#(or not conceit? paradox? idk)

[thehardkandy]

I'm really glad I decided to finish Exordia this morning because it did lead to just about 7 hours of writing (+lunch break and dog walk) so that I was able to do a short story front to back ~3300 words.

Feels like a bit W because the last short I did was October, which is still much more recent than the one before it had been (though I've had a few abortive attempts at getting past the first 20k of a book in there)

I spent a lot of the winter depressed and struggling to find the joy in doing something for it's own sake, so I've been trying to really push myself toward the parts of writing that have me looking back on my own writing fondly. Because even without plans for publishing stuff there is so much of my writing that I think my life is better for having written

I feel very good about what I wrote today, so hopefully I'll keep doing this small stuff

I'll say an especial shout-out to the Penric novellas, the cemeteries of amalo books, and Exordia for really making me feel that extra fondness for books and writing lately

[prairiedust]

one thousand days of destiel, or cas: fuckerupper of endings

Idk why I’m crawling out from under my woodpile to write this, except that it occurred to me that in three years I’ve not rewatched a single episode of Supernatural and have at least two dozen tags yet blacklisted on tumblr, and that I am still not okay about this stupid show.

I never tried to tie up the folklore/author themes I’d been geeking out about through the last seasons, neither as the show was ending nor afterwards. I’ve been simmering now for over a thousand days. I could not even write a complete sentence about spn for all this time, and so I just left that pot on the back burner and did other things. Finished my Master’s degree. Started a new job. Saw my oldest child graduate from high school and move off to college, and helped my younger child move on to sixth grade. Watched some other shows, got a new blorbo, saw some movies, started painting again, picked up a couple of new hobbies as I am wont to do.  

Today is the 5th of November, 2023. (ETA i sat on this for a bit.)

November 5th, 2020, was exactly one thousand and ninety-five days ago.

I see gifs from the show from time to time and I think to myself, wow, that scene/episode/series is completely irrelevant to my life now. I am fine and normal about everything. But if it really was, if I really was, it would not hurt so much to see the gifs and the lyric posts and the amvs when they aren’t caught in my tag filters. So maybe it’s time to get some things out of my head and onto paper.

I genuinely, nearsightedly, naively thought that since Dabb et al had been the ones writing the whole folk v author themes, and thus posing as someone we could count as being on “our side,” the folk-side of the postmodern audience, they’d honor that conceit, even to the very last shot. 

They did not.

And yet… they absolutely did.

Which hurts and is fucked up, but also it’s fine. It’s fine.

In the end, the only “folk hero” (by which I mean the only force in the spn universe capable of warping the threads of the story with any permanence) was Castiel. When Castiel left the story (of his own volition, if you can find a comfortable layer of this meta pie for that concept to rest in,) the writers reverted to God Mode. Because Castiel had been their freedom, their mouthpiece, their avenue for improvisation, and so at the end of the series…

well, we got You changed me/I love you

   •

and then we got “Cas helped.”

So much has been written about that pivot point, but genuinely I don’t give a rat’s ass about rewrites, producers, the cutting room floor, or COVID. It exhausts me, and I’m not beholden to writing about spn for grades or notes or any kind of other bullshit that would oblige me to do research.

I feel like… we got what we got.

So let’s criticize some media.

The Paradox: 

Cas imploded— went from flexing the narrative from within to being narrated by a force from without. And I couldn’t bear to wrap my head around that for a long time. It seemed that this “twist” was beyond cruel. That’s what he got. Vanished and nerfed. For saying ily. That was what happened when he was finally in focus, fully revealed. He lost. He was relegated, along with Jack, to become heaven’s Two Men and a Truck.

It was a trick, the whole “Chuck is a writer” plotline. The Author regained control of the character that had previously been acting independently. Very Pirandellesque, very frustrating, ultimately even tragic.

So, yes, thematically and critically, having Castiel give up his Agency for Characterhood– giving up his ability to create plot for a role as a character in a plot— was ‘literary’ brilliance. It cemented his status as a grand fucker-upper of the show in a way that any show writer “authoring” a requited destiel ending would not and could not have done. Even Jack, I believe, had been “manipulated” into god-hood from within the narrative. Jack was Dabb’s grand metaphor, he was a product of Author. Castiel was… well, he was a chaos engine from the moment he walked through those barn doors. 

To seal the metaphor, the writers ended up living that truth.

I really don’t know if I’m being cogent about this. I’ve been struggling to turn this idea into words for, like, ONE THOUSAND DAYS.

