#and like the fun for me is reading into subtext (intentional or not) and constructing this little narrative

[eddiediazenjoyer]

just thought of a world where eddies canon queer arc is just him realizing he’s gay and then finding joy or whatever . and that’s it. started snoring just thinking about it

[metanarrates]

Hello. Sorry if this a stupid question u can ignore if u want.

How can someone get better at media analysis? Besides obviously reading a lot.

Im asking this bc im in a point where im aware of my own lack of tools to analyze stories, but i don't know where to get them or how to get better in general. How did you learn to analyze media? There's any specific book, essay, author, etc that you recommend? Somewhere to start?

I'm asking you because you are genuinely the person who has the best takes on this site. Thank you for you work!

it sounds like a cop-out answer but it's always felt like a skill I acquired mostly thru reading a ton, and by paying a lot of attention in high school literature classes. because of that I can't promise that I'm necessarily equipped to be a good teacher or that i know good resources. HOWEVER! let me run some potential advice to you based on the shit i get a lot of mileage out of

first off, a lot of literary analysis is about pattern recognition! not just pattern recognition in-text, but out-of-text as well. how does this work relate to its genre? real-world history? does it have parallels between real-life situations? that kind of thing.

which is a big concept to just describe off the bat, so let me break it down further!

in literature, there is the concept of something called literary devices - they are some of the basic building blocks in how a story is delivered mechanically and via subtext. have you ever heard of a motif? that is a literary device. it's a pattern established in the text in order to further the storytelling! and here is a list of a ton of common literary devices - I'd recommend reading the article. it breaks down a lot of commonly used ones in prose and poetry and explains their usage.

personally, I don't find all the literary devices I've learned about in school to be the most useful to my analytical hobbies online. motifs, themes, and metaphors are useful and dissecting them can bring a lot to the table, but a lot of other devices are mostly like fun bonus trivia for me to notice when reading. however, memorizing those terms and trying to notice them in the things you read does have a distinct benefit - it encourages you to start noticing patterns, and to start thinking of the mechanical way a story is built. sure, thinking about how the prose is constructed might not help you understand the story much more, but it does make you start thinking about how things like prose contribute to the greater feeling of a piece, or how the formatting of a piece contributes to its overall narrative. you'll start developing this habit of picking out little things about a text, which is useful.

other forms of in-text pattern recognition can be about things like characterization! how does a character react to a certain situation? is it consistent with how they usually behave? what might that tell you about how they think? do they have tells that show when they're not being trustworthy? does their viewpoint always match what is happening on screen? what ideas do they have about how the world works? how are they influenced by other people in their lives? by social contexts that might exist? by situations that have affected them? (on that note, how do situations affect other situations?)

another one is just straight-up noticing themes in a work. is there a certain idea that keeps getting brought up? what is the work trying to say about that idea? if it's being brought up often, it's probably worth paying attention to!

that goes for any pattern, actually. if you notice something, it's worth thinking about why it might be there. try considering things like potential subtext, or what a technique might be trying to convey to a reader. even if you can't explain why every element of a text is there, you'll often gain something by trying to think about why something exists in a story.

^ sometimes the answer to that question is not always "because it's intentional" or even "because it was a good choice for the storytelling." authors frequently make choices that suck shit (I am a known complainer about choices that suck shit.) that's also worth thinking about. english classes won't encourage this line of thinking, because they're trying to get you to approach texts with intentional thought instead of writing them off. I appreciate that goal, genuinely, but I do think it hampers people's enthusiasm for analysis if they're not also being encouraged to analyze why they think something doesn't work well in a story. sometimes something sucks and it makes new students mad if they're not allowed to talk about it sucking! I'll get into that later - knowing how and why something doesn't work is also a valuable skill. being an informed and analytical hater will get you far in life.

so that's in-work literary analysis. id also recommend annotating your pages/pdfs or keeping a notebook if you want to close-read a work. keeping track of your thoughts while reading even if they're not "clever" or whatever encourages you to pay attention to a text and to draw patterns. it's very useful!

