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dean winchester / tracy chapman “fast car” for spncarfuckersweek

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a-and i lo- i love you. of course i love you

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So, the toxicology report came back on Lance. Nothing. But the medical examiner said his body showed clear signs that he was killed by Belladonna.

bonus:

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there are a hundred different ways to interpret spn but i think if your interpretation runs contrary to "sam and dean and cas love each other" it's like. fundamentally flawed

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The final gif in the “do not tell me the lord works in mysterious ways” gif set of Cas looking back at Dean? Sent me to my KNEES? That LOOK? Holy shit. Words cannot describe how speechless I am. Cas was gonna absolutely Hail Mary on Dean the moment he talked back to him and I mean that in a very very good way.

(Gifs by @jenneferofjengaberg and from this post)

Oh, you mean this gif?

Bro. Mate. Buddy. Same. When I first saw that gif my eyebrows went UP and I might have watched it, like, 8 times in a row.

That is possibly THE bitchiest look we ever see from Cas, and ---- I like the way you put it. He was absolutely gonna Hail Mary on Dean. And I too mean that in a very good way.

But you know which one really gets me from this gifset? Its this one:

That is SUCH a human gesture. That's not angelic at all. Angels are stoic and implacable. Expressionless. They dont react to things with anything other than blank-faced emotionlessness. But this? This is a dude who's bitchy and exasperated and low on patience, and is showing it.

This.... is a dude who's spent enough time with humans that he's already picking up some of their behaviours. Now, I can't remember precisely which episode this is from, but its S4, and pretty early on in the piece, from what I remember. And Cas -- who got stabbed in the chest not all that long ago and who barely blinked in response -- is throwing his hands up in irritated exasperation. Already. He's been in contact with humans for five whole minutes and he's already absorbing and emulating their body language without even realising it.

(Theres also a meta to be had here on this action being something he must have picked up from the Winchesters, on account of them being the only humans he has contact with at this stage, and, more specifically, that he's picked up from Dean, because Sam was still wide eyed with awe in those early days over angels and doesn't start reacting like this until later, but Dean hit "irritated and frustrated" within about three seconds of meeting them, and Deans never been one to shield his outward reactions to being frustrated and irritated. So we can infer that this is a behaviour that Cas has picked up from Dean, specifically)

But the other thing is that its so natural. Recall, if you will, the "rusty" "finger quotes" moment from an episode that happens much later than this one. That moment is Cas consciously trying to emulate human behaviour/body language. He's he's trying it on with the same level of grace and ease as a child trying on their mother's high heels. The action doesn't fit him; he's deliberately mirroring human behaviour that he's seen, but its clumsy and awkward and lands oddly.

But this? This is effortless. This isn't him trying to react in a way a human would; this is just him reacting. And it just so happens that his automatic, thoughtless reaction is........... incredibly human. He's seen this behaviour and unconsciously adopted it. He doesn't even realise.

Tldr: Cas has spent all of five minutes with Dean and he's already unconsciously adopting and emulating his behaviour.

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Jensen Ackles on Fair Fight zoom call (Dec.8th 2020) 

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bingo card for tuesday’s live🙃 it’s either gonna be complete chaos or extremely uneventful

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15x18 Dean: struggles to process a lot from Cas, sits despondently on the floor before reality hits and he’s left sobbing, ignoring calls from Sam during apocalyptic circumstances when Sam could be in deep trouble

15x19 Dean: typical grieving behaviour, shortest possible factual explanation of Cas’ death during which he can’t make eye contact with anyone, gets a drink in his hand within the first few minutes of screentime, passes out drunk on the floor, something he hasn’t done since the last time Cas died, offers to kill himself and Sam in exchange for the world fixing and specifically Cas bringing back, runs desperately and without question to the door when he thinks it’s Cas, processes Cas’ parting speech and refuses to kill God because of it

15x20 Dean: CAR

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Cas. Cas, I hope you can hear me.

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love to wake up every single day and have my real life mental health negatively effected by a fucking tv show, even as I try to move on. this is so stupid. I can’t stop thinking about how much that finale just spat in the face of all the genuine, life-saving messages the show gave us in years previous. and in the middle of a fucking global pandemic where countless loss of life is a real and daily part of our experience. what the fuck.

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Misha is listening

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maybe I shouldn’t say this because I’m setting myself up to get crucified, but...y’all do know that some of us are...multishippers?

and even if multishippers didn’t exist, making this shitshow about ship vs ship is the stupidest fucking thing we could do, and probably what the network would prefer. turning on each other instead of the ones who gave us this crap.