The folk-vs-Author themes becoming A Thing in The Supernatural Show was like a chemical reaction: once the ions had bonded, the resultant compound could not be separated back into the different materials. What on that screen was Author, what was “author,” ie show writer, and what was text-experiencer-as-author? Where did the Sam-as-magician arc go, what were we supposed to do with the semi-metatextual moments that Mary had, having been brought back into the narrative by Amara, not Chuck? Everything got so out of control. Add in a smidgen of secret-sauce-TPTB possibly superseding the author/Author, and what you get is that ridiculous mess of a final two episodes.

It’s not about the rusty trombone or the butt hole pleasures. It’s about love. And kids.

Thank you, hon. It really is. (The above line was left in this doc by my spouse. It is a quote from The 40-Year-Old Virgin. I’ll allow it.)

Anyway. It was hard to see past the sound and the fury of it all. 

*****

I was feeling nostalgic several months ago and took a swim in my old meta tags; I found a gem from season…10? Idk and idc, but it was from “The Things We Left Behind.” 

I compared Claire to Sleeping Beauty (a tale that got a lot of use in later seasons) and wrote: “I tend to think that Castiel’s entire arc is about desperate and unintentionally misguided attempts to Change The Ending of whatever story he’s shown up in” and reading that again really kind of sucker-punched me.

‘We’re making it up as we go’ was the crux of Cas’ existence. Remember that half-related story in Baby wherein Cas got himself hitched to the Djinn queen? Remember when Jack died and the Empty came to claim him in Heaven and Cas made that terrible bargain? The last-minute attempt to gank Lucifer that actually got him killed and sent to The Empty?

Time and time again, Castiel’s go-to for “changing the narrative,” for advancing his plot, is self-sacrifice. In Chuck’s house against the archangel. The Leviathan disaster. Saying ‘yes’ to Lucifer. The Bargain for Jack in Heaven. And those times it worked out. Not without great pain for both the other characters and for the viewers, but he always came back. 

And with each return, his motivation became clearer. (Picture your favorite screencap of Dean here.)

Cas’ love grew, crystalized, and then disappeared, like frost on the windowpane of a house on fire.

If they had continued the CasDean storyline, it would have ultimately been The Author IRL writing/creating/manifesting/materializing ‘destiel.’ And so by putting a torch to all of that architecture, they essentially gave everything to us. Unspoilt. Fingerprints wiped. Serial numbers scratched away. Jailbroken. Whatever floats your boat. 

The confession was both affirmation and abnegation. Symbolically, The AuthorTM had washed his hands of it, but with destiel out of the picture, The Author also got his ending.

This is why “Cas helped” felt like a ‘fuck you.’ If Cas was out of the narrative, why did he come back as one of Heaven’s real estate developers? It did not fit. 

And yet. It did. Because Chuck won. Chuck, or everything that an Author represents in television land– TPTB, showrunner legacies, multiple producers, a chaotic and treacherous and politically messy writer’s room, multiple incompatible or unresolvable MOs and visions— all that ends up being packaged and presented as a single unerring vision.

So I have to admit, although I don’t have to do it with any ion of grace, that in the end it was pretty fucking smart.

Destiel is ours. Destiel is the folk ending. The Author never got to touch it, never so much as breathed on it, was so far divorced from the concept that the absence thereof going forward hit us like a truck full of bricks.

Yes, it hurts that Dean was just left on the floor until the credits rolled, that there were no final words, no ensuing acknowledgement. 

I’ll go so far outside the Text as to address the ‘Dean can’t reciprocate’ direction from one of the scripts:

If Dean had made a single move onscreen. Uttered a word. In Despair or either of the other two episodes.

Destiel would have been claimed by The Author. 

Anyway. I’ve been collecting posts now and again under the tag ‘the endless folklore of supernatural.’ For three years, the fandom has continued to loot, to ransack, to graffiti, to create and re-create, to burn, to mix, and to distill. 

There’s all kinds of things in that tag, it’s sort of a kitchen sink of everything that I thought was even tangentially relevant to folk-Destiel and the postmodern experience of creating text as a reader/viewer etc. 

We turned a literary story based on an urban folktale back into folklore. 

And so it goes.

I doubt I will do much more analysis of this show, even if it comes back, and I unfortunately can’t touch The Winchesters. But I can’t say I never will. I just thought three years, one thousand days, was a pretty good place to leave a marker on the trail.

—

Epilogue: About The Winchesters:

I did not finish watching The Winchesters because of something wildly, randomly, but highly personally triggering that was built into one of the episodes; however I am very sorry that it was canceled or possibly ironically lost to the WGA-SAGAFTRA strike of 2023.