now, for out-of-work literary analysis! it's worth synthesizing something within its context. what social settings did this work come from? was it commenting on something in real life? is it responding to some aspects of history or current events? how does it relate to its genre? does it deviate from genre trends, commentate on them, or overall conform to its genre? where did the literary techniques it's using come from - does it have any big stylistic influences? is it referencing any other texts?

and if you don't know the answer to a bunch of these questions and want to know, RESEARCH IS YOUR FRIEND! look up historical events and social movements if you're reading a work from a place or time you're not familiar with. if you don't know much about a genre, look into what are considered common genre elements! see if you can find anyone talking about artistic movements, or read the texts that a work might be referencing! all of these things will give you a far more holistic view of a work.

as for your own personal reaction to & understanding of a work... so I've given the advice before that it's good to think about your own personal reactions to a story, and what you enjoy or dislike about it. while this is true that a lot of this is a baseline jumping-off point on how I personally conduct analysis, it's incomplete advice. you should not just be thinking about what you enjoy or dislike - you should also be thinking about why it works or doesn't work for you. if you've gotten a better grasp on story mechanics by practicing the types of pattern recognition i recognized above, you can start digging into how those storytelling techniques have affected you. did you enjoy this part of a story? what made it work well? what techniques built tension, or delivered well on conflict? what about if you thought it sucked? what aspects of storytelling might have failed?

sometimes the answer to this is highly subjective and personal. I'm slightly romance-averse because I am aromantic, so a lot of romance plots will simply bore me or actively annoy me. I try not to let that personal taste factor too much into serious critiques, though of course I will talk about why I find something boring and lament it wasn't done better lol. we're only human. just be aware of those personal taste quirks and factor them into analysis because it will help you be a bit more objective lol

but if it's not fully influenced by personal taste, you should get in the habit of building little theses about why a story affected you in a certain way. for example, "I felt bored and tired at this point in a plot, which may be due to poor pacing & handling of conflict." or "I felt excited at this point in the plot, because established tensions continued to get more complex and captured my interest." or "I liked this plot point because it iterated on an established theme in a way that brought interesting angles to how the story handled the theme." again, it's just a good way to think about how and why storytelling functions.

uh let's see what else. analysis is a collaborative activity! you can learn a lot from seeing how other people analyze! if you enjoy something a lot, try looking into scholarly articles on it, or youtube videos, or essays online! develop opinions also about how THOSE articles and essays etc conduct analysis, and why you might think those analyses are correct or incorrect! sometimes analyses suck shit and developing a counterargument will help you think harder about the topic in question! think about audience reactions and how those are created by the text! talk to friends! send asks to meta blogs you really like maybe sometimes

find angles of analysis that interest and excite you! if you're interested in feminist lenses on a work, or racial lenses, or philosophical lenses, look into how people conduct those sort of analyses on other works. (eg. search feminist analysis of hamlet, or something similar so you can learn how that style of analysis generally functions) and then try applying those lenses to the story you're looking at. a lot of analysts have a toolkit of lenses they tend to cycle through when approaching a new text - it might not be a bad idea to acquire a few favored lenses of your own.

also, most of my advice is literary advice, since you can broadly apply many skills you learn in literary analysis to any other form of storytelling, but if you're looking at another medium, like a game or cartoon, maybe look up some stuff about things like ludonarrative storytelling or visual storytelling! familiarizing yourself with the specific techniques common to a certain medium will only help you get better at understanding what you're seeing.

above all else, approach everything with intellectual curiosity and sincerity. even if you're sincerely curious about why something sucks, letting yourself gain information and potentially learning something new or being humbled in the process will help you grow. it's okay to not have all the answers, or to just be flat-out wrong sometimes. continuing to practice is a valuable intellectual pursuit even if it can mean feeling a tad stupid sometimes. don't be scared to ask questions. get comfortable sometimes with the fact that the answer you'll arrive at after a lot of thought and effort will be "I don't fully know." sometimes you don't know and that can be valuable in its own right!

thank you for the ask, and I hope you find this helpful!