I know there are some destiel shippers who are only interested in the canonization of the ship, and I know there are some wincest shippers who are not nice to misha and were pleased with the brothers-only ending, but far and away most of us--regardless of what we ship--recognized the finale as MASSIVELY disappointing and narratively flawed, who understand that shipping was a single element in a long line of bad writing/editing choices.

just...I’ve been here on tumblr since 2008 and I’ve been watching SPN since day one, I’m perfectly aware of all the nasty shit that’s gone on between different factions of the fandom. but, like, we call ourselves the “SPN family,” shouldn’t we try to recognize that the real enemy here is the network that fucked us over, instead of playing into their ready-made narrative of “a bunch of teenage girls on the internet are just fighting about which pair of middle-aged men should kiss?” fandoms already get so much disrespect in the media and dumb shit like screaming at each other, or turning on the actors and accusing them of everything from lying to homophobia just gives them more ammunition to vilify us and therefore disregard the important things we’re trying to express about representation (POC, women, queer, disabled, mentally ill, etc, etc) and about what content creators owe to their fans. 

just some food for thought.

(also saileen is a gr8 ship and eileen deserved so much better too and I’m barely seeing any talk about that.)

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I'm so frustrated, I feel UNHINGED. Genuinely do not know whether I am neck deep in a crazy conspiracy theory, an overly sensitive queer, or being gaslighted by a fucking television network. And it's exhausting to justify my heartache constantly to straight people and non-fans.

Furthermore I know people in my real life are sick of me talking about it, but I literally cannot make myself stop. I'm fixated and I desperately do not want to be lol. If there were some sort of resolution on the horizon, at least that would be something. But every day is just more questions and contradictions without answers. And all along feeling like I shouldn't be this invested in a fictional tv show.

On the other hand, endorphins? I dunno. It's all very confusing, and I'm sure it's not helped by this all happened mid-global pandemic/presidential election/holiday season.

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The sheer chaos of Supernatural.  Destiel happens in the middle of the election.  Putin rumors fly without a care in the world for the psychic damage it’s doing to us to process all of this at once.  We’re all in turbo hell with Cas just trying to deal with this.  It’s the greatest joy of our lives, but we’re all gay, so the minute we experience true joy at all these memes, we’re in turbo hell.  What’s going to happen next!? The next spn episode is absolutely nothing, the sheer amount of “NO REALLY what’s going to happen next!?” begins to fade.  Then wham it’s back with the most batshit ending possible.  Dean gets nailed to death.  DEAN GETS NAILED TO DEATH. Sam’s wig happens.  I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the reality of that.  The car goes to heaven but Cas is in hell.  No, wait, he’s in heaven, but he totally ghosted Dean after what happened.   There’s absolutely nobody there except Bobby, because fuck actually giving anyone an emotionally satisfying ending, except maybe a handful of Wincest shippers?  I don’t know.  Putin’s silence on the lack of Destiel in the finale is defeaning.  It’s the simultaneously the most awful and most hilarious ending in history.  It’s been a solid month of this.  Wait, is Jensen homophic or not, nobody knows.  He hated the ending, but who didn’t hate the ending.  Misha’s over there throwing salt apparently, too.  But the finale has aired.  Unless there’s a tell-all book in the next few days, we can rest now.  There’s peace now that we’re done.  We can lay our weary heads down.  The show is over, there’s no more to give.  We have found our way out of turbo hell and into heaven, but we’re going to ghost this series like Cas ducking out on Dean.  And then the Spanish dub is like, “Oh, no, there’s still gas in this tank yet.” and has requited Destiel in the dub.  We’re in The Mystery Spot, “The Heat of the Moment” is playing on loop in my head and it’s haunting me.  There’s probably a poodle around here somewhere.  The sheer chaos this show managed to sow in us, even if you weren’t a fan of the show, you likely have seen the memes and have a basic grasp of what’s going on.  The power of that.  We’re in hell, you’re laughing and we’re in hell, but maybe the real journey was the turbo hell we made all along.

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“Yo  a ti, Cas” Or how mexican dubbing gripped us tight and raised us from Despair.

Ok. So I promised a big meta about the dubbing thing and so while I don’t have all the answers YET, here’s a bit of perspective on the differences between Despair and The Truth.