“What is the maddest thing a man can do? Let himself die.” That’s the clue that leads Castiel to his hidden grace in a copy of The Man of LaMancha in 10.18 ‘The Book of the Damned,’ written by one Robbie Thompson.

I noticed from the get-go that Thompson gave Carlos the last name Cervantez. He was nodding to the self-immolation of the last cadre of writers of Supernatural and stating clearly that he was holding a pen, not a match.

Want some very fun and amusing and wildly pertinent facts about the Don Quixote books?

The narrative conceit of Don Quixote IN THE FIRST PLACE LOL is that Cervantes claims to have found a manuscript by a historian named Cide Hamete Benegeli and Cervantes thought the story was pretty neat, if a little rough; Cervantes retells the story for us from what he’d read by that author, distilling the “original” into the book we experience as Don Quixote the Man of La Mancha.

The final words of Cervantes’ Part One are “perhaps another will sing with a better pick.”

Later, someone publishing under the pseudonym Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda wrote their own part two, feeling that the original author was taking too long to get their ass in gear (or judging by their own preface they felt that Cervantes had not even done the original story justice in the first place. Which is A Mood.)

So when someone actually did have the audacity to run off with his characters and commit word crimes with them, Cervantes absolutely obliterated the dude in his own Part Two. 

Thompson left Spn after season eleven. But, lest someone think this is a commentary about fan fic, he also wrote the episode Fan Fiction. So anyway all the Cervantez-Cervantes business was certainly something.

[justmysicklypride]

1-44

1. Any scars?I mean I accidentally injure myself a lot so probs2. Self harmed?Idk3. Crush?No one rn4. Kissed anyone?Nop5. Coke or Pepsi?Pepsi but I like both6. Someone you hate?@2thingsfunny bc screw you for sending this ask (But for real, I don't hate anyone) 7. Best Friends?Don't have one 8. Have you ever done alcohol or drugs?Alcohol yes, drugs no9. What’s your dream job?Something that lets me earn money without having to do shit10. Ever been in love?Definitely not11. Last time you cried?None of your business12. Favorite color?Green13. Height?5'214. Birthday?Sometime in May15. Eye color?Dark brown16. Hair color?Black17. What do you love?Myself bc I'm conceited (and possibly Vic Fuentes, Yuri Plisetsky and Roy Mustang) 18. Obsession?Performing onstage 19. If you had one wish, what would it be?Endless money supply20. Do you love someone?Nope unless you mean like the general human love (like the "I love you as a human, from another human" kinda thing) but otherwise no21. Kiss or hug?Hug22. Nicknames people call you?Ying, Banter Express (I'm never gonna live that one down ngl), Pika, Sea Urchin, Holi... (I'm probably forgetting some but yeah)23. Favorite song?Right now, it's Cancer by mcr24. Favorite band?Ptv I guess25. Worst thing that has ever happened to you?Been born bc living and responsibilities suck26. Best thing that has ever happened to you?Idk? I mean there's a lot of good things that has happened but idk what the /best/ thing is27. Something you would change about yourself?Make myself taller28. Ever dated someone?No29. Worst mistake?I don't really have many regrets in regards to things like mistakes bc they happened for a reason and stuff y'know? Like paradoxes and timelines and shit so I can't really answer that30. Watch the movie or read the book?Book31. Ever had a heartbreak?Yes and no? I mean I get over things p quickly so I was like "oh that's sad" but then I was fine so idk32. Favorite show?Big Bang Theory33. Best day of your life?[Refer to question 26]34. Any talents?I have a photographic memory, I can play by ear and am p much self taught in piano, violin and guitar (with varying results), I can fix shit I guess idk, I doodle sometimes, I'm good at bullshitting/making things up on the spot which means I'm good at sarcastic remarks/comebacks, as well as whenever someone (like in school, and a teacher) asks me a question I can come up with something quickly even if I have no idea what I'm saying35. Do you wish you could ever start over?Yes and no bc there's a chance I could make things worse but also a chance I could make it better36. Any bad habits?I'm way too straightforward and always make sarcastic remarks about everything which a good amount of people don't appreciate37. Ever had a near death experience?I almost got hit by cars at a lot of different times38. Someone I can tell anything to?Nope39. Ever lost a loved one?My grandma died but I was a baby/young toddler at the time so I didn't really know her, my friend killed himself last year in December but we weren't that close so idk if he would be considered a loved one40. Do you believe in love?Definitely not41. Someone you hate/Dislike?[Refer to question 6]42. Are you okay?I already answered this question Jessie gosh43. Relationship status?Single bc all the guys I've met are more predictable and idiotic than a pile of sticks44. Selfie?https://www.google.com.au/search?q=trash%20can&tbm=isch