solomon that we saw Jack glance at in 13x02, and it's more romantic stuff as well.

Sam's like "Jack is out there in the world, and he's alone and he's scared and he's dangerous", which is exactly Dean's stance from 13x01 saying better to keep Jack in the Bunker with them so the only people he'd hurt are them. Yes Sam still seems to care about Jack, but he is also now valuing him practically, and seeing he's dangerous, and it's caused this flip in his attitude to one mirroring Dean's but obviously with much less hate and upset about what happened to Cas etc

Heist HQ!

Quirky random demons! Hat and headphone demons.

Hahahah they're called Smash and Grab. Smash has flowery DMs so I love her. Grab is wearing that hat voluntarily so I am not so sure about him at all.

PS: in America has flipping the bird with 2 fingers become a thing or was that a peace sign? When I was a young'un I was told that you always had to do peace signs palm out because showing the back of your hand with the exact same gesture was as bad/worse than giving someone the finger.

Is Smash human? Since he said Grab is a demon that leaves an empty space over what she is.

Lol, Dean realising it's a heist. "What is this, a heist? Hold on, is this a heist?"

Hahahahahha his favourite My Little Pony... Come on Dean, you kept the little pony you cut off that car in 7x06. You literally can not throw stones in this house.

Luther Shrike looks like if he was on UK TV he'd be played by the guy who played Walder Frey (David Bradley).

There's some stuff on the board that looks like the Sumerian(?) that Kevin translated the angel tablet into. Since we already had Kevin back on screen, it seems superfluous to mention, but it gives me a 4 in a row for mentioning Kevin in an episode this season so BINGO and more dramatic irony that Sam and Dean don't know he's responsible for Lucifer coming back, or, indeed, that Lucifer is back.

(With a bonus grumble from me that it's a reminder, in this season about a nephilim, that we still don't know what the angel fall spell's specific wording was)

Oh boy the "hell and back" thing. Ouch. So we're apparently delving THIS now? Is this penance for 11x10 and Dean not seeming too bothered to go back down there aside from token nervousness about the whole thing in the acting? Anyway getting flashbacks to that out of the blue... Look I am a smol sensitive Dean girl you can't just throw that at me. D:

It's interesting the perhaps king of the crossroads can't swing this with a random soul. I would assume it's specifically blood of someone CONDEMNED to Hell and saved/brought back. And woah I have it paused right after the flashback to collect myself, but either this has to get a Cas mention or it's one heck of an empty space in the story that Cas saved Dean and is the reason he's viable for this.

And lol lol lol lol see above like THREE PARAGRAPHS AGO I am never ever going to be over the angel fall spell and the fact it required grace in such... suspicious... circumstances of nephilim and cupids, and the whole theme of clarification, and how we have these such specific spells - virgin blood in 12x22, archangel grace last episode, and human who has been to hell and back now...

I'm just saying, I'm gonna be on my deathbed when I'm 150 like "the angel fall spell needed the grace of an angel in love with a human, come fight me, Carver" and then I give up the ghost just so I can go beat him up in the afterlife.

Bart beams at Dean, wanting his blood. Dean offers it up just to get this over and done with, but he says, no, straight from the tap and anyway you two are extremely competent in a weird crisis, why the heck would I not exploit that I need your manpower for this?

Shrike is human who has been to hell and back - obviously a dark Dean mirror because apparently he's a sadist and murderer, and Dean's entire thing is whether he's a killer or not for doing this job he does and I have gifsets and meta blahing on and on about that but yeah basically 2x03 set up that for Dean about how you do the job because you like/need killing or you do it to save people, and his torturer arc, and his Mark of Cain/demon descent... Nuff said for now.

UGH so Sam pulls Dean aside and says, "we want that spell - we NEED that spell" which is a huge clarification, and literally the want/need theme you are probably aware I bang on about a weeeeeeeeeeeee little bit. In general it's the "use your words" theme which does not harm Sam for the reminder but also is a huge Destiel theme because the need/want thing is from the crypt scene/10x19 with the call out on the crypt scene from Dean's subconscious and the ongoing issue of whether Cas feels needed or wanted, with the fact he feels "needed" called out in OH WAIT 13x04, aka last time out for Glynn... the fact the clarification is coming now in the other direction is because this is a Sam thing anyways, and - UGH I have it paused with him on screen and he seems to have an even worse shirt on? - it's not about Destiel subtext for him it's just using your words and in general bolstering the presence of the theme. Of course they don't just want the spell for kicks, they have a serious reason for needing it. In fact Sam's concern about Jack going from emotional concern for Jack himself to seeing Jack as a dangerous crisis is encapsulated in turning a desire into an obligation.