First, a little background. I am a former professional dubbing translator. While I worked on anime series from Japanese to Spanish, rather than in live action ones from English to Spanish, the process is not that different. Also, I worked in Mexico, where Supernatural is dubbed, so that’s why I can make the assumptions I make. Finally, my specialization in college was translation from English to Spanish, so I guess I know what the hell I’m talking about.

So let’s start on HOW you translate something for a dub. Back in the day, you got a ton of VHS tapes with the episodes on them with time codes, and, if you were lucky, a shooting script. This is to say, it was not a transcript of the actual words said in the episode, but the script BEFORE the actors, directors, and everyone else had a hand on what was said and changed. And thus, anything adlibbed? Is not going to be in that script which, at least for the anime side of things? Was a nightmare as the script was usually “And here X actor can say whatever they want” and I had to go and listen to the scene ten thousand times. Now a days, you get either a video file or a streaming link, and sometimes, the shooting script. If you get a script, btw, you can also not get a script in the original language. I know that the person who had to translate Sprited Away to Spanish was working off a German script, not the Japanese one. So yeah, some things can be lost in translation there.

THEN you get to translate. BUT you can’t just translate word by word. You have to adapt it so that it will sound like something a person will say, and sometimes, literally is not the way to do it. And in particular, Mexican dubbing has a reputation to uphold as the “Neutral” dub that is send to most Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, so we can’t use certain words (I don’t have the list at hand, but I remember that I couldn’t use “Llanta” for Tire, and so I had to use “Neumatico”. And no “sweaters” or “hotcakes” or stuff like that), AND we have to match the lips of the original video. Which is like, the worst nightmare ever because of what we call “labiales”, that is to say, the letters where lips close.

I can’t tell you how much we all loved when a character gave a long winded speech with their back to the camera due to those damned closed lip letters.

All this is to say that sometimes, the line could be “We are all in this together for good or bad”, and the translation become something more like “Estamos en esto, por las buenas o las malas” (We’re on this, the good way or the bad way) or “Estamos juntos en las buenas y en las malas” (We’re together in the good and the bad), depending on the translator, dub director, and voice actor.

Depending on the client, that is, the original owner of the series, sometimes they will review the translation once it’s all dubbed and edited. I know that in the Avengers movie, a Disney rep was present on the cabin and forbade any changes from the script, which resulted on a couple of awkward lines in the end result. I don’t know if that’s the case for Supernatural, but I honestly doubt it. Still, translators can’t make huge changes for the dialogue. One couldn’t just ADD a relationship that wasn’t there, no matter what.

(As an aside, due to the very conservative mindset of some tv stations, it’s more common that gay relationships become more ambiguous, by changing “I love you” to “Te quiero” which can be more of a filial love than a romantic one. And well, that one case in Sailor Moon where a gay character was changed into a woman because the dub director honestly thought the character was a woman. But that was in the nineties)

Now, let’s go to how Castiel’s speech was translated.

The original, according to Superwiki, went like this:

Castiel:  You’re the most caring man on Earth. You are the most selfless, loving human being I will ever know. You know, ever since we met, ever since I pulled you out of Hell, knowing you has changed me. Because you cared, I cared. I cared about you. I cared about Sam. I cared about Jack. I cared about the whole world because of you. You changed me, Dean.

Dean: Why does this sound like a goodbye? Castiel: Because it is. I love you. Dean: Don’t do this, Cas. Cas.

And the translation, as it was aired, went like this (And people, you have no idea the war flashbacks transcribing this gave me, so I hope you appreciate it):

Castiel: Eres el hombre mas amoroso sobre la Tierra. Un hombre sin egoismo; el hombre mas generoso que haya visto, y que jamas vere. Sabes que desde que nos conocimos y desde que te saque del infierno, el conocerte me ha cambiado. Porque a ti te importa. Y a mi me importa. Me importas tu. Y me importa Sam, me importa Jack, me importa todo el mundo. Y fue por ti. Tu me cambiaste, Dean.

Dean: Porque suena esto a despedida?

Castiel: Porque asi fue. Te amo.

Dean: Yo a ti, Cas. (The empty appears and Billie opens the door) Cas…

Castiel: Adios Dean

Dean: No!

Ok. So… At first glance, they’re pretty much the same until we get to the I love you. BUT let’s dissect it a little bit.