[aroclawthornes]

Blooming Brilliant, an Aroace Willow Park Manifesto

[id: a gif of a heart locket opening. One half of the locket displays a picture of Willow Park from The Owl House, winking and making peace signs with her fingers. Blue and yellow stars surround her. The other half reads "willow park my beloved." /end id.]

Greetings! It’s me, User Aroclawthornes, and instead of working on all the time-sensitive homework I have I sat down and wrote an essay explaining why I think Willow Park OwlHouse could plausibly be read as aroace, and why it would be a thematically enriching interpretation. I’ve never written anything like this before, so it’s oddly formal, a little pretentious, and contains a lot of qualifying language, but I'm confident that it gets my point across. I’m not intending to speak over other interpretations of Willow or assert that it's the only true way to read her, but it's a headcanon I find interesting, and I think there’s a lot of evidence to back it up, between certain elements that Willow’s arc employs to some good old overanalysed symbolism. If you're aspec, I hope this is validating; if you're not, I hope it's interesting; if you don't care, scrolling past it is quick, free, and easy.

Some disclaimers on terminology: I’m speaking from an aroace perspective, and so when I say “aspec coding” I’m generally referring to both orientations as a catch-all - a lot of the coding surrounding Willow could go either way. I’m also going to be talking about commonly accepted “aspec” narratives, but I’m aware of the limitations of this insofar as my experiences are only a single facet of the diverse range of aspec people in this world, so anyone who wants to add or argue anything - respectfully - is encouraged to.

Analysis below the cut!

The Thing About Plants

I’m not going to pretend that an association with plants is historically indicative of aspec coding, because, frankly, there haven’t been enough aspec characters to establish it as a convention, and it’s also a fairly wide-reaching branch of symbolism. However, I am going to propose that lighthearted comparisons between asexual people and plants (however misguided on functions of plant reproduction they are) are fairly common elements of budding ace teenage humour, as are related quips about photosynthesis.

[id: a screenshot of Willow from "I Was A Teenage Abomination", depicting her sitting on the ground while casting a spell over a small, pink flower. /end id.]

I’m also not going to claim that the colour green Belongs To Aromantics, and therefore that All Plants Are Belong To Us, but in tandem with everything else I’m about to cover, the connection between Willow and plants seems like a fairly plausible nudge to a relatively common element of aspec humour.

“Half-a-witch” Willow and the Late Bloomer Experience

[id: a screenshot of Willow with glowing green eyes, from "I Was A Teenage Abomination", depicting her summoning a mess of thorned vines. /end id]

Willow is literally nicknamed “half-a-witch”, in reference to her supposedly incomplete state - this is a sentiment eerily reminiscent of the pressure to find one’s “other half”, which affects aspec - especially aromantic - people particularly profoundly. She’s considered a late bloomer, someone who hasn’t reached the societal milestones of growth at the expected age, and who is derided and considered immature as a result of this perceived failure. However, we quickly discover that Willow is, in fact, an exceptionally competent and powerful witch - taken out of the restricting frame of the Abominations track, she’s able to grow into her own, “complete” person, therefore proving that she was never really lacking in anything in the first place. Like real-life aroace people, she was perceived as limited and immature based on the expectations and judgements of other people, but Willow was never deficient in anything, least of all herself.

[id: a screenshot of Willow and Luz from "I Was A Teenage Abomination". They are holding hands - the former is laughing with her eyes closed, and the latter is grinning, while covered in abomination goop. /end id]

As far as symbolism goes...the track Willow is initially put in literally requires her to conjure up another humanoid entity, with the expectation that she will therefore prove herself to be a whole and mature person. Only with this ability, she’s told, will she be successful and happy as an adult. The shapelessness of her attempts at conjuring an abomination reinforces this connection in my mind - if I may reference this quote from Ducktales 2017‘s (absolutely stellar) A Nightmare On Killmotor Hill, in which the protagonists explore their own subconscious fears via. the dream realm, for a second:

��I think that’s supposed to be my romantic interest, but I’m too threatened by the concept, so it never takes shape.”

A lot of young aroace people find themselves in situations where they attempt to convince themself of their interest in someone in an attempt to be “normal,” or end up lying in response to family members or friends’ questions about crushes. While Willow’s abominations, first and foremost, represent the expectations from her school, classmates, and family to be a successful, “complete” witch with a profitable future, I think that with an aroace interpretation of Willow they could also very easily be read as representing some latent insecurities over a lack of attraction, or pressure to find a significant other.

(I’m not condemning Willow’s dads, by the way - they seem like perfectly lovely fellas, and I’m confident that they were doing what they thought was best for her. They’re certainly very quick to drop everything to assure her future in Escaping Expulsion, so obviously they care about their daughter very much.)

Greens, Blues, and Yellows: Colour-Coding Willow Park

A while back, I made this post comparing Willow’s palette to the aromantic and aroace flags:

[id: a screenshot of a post depicting the aromantic and aromantic asexual flags, colour-picked from images of Willow in her Hexside uniform and casual dress respectively - these are overlaid on top of the flags. The caption reads "observations on willow park". /end id.]

The grey-and-green aromantic flag has long been the accepted mainstream symbol of aromanticism, and, as the above post - and many others - demonstrate, Willow’s palette reflects it near-perfectly. This could easily be a coincidence, owing to the palette of the standard Hexside Plant Track uniform, as well as her hair and eye colours - which are obviously supposed to be reflective of her plant-related abilities. However, given how fond of employing hidden meanings The Owl House has shown itself to be, I don’t think it’s far-fetched to claim that there’s at least a chance that her palette was constructed with the flag in mind.

The latter is...a bit more problematic for me, although it’s fun to joke about. The blue-and-yellow aroace flag was only created in December 2018, relatively late into The Owl House’s initial production, and it’s still relatively obscure, although on the rise in popularity as the accepted aroace flag (I only recently started using it myself), so I don’t know if Willow’s casual wear is enough to verify the presence of any deliberate subtext. I think it’s a fun coincidence, however, and (as was pointed out in this post) it’s cool that these blue and yellow stars surrounding Willow occur in the same frame as Luz’s bisexual decor:

[id: a photograph of Luz, Gus, and Willow, all surrounding a disgruntled-looking Principal Bump. Luz has flowers in the colours of the bisexual flag decorating her hair, while Willow is surrounded by bright blue and yellow stars. /end id.]

also seen above: powerful bi/aspec solidarity

Conclusion:

Do I genuinely believe that Willow is being deliberately written this way? If you’d asked me, say, two months ago, I’d have said probably not - as far as queer representation in kids’ cartoons has come, it has a ways to go, and focusing on transgender characters seems like a more obvious (and equally invaluable) route to go down. I can name maybe five explicitly aspec characters off the top of my head, two of whom have been written as alloromantic and/or sexual in adaptations or continuations of the source material (I have...some grievances with 2005 Doctor Who). But the emergence of Raine, an explicitly nonbinary character on Disney Channel, has given me a little spark of hope, and so, even if it’s never confirmed, it’s comforting to be able to see a character with such strong elements of aspec coding and think to myself, just maybe, that there might be some intent behind it.

I also...really want to see interesting things done with Willow. We’re halfway through Season 2, and despite some promising setup for her arc in the Season 1 finale, she’s sort of been left by the wayside lately in favour of developing the more “plot-relevant” characters, such as Luz, Amity, Eda, and Hunter. Frankly, I think it’s a disservice to her Season 1 development, despite how much I adore all the characters I just listed - beyond any personal motivation, the prospect that Willow could be aroace adds a lot of sorely-sought depth to her, and, as detailed, a lot of this has already been set up in her earlier episodes. I just...I think it’d be neat. Rarely do you get a kids’ show so brazenly queer in its themes as Owl House, and aspec people deserve to be included in that.

Willow would also be great aroace representation because, well - those five or so aspec characters I mentioned being aware of are all white or “raceless” (...also written as white, basically), and so an aspec Asian character would be a really lovely step forward in this area. Additionally, all the characters I referred to are also conventionally skinny, and Willow is not only fat, but written in a way that doesn’t treat this feature as a caricature. People who are more knowledgeable on these topics than I are absolutely free to make additions, as is anyone who feels like I’ve left certain details out.

tl;dr: Willow’s association with plants could be read as a cool nod to aspec humour, her “late bloomer” narrative is eerily reminiscent of some common aspec experiences, her palette speaks for itself, and it’d be really cool if we could diversify the so-far fairly bland sphere of aspec representation.

I’m going to conclude this by linking Rose by The Oh Hellos, because they’re my favourite band, they share The Owl House’s initials, and I also think it’s a good Willow song. Peace out.

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

12, 14, 20, 23!!

12. What is the worst writing advice in your opinion?

Oh :) so I answered this for dialogue and was spicy but :) you want :) the tea :) so here’s a list :) I am salty :)

1. XYZ POV is easier than XYZ POV so avoid XYZ POV since it is harder

I say no! I am a POV hoe and I just need to say this statement is just way too unsophisticated to describe the complexity and nuances of POV. I often will see people talk about the limitations of POV (often in defense of another) which I think is so unproductive and backwards. The point of writing is to work around your limitations and tackle difficult tasks, not to tear down one tool in order to uplift another tool (yes POV is a tool. all tools do different things. one is not better than the other. would i say screwdriver is better than a hammer??? no?? they have?? different?? purposes??? this is not equally comparable). Of course it’s important to learn obvious limitations (limited POV is limited to one character etc, first person will use I versus other pronouns) before you use a point of view, but never let these limitations stop you from using a point of view/mistaking that these limitations make one POV harder than another.

All POVs have their unique difficulties that are also unique to a particular project that is also unique to the particular paragraph or sentence you’re writing (the Russian nesting dolls of POV). I see a lot that third person is the “reliable” point of view and is “easier” than first person so don’t try it if you’re just starting out (or the reverse). In reality, a third person narrator can be just as biased and unreliable as a first person narrator depending on the character its following/how the writer uses it, and also presents its own unique challenges. I’ve also learned that “third person is just a lot more distant than first” which I don’t think is doing these POVs justice. POV is SO complex. I’ve read first person narratives that are way more distant than intimate thirds--it is truly all in how a writer uses these tools, how they psychically position their character, the character’s diction (do they use contractions? formal language? informal?, speech/thought patterns (do they speak or think robotically or in long, fluid sentences), etc. If the advice is to “write one POV because it’s easier”, let’s revise it to “write one POV because it suits your work’s vision and you understand its mechanics will allow you to attain the intent for your piece versus another POV”.

2. Translate your work’s POV for a different effect

The reason I disagree vehemently with this advice is because it doesn’t work (IMO). POV is very complex--in my opinion, you cannot merely translate a piece of writing into a different POV and expect the result of your writing to be any different.

For example, I write, I walk to the store. I want bread because I am sad.

Then I translate that to:

She walks to the store. She wants bread because she is sad.

What actually changes here? Is there more distance from first to third? Do I know more about the character? In my opinion, no, this reads like I switched the I’s for She’s (which is what I did).

The reason this doesn’t work, is because POV is a part of narrative and character. You cannot strip POV from the narrative and expect the narrative to change at all--it is something built into it: the structure. To me, translating POV for a different effect (for example translating third person to first for more intimacy) is the equivalent of planting a tree and then realizing you wanted a pink tree so you spray paint it pink and then insist the species is different. Did the tree ACTUALLY change? No? It’s just the same tree with a coating. I think of translating POV as “coating” one POV in another. It creates a false sense of POV. A first person POV that was translated to third person without any other work to make the story work in the POV (merely pronouns were changed) is an inauthentic mode of representing that POV since IMO, POV is something that is intrinsic to a narrative and its structure--you can’t just separate them, rather you have to structurally re-organize how you go about representing that POV (how does distance change here? voice? subtext? immediacy? -- these are not things that occur by merely translating POV, but things that occur after hard work of actively incorporating them utilizing the POV as a tool rather than a final product). I’d revise this advice to: be intentional with POV.