"He'll never see us coming"

"they're coming"

More dramatic irony, immediately showing us that on the other side of the story the bad guy has more information than they think he does, and that they aren't going to have it as easy as they think. That Bart has already been made as a traitor and that Asmodeus knows his next move will be exactly this.

Asmodeus may not even be *on screen* in this episode and he's being written as more intelligent than he has been in both Buckleming episodes, which is super unfortunate that he's supposed to be an intelligent character and we have to judge the characterisation of these unfortunates who are main BL property off their depiction in OTHER episodes...

And yeah Shrike may chat with demons but he has demon traps, exorcisms memorised and he toes the line of a horrible human being but not demonic himself, but such a hair's breadth away that demons and demon interactions and generally knowing wtf is going on with demons is just his life.

He has a really pretty grate which I think is specifically in the hall so that he can exorcise demons out through it. It probably goes straight to Hell

His windows also have bars on them which look like random jumble to an unfamiliar eye but are of course iron warding

I think he also has grapevines. He lives on a vineyard with barbed wire and demon traps on the gates.

The metalwork is the coolest thing in this episode and this episode is not half bad so far

Oh my god Dean called out poor Smash for her amazing boots and called her "Winona" - she DOES bear a passing resemblance, but hey leave the boots alone.

Anyway that moment just to show they're top and tail under a blanket in the back of the Impala which is pretty funny to me - I'm never sure you can actually fit anyone in there like that but they want to prove me wrong.

I'm like 1000% sure Sam's ruse doesn't work, because Shrike knows they're coming but he's let in anyway because why not. Let's have some fun. Interesting that Sam's the one made to do this. Having to lie and we already KNOW he's been caught out.

Anyway more focus on the boots... 3 times and I'm super worried we're gonna have to identify some remains by the flowery boots >.>

Or more positively it could be used to fuck with us in some way

"Dean? Don't get dead." "you too." Aw.

Is Grab in the trunk of the car?

Iron warded door. Yeah, that's normal.

For these guests, the rug is pulled back, the demon trap is plain to see on the floor. We see Sam from above, like he's being watched.

Shrike's front room/office is like Metatron's desk? I swear he had that lamp. Cuthbert's house... I swear that's Bobby's wallpaper or one in a similar hue with appropriately similar patterns to at least make a sort of sense of familiarity.

Awww Dean and Smash. He calls her weird but then spots she's drinking the delightful sounding does what it says on the tin NERVE DAMAGE, and then he says he used to live on it as a kid, despite its illegal amounts of caffeine.

Ew and she's getting it expired on ebay.

Dean, she may be bonding with you, but don't drink it. It's literally called Nerve Damage.

Welp

he's gonna be bouncing off the walls after 1 sip

OH they have to summon Grab I guess?

"Cool."

Hahahaha

Dean's babysitting the weirdoes.

Heh, calls Dean "chief"

HAHAHAHA Smash told Grab off screen that Dean was just a pretty face :P

WHOOPS looks like Dean just got puppeted by his own blood. Like a couple of weeks ago or something I was writing about a worst case scenario for Jack's powers being that they completely overwhelm him and he's like, inside waiting to be busted out, perhaps as a conclusion of the crypt scene/swan song repetitions from an external evil possessing and controlling to an internal force making it happen - a slow process but it really has switched, and it has been a fairly smooth slope down :D

Also that was hilarious. Poor Dean.

Dean's being poisoned with NERVE DAMAGE and Sam's being poisoned with homemade gin. If that's what it really is.

Hahahahahah Sam picking up a basilisk fang. We've all seen Harry Potter

LOL Sam knows random knowledge about basilisks and gorgons. Of course it's a test, and Shrike would know what it was, but good on Sam for recognising it. I watched Tall Tales so recently I'm still giggling about him recognising a crocodile belly scale, but now I just think Sam has an affinity for identifying the weirder monsters. He must have read a load of junk about them in the MoL bunker.

His persona as the collector guy wanting to sell to Shrike is basically Sam but with a bit more nervous bluster, which might be explained by knowing how dangerous this guy is and that Sam is having to pretend. He's not even wearing clothes as a get up here.