Cas begins with a “Eres el hombre mas amoroso sobre la Tierra” which is not how I would’ve translated “The most caring man on Earth” since “caring” is more like “Cariñoso” rather than “amoroso” which would be “loving”, and yes, there’s a difference. Plus, “el hombre mas amoroso” sounds a bit clunky, so Personally, I’d have gone with “Eres el hombre mas cariñoso en la Tierra”, that would’ve given us more time for the rest of the speech, but I wonder if the translator choice for Amoroso instead was more due to the fact that “amor” (love) is more clearly romantic than “care” (cariño, in a sense, more on this later) and so it foreshadows the end.

Again, with the literal clunkyness we have “Un hombre sin egoismo” (A man without egoism) which sounds weird no matter what language you speak, and it should’ve been “Un hombre dadivoso” (A giving man) or “un hombre desinteresado” (a selfless man) although the second could be mis-construed as “a man without interests” so “dadivoso” would’ve better. But the more puzzling is that the Spanish separates the selfless man from the next, which is REALLY confusing as the English is “the most loving man”, which would be “el hombre mas amoroso” making it quite redundant, so the Spanish changes it to “the most generous man”, “el hombre mas generoso”. To add to this, Cas continues with “that I have seen and I will ever see” instead of “That I know”, because it’s far more poetic. And loving.

So yeah, Mexican Cas is basically saying that Dean Winchester is made of love and puppies.

Ahem.

The next part “You know, ever since I pulled you out of hell, you’ve changed me” is more or less word for word, and the only thing that changes is that the English sounds more like a question and the Spanish one is an affirmation. YOU KNOW that ever since I pulled you out of hell, you changed me.” Little verb tense play, that doesn’t change much except Cas’s resolution to say what he has to say.

And then we get to the part that made me squeal out loud. Because we go from

“Because you cared, I cared. I cared about you. I cared about Sam. I cared about Jack. I cared about the whole world because of you”

To

“Porque a ti te importa. Y a mi me importa. Me importas tu. Y me importa Sam, me importa Jack, me importa todo el mundo.” Which at first glance is the same, but NOPE.

First change: The original is in past tense “I cared”. Spanish version is in present tense: “I care”.

Which is a little non important thing except when you remember that simple present means “immutable absolute truth that won’t change with time”

Second, the choice of word for care.

I mentioned before that Care can be Cariño, as in filial, non romantic love (Or romantic love pet name, as it can also be Darling. It’s one of THOSE words). Other translations for care include “cuidado” (as in attention, concern, keeping, and worry), and of course “interesarse” (Which also can be care), “preocuparse” (care, bother, trouble, mind, fuss), and yes, “importar” but “importar” ONLY translates to English as a verb as “import”, “matter” “amount to” and notice how none of those words include “love”.

Mexican Cas is not saying “you love the world, and so I do”. Mexican Cas is saying “The world matters to you, and thus it matters to me, but my feelings for the World (and Sam, and Jack) are not in the same league as my feelings for you.”

And then Dean asks “Why does this sound like a Goodbye”, just like in English, in present tense…

And Mexican Cas replies in PAST tense. “Porque asi fue”. And THIS is important because it means that everything he said before WAS the goodbye, and not what comes next. All the rest? Is in the past. “Because it was”. Not “Because it IS”. And the next part? Is their future.

I love you.

Te amo.

Simple present. No ambiguity like “te quiero”. Spanish Te amo is for romantic love. Not brotherly, not family, not bro-mantic. ROMANTIC.

It’s like “I’m IN love with you” (Although that’d be “Estoy enamorado de ti” and I doubt that would’ve fit in the time Misha spoke)

And of course, the answer. “Yo a ti, Cas”. Not “And I, you” as I’ve seen it before (And I also thought it was, until transcribing the scene) but a simple “I, you, Cas.” Which ok, pretty cave-speak, but the meaning is pretty clear. Dean Winchester loves his gay angel.

It is also telling that the empty doesn’t appear until AFTER Dean confessed, so no, Mexican Cas is not “happy with the saying”, he had to get to the “happy with the having”.

And when Billy appears, it does seem as if he wants to say something more, but Cas is a love-sick selfsacrificing dumbass and so we all get our hearts broken.

I did get in contact with Dean Winchester’s mexican voice actor, and am waiting for answers to a small interview I did with him which includes the question “did that And I you, Cas” was in the script, and am trying to contact Castiel’s mexican voice actor. So I will be updating you on that. But I hope this clears up some of the questions about how Mexican dubbing made Destiel Canon :D

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#TheySilencedYou

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Spanish-language Supernatural be like...