3. Use Freytag’s triangle/pyramid to structure short fiction

I wrote an entire post on this already a few weeks ago about why I just don’t like traditional dramatic structure for representing the structure of short fiction, which is HERE so I won’t reiterate, but I just don’t think this mode of structure puts enough emphasis on a changing event. Not to mention that short stories are so short, I prefer to look at them as impressions or moments, rather than something that needs exposition, rising action, climax, denouement. Looking at structure in this way can often reinforce a beginner short fiction writer to clog their stories with unnecessary information. Short stories are so FAST. It is so overwhelming to look at a story as “so you gotta have exposition before your inciting incident, rising action before your climax, and then enough time for a denouement!” when your inciting incident can happen in the first sentence (no initial exposition) and you might not have a traditional “climax” but a subtle changing moment for the narrator (and no falling action at all). I honestly just don’t like this structure very much for teaching short fiction because of how little emphasis it puts on the inciting incident (the inciting incident doesn’t have a peak of it’s own, which I think it should because it is arguably the most important thing about a short story - without one, you have no story). I would revise this as: use Freytag’s triangle to understand a form of story structure and then analyze whether or not your work needs this structure or another structure to convey your intent. Kind of the same vibes I have with the Hero’s Journey.

14. Character names. How do you come up with them?

For the last few years I’ve gone full chaotic and just use random name generators and keep clicking until I see a name I like.

20. Allusions and references to other works. Thoughts? Do you like to use them?

I actually don’t love this technique very much (maybe because I always did this with Shakespeare references in my work when I was 13 because I thought Shakespeare references were ~edgy)! I think this can isolate readers who don’t understand a reference (especially if it’s very niche) but really that isn’t as much of a problem for me as I think it can date the work! A future story may call for it, but I personally don’t love allusions/references at all (I don’t know why?? I think I honestly turned myself off of them lol).

23. Are there any misconceptions people have about your writing?

I love this question! I think people think my details mean more than they actually do. I’ve noticed this a lot recently, and I think it’s because I write very detail-rich stories so the details may be assumed to be motifs when in reality I just love pretty words and detailed descriptions. I think I got a critique on my story recently asking if a particular food was symbolically important when really I was just going ham on the specificity oops !! That one is more fun for me though and can actually reveal unintentional patterning/symbolism (which I do?? a lot?? apparently I know nothing when I write). I also often get from my parents and others that assume my writing is hard to understand because of its genre (literary fiction). This applies to people who just don’t understand what literary fiction is when they read my work not constructive criticism of clarity problems (which I have! :)) When my parents read my work, they’re like “I can’t understand this, you are too complex for me, all of these words must have special meanings” and I’m like... Dad all it says is the character bought soymilk (they assume the writing must be harder to understand than it is because it is Literary Fiction (TM) when in reality it is just words)! This one is actually really cute when it comes from my parents though since they are like I INSIST I must read this in a FANCY way you write FANCY. It’s adorable! <3

[anothershadeofpurple]

As someone who was once a fan of the show, but gave up on it a long time ago ( mostly because it got really boring), I must say, your theories and speculation are so much fun to read. I don't see myself going back to it, even now as the finale is about to air; but thank you for your beautiful and hard work. I hope you enjoy analyzing everything about it. But in a way, I feel like you are much more intelligent than those writers will ever be. I honestly don't think they have your foresight.

Thanks! So I just read this quote.

“Every once in a while there would be a fan theory that was totally dead on. And other times it would be like, trust me, none of us are smart enough to come up with an idea like that.” ~ Eddy Kitsis

He’s talking about Lost, not about OUAT, but I thought it was funny that I read this just after getting your ask.

I’ve been told this a lot and I never quite know how to respond to it, because while some of my speculations are me showing a possibility of how to put things together and not all of them could possibly be intentional - nor do I think they are, but they are contemplations and interpretations I get something from… 

There are some things, like the basic premise of OperationOUT - we are in the world of the Collective Unconscious and Emma is our tour guide so to speak - are intentional on the part of the writers and explain the concept of the show. If I wasn’t on to something, OperationOUT would have stopped making sense, but two and a half years after, all the show has done is make it more and more clear that underneath the fairy tales is a medical whodunnit and a person working through her traumas. It’s a thematic exploration of character in a world constructed based on psychoanalytic theory. Which would seem far-fetched if it wasn’t for the fact that so many books on screenwriting and storytelling in general use Jung, Freud and the Hero’s Journey. And there are many books dedicated to fairy tale theory, symbolism and psychology. It’s not as big a leap as you may think. It’s just a world that allowed them to explore a bunch of different fairy tale characters within a bigger framework.

The interview below from The TV Showrunner’s Roadmap by Neil Landau suggests there is something larger to tap into.

AH: One of the greatest lessons that we took from Lost was that the most engaging mysteries are character mysteries. Why people do the things they do? Whether an audience knows it or not, that’s what I think they find most engaging. All the other mythological questions are cool and fun, but if they’re not attached to engaging character mysteries, then they’re not nearly as satisfying.           

EK: Exactly, so for me, one of my favorite scenes is when Emma wakes her son up—now she believes. Yes, it broke the curse, but that’s secondary to the fact that she saved her son’s life. To me, that is the perfect blend of character and mythology.            

NL: How much do you trust that your audience is going to be able to keep track of the mythology? Do you put little reminders in?            

EK: Sure. You try to build in little reminders, but ultimately, I feel like if you can create within the episode, an engaging story for that character in that episode, the audience will go along for the roller coaster ride—even if they don’t remember every detail. For the audience who wants to go closer, then you reward them by saying, “Look, this is how it fits into the larger tapestry.”           

NL: Audiences are really smart.            

EK: Yes, Lost was intricate, but go look on the blogs. Everyone got everything. Everything. People loved that the show wasn’t dumbing down for them. As long as you do what Adam said and give them something engaging, then they can enjoy it.

AH: Audiences crave meaning. They want things to matter. They want there to be something more to everyone. I think it’s that questioning nature that makes people like stories. If you can dig a little deeper and find something behind the story, I think that’s very rewarding and makes an audience want to see more.

What better way to do this than to have a bunch of characters play out the dramas of one person? And have those characters be characters in their own right?

So far I haven’t seen a meta like OperationOUT. I’m ready to have my mind blown by something else that encompasses the entire show. I’ve sat down and played my own devil’s advocate and wondered if there is another explanation for these same elements. There’s brilliant meta out there that deals with parts of the show, stuff I could never come up with, but nothing explains… the plot holes, the repetitiveness, the open-ended storytelling. The subtext - and I don’t mean just SQ - that is never made good on. Nothing makes sense of the whole thing besides that.

I just don’t buy that these writers are not smart. I think they don’t see the world the way I do and I would never have carried out this concept - nor would I have come up with it. I can’t take that credit, I really think I just observed something and put the pieces together.

It’s just strange to take a compliment you feel you don’t deserve, you know? I’m not trying to sound ungrateful, I just… I guess I care a lot about being understood. Or about not being misunderstood. So… my gratitude often comes out in longwinded explanations. Or this is just the weird objections of someone who doesn’t know how to take a compliment.

Okay, I’m gonna try again.

Thank you! Bot for reading and for taking the time to come and tell me! It’s so awesome that people actually read what I write, when I really think about it, I can’t always quite wrap my head around it. And then you get posts like this. :)

[uomo-accattivante]

I love this interview! 👍🏼

Writer/director Alex Garland set a high bar for himself with Ex Machina, his stellar 2015 directorial debut. That sci-fi movie had a lot on its mind, but his newest film, Annihilation, is far more cerebral. It’s one of the most challenging movies of the year: bold, beautiful, and haunting in a way that occasionally verges on being experimental.

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with Garland and actor Oscar Isaac, who plays a key role in the film, to talk to them about bringing this story to the big screen. We touched on the film’s behind-the-scenes clashes, whether or not Garland was concerned with audiences being able to keep up with what he’s doing in this movie, Isaac’s approach to his troubled character, and much more. Read our full Oscar Isaac and Alex Garland interview below.

Warning: Both Garland and Isaac occasionally drop spoilers in a couple of their responses. If you’