OH BOY Sam's big gambit is Ruby's knife... I remember in my 8x02 watching notes (hi Dabb) I was amused that they kind of forget that that knife is one of the most valuable things they own and they just dropped it in the weapon bin with a warning, rather than considering even trading it for the tablet or whatever even as a ruse... Just the idea they go around laden with magical artefacts that help them all the time like this which would actually be priceless to collectors - like in 12x06 Asa having an angel blade on blue felt in a glass case.

I don't think there's been a strong bias about which one of them has an angel blade and which one still uses this knife in fights since Carver era, but Dean took it to Purgatory, while Sam seemed to have more consistent possession of it for a while, Dean was the one who wrangled it from Ruby in 3x16 and sort of formally took ownership of it on behalf of the Winchesters.

Given the emotional background to this season of Sam's powers being explored through Jack, though, it is interesting (since they have enough angel blades they could just swap to using them all the time instead of this knife, which is a relic of Sam's darkest times) to just give it up, but quite aside from its worth to the right market, it has an enormous emotional weight of the season 3-4-5 drama for the Winchesters, and remembering it as Ruby's knife ties it to Sam. He still uses her knife and keeps her memory close, perhaps just as a reminder. But that weight is there and bringing it up is a reminder of all that, because so often we just see it as a tool, but this is asking us to stop and CONSIDER what that knife actually means, how much it's worth, and how even though they could stop using it these days, they don't, but what it would mean to Sam to give it up.

Dean reeeally not getting along with Grab. Who, of course, is the demon in this mix. The fact Smash is not a demon is only brought up in that scene where Dean is talking about her working with demons - it's taken for granted that she's human and perhaps that is the default, but not when you're expecting a room full of demons as we might be when meeting them. So. More empty space fill in the blanks, use context and people using or not using definitions to not be surprised that she's human.

Anyway Grab calls Sam stupid and Dean gets so angry he stops and turns around even though the spell's been dragging him along so there's a ridic Swan Song mirror for the collection - while "puppeted" by the spell, "defensiveness" of his brother halts Dean's progress...

Aaaand he's off again. Not enough? :P

Hey creepy underground cellars. That's never bad.

LOL Dean gets called HANDPUPPET

Mr Fizzles can tell when you're being a liaaaaaaaaaaaaaar

"I will kill you." "I bet you say that to all the girls." Awww and here was I thinking Dean wouldn't get flirted with any more this episode.

That was literally from the Crowley handbook - 9x10/9x11 made a huge point out of it.

This murder cellar connects to 12x01, 12x12, and 12x20, with the cellars being where Sam was kept and the twig people were made, and 12x12 for the basement Ramiel kept his shit in. Crossing them all over into this is super fun.

I guess this is where Smash does her thing?

GREAT door.

I hope that thing doesn't bite

It almost certainly bites

Oooh Shrike thinks Sam is a demon.

He didn't see him not get stuck in the demon trap out in the hall.

He has some of the info but not ALL of the info - in this way, while Bart sent them to deal with curveballs, Sam has turned out to be the curveball instead.

Ow that's a big hole to blow in the books, that were nearly Sam.

He conveniently slides back to his knife.

On the other hand re: curveballs, if Shrike thinks he's a demon, that shotgun blast wouldn't have killed a demon but it will kill a Sam.

Sam just goes and stabs the dude.

"As long as I'm on my property I can't die."

Well that's annoyingly cheaty

I wonder if it's symbolic of something but I can't instantly link it to anything so I have to move on.

There's something very like the Cain stuff with Dean in 9x11 between Sam and this guy, especially as they matched up as equals in knowledge about gorgons or whatever earlier.

MAW

DEAN LOOKS INTO THE MAW

Dean does not like spiders.

Hard same.

Why is he always so relatable

I'm cackling so much at his reluctance to put his hand in there. It's like the not wanting to go in the hole in 13x06 but so much funnier because... spiders.

There was an eel tank at the local aquarium when I was a kid which had a game EMBEDDED in the side of the eel tank to put your hand in and feel what an eel feels like.

I'm having, like. PTSD flashbacks to this and the Tiger Head in the museum which terrified the living daylights out of us as children and we wouldn't even go past it because it looked so fierce with its big open mouth

this is literally combining two of The Most Horrifying Things about my childhood into one

Plus biting for blood = needles to draw blood which is a rather more recent thing what with recently coming down with a mystery chronic illness and spending 2 years fishing around for a diagnosis via endless blood drawing, so put that one on the list

I believe in you, Dean. You're stronger than me.

He's stronger than me

I love him more than I have ever loved him in this exact moment

He had to account for the fact that Shrike might regularly go in here so of course it won't take YOUR HAND or something.

Of course it's a massive suspense thing for a teeny weeny pinprick. Of course.

This is like the dead opposite of the Werther Box - it's just a key for the lock, not like... the entire murderous thing Cuthbert designed

NINJA reflexes to save Smash there

Bye Grab. You were a dick.

OH NOES Shrike is here, with the demon knife, covered in blood. That's not worrying for Dean to see AT ALL.

Smash just legs it.

Awww she seemed to care about Grab at least a little... They had matchy matchy names.

Dean wants to go watch Game of Thrones.

Walder Frey knock off prefers to read the books

how did Sam get here.

I'm gonna assume like... not!Sam for now, since he saved the day so fortuitously.

Bart lurkin' outside.

Not surprising at all that Smash has a deal with him. I doubt he's letting her off easy, either, she's going to be sent right back.

Does Shrike just walk through this thing and ignore all the darts because they can't kill him?

"Shrek"

Sam sure has some quick and easy insights into the keypad.

"Like in Entrapment"

"Did you just say Entrapment?"

... Did Sam just get busted over his pop culture knowledge, by Dean, slower on the uptake than what I thought was weird for Sam?

Omg they're sending Shrike through because the darts can't kill him. This is ridiculous

That *was* ridiculous, but funny

Winchester problem solving.

Awwwww Smash is back, if it's really her.

Sam figures out she has a deal.

He also has a real side-eye of Dean. If he's actually Sam I got to re-evaluate him through this section :P

If not, I have another case of something impersonating Sam while doing The Eyebrows

More horrifying: this is Sam actually doing The Eyebrows

Oh god it's full daylight all of a sudden and Sam's plaid

is orange

under the orange jacket

I hate Sam Winchester

undying feud levels

Guess this is the edge of the property where he can't be killed? Be hilarious if they get him over the line somehow to kill him

STUNT DRIVING

Suddenly backstory and emotional music plays.

Starting to think nothing’s up with Sam though, like, if he actually was replaced or not, because it was really funny imagining it and not letting them get the drop on me if it happened, and Sam being called out on his references etc, but we're getting pretty far into it all like leaving the property, having this moment, etc, so maybe it was just a fake out and Sam BAMF'd himself free off-screen or was never even tied up

Seems to just be a story of life, though that Shrike's kid died so soon after he was saved, and it was a "waste" of a demon deal. He seems like he must have already been a certain sort of person to know how to MAKE the deal...

What's in the trunk...

Ooh I wondered if it would be as soon as Bart wasn’t forthcoming. So a 6x04 parallel as well (or 6x10, which dealt a lot more with them having to work for Crowley).

Oooh they were off the property. WHOOPS. It *was* the gates. I thought so but I didn't figure he'd be so stupid to face them head on.

Although it was over Bart's bones so it was a risk he had to take to leave?

And now we have a new problem :P

Awww poor Smash

And there's the rest of the spell. Do they take it?

Oookay I was thinking Sam would have to be Sam for this part and he and Dean are making emotional decisions together and Sam's picking the correct path so... I guess I have to assume 100% this is Sam again? Mittens isn't talking to me about stuff from this episode like there's too many spoilers for her to humour me about stuff. Even what I thought were silly things.

And now Smash/Alice is in peril after they made the decision that they do not want to get involved in Bart's shit because he's a shitty person.

Bye bye Bart :3 Nice move, Dean.

So basically, yep, Bart tried so hard to be what Crowley was to Dean in their opening interaction and all his set up to come across as like... something Dean had been missing? That Dean might WANT a demon ally to be on the hook with/have on his hook, even just have on his SPEED DIAL, because to him that probably meant being able to manipulate the Winchesters and so on...

But as I figured from the opening, he just completely underestimates them, including that Dean is way way way waaaay smarter than he gives him credit for, so OF COURSE Dean wins by outsmarting him, by doing what soulless!Sam STOPPED Dean from doing in 6x04 and just torching Crowley on the spot because what did they REALLY owe him and how much loyalty could you really have from a demon as uneasy business partners... So Dean outwits him, and in a move almost exactly like 13x06 he sets up the tools and someone else gets the kill but it's Dean who outsmarted the monster.

And whooops half of half a spell? Not even half... it's all gone.

Whoooops. Well at least they saved Alice. And they're putting her on a bus, as they usually do with characters they won't see again.

There's like 2 minutes left, which is always an ominous sign.

Anyway *waves goodbye to Alice*

*Dean pats Sam on the shoulder and we get the last look at Sam smiling*

Aaand to the Bunker, where Dean is getting them some beers while wearing his black Henley.

Like the whole thing resolved with that dude and Bart is dead and all (... they better find someone to replace him although constantly subbing in random "I'm the new king of the crossroads" characters might get a bit ridiculous, we know there's going to be an opening someone will take... I really hope that was a cue to get us to whoever takes over... If not they just make it even more frustrating that I’ve been waiting 7 years to know if someone replaced Crowley or he was doing both jobs, and now it’s made even more clear there’s a job for a secondary powerful demon in hell to show up in this role and the head crossroads demon is a serious position with power and such... It’s such a frustrating hole in the world building to overlook and I've been over-thinking it for longer than I’ve been on tumblr by a good few years.)

anyway Sam n Dean are talking

Is Sam going to explain how he escaped from being knocked out and showed up with perfect timing, or was that the plot hole?

Nah, they just have a nice talk about the job and how saving people is fun, and all. And Dean being optimistic. Yay! It's a similar call out to 13x06 and why Dean was so obscenely happy in the cowboy room, but Sam is now seeing that Dean is permanently feeling better even in ridiculous situations, and his mood really has permanently resettled to optimism and cheerfulness again and it is NOT just the cowboys.

Okay so I probably need to watch the last part of the episode again but I am now weirdly curious about what happened to Sam - though we know he's great at escaping things, but Shrike put his life into doubt to Dean, and we had no reason to assume he'd leave Sam in a place where he could easily get out, I'm guessing now that the way he showed up looking like he COULD have just killed and/or maimed Sam with that bloody knife, and I even pointed out that to DEAN'S eyes it would look sooo much worse than if it was as simple as Shrike knocked Sam out, and immediately legged it to the safe to check on it while just hoping unconsciousness would be enough to keep Sam down. (He has an iron skull after being knocked out so many times - like that thing where you kung fu your hands to have tons of micro fractures in order for the bones to heal stronger? That's Sam's head.)

He seemed to be put into question after he showed up again and I began to doubt it again as soon as they left the property because it would make no sense to leave Sam behind and just take a fake with them for the emotional resolution of the episode. Especially once they got into it and it was blatantly a straightforward emotional resolution to the episode that Sam had too much of a stake in for it NOT to be him at that point.

BUT Dean questioned Sam's reference to a thing right after he showed back up, while Sam was coming up with some hilarious ideas for solving things in a way written which you COULD think he was not!Sam and someone with more info/their own stake in this (e.g. the worry Asmodeus was coming) just because it was Sam at his most mercenary to come up with the "just send the guy who can't die over the traps to spring them all" plan... We KNOW Sam can be like that but at the same time... Sam being like that can also be some other person who would think like that as the LEAST WORST thing they thought that day instead of the actual worst.

Anyway it was all set up in such a way that Dean calling out something he didn't expect about Sam means he's questioning the people around him when they behave uncharacteristically - because he KNOWS his loved ones. He understands when they aren't behaving like themselves. He gets a secret out of Sam that he watched something he'd never normally watch just for Catherine Zeta-Jones, which Dean has to concede, while struggling with how much to mock Sam. It's interesting they use the empty space of Sam arriving without explanation to cast him into doubt, then have him doubted, verbally putting something out there that Dean stopped to question what Sam was saying. They brush it off, and it ends up being nothing, but considering the looming possibility of Casmodeus - and the fact that Sam started the episode saying he'd talked to Cas so they have literally been decieved THIS episode without knowing it (and Dean didn't get to verify if it was Cas or not - another reason to phone Sam instead of Dean)...

I wonder if it is leading up to Dean calling out Casmodeus about not being Cas? That this fake out might have been a time it really was Sam, but we and Dean were given a set up to doubt Sam was there in one piece, us with dramatic irony and Dean with just plain not knowing, and so they could play with this concept and it just tapers off - maybe we take the reaction about C Z-J as proof, maybe we eventually decide Sam has to be Sam after all and there's nothing going on here because he's involved earnestly in the emotional decisions at the end of the episode.

But it was interesting. Unlike with Ketch and his twin, it was the sort of set up where I wasn't certain we wouldn't finish the scene and then cut to Sam tied to a chair and bouncing it over to a nearby sharp object to saw himself free and run and stop the drama, at least until the end of that part of the episode. Once we were back out in the clear light of day it was like Sam's disgusting plaid was all the proof we needed it was really him :P

#13x08 #season 13 spoilers #*quietly sets Sam's wardrobe on fire*#my stuff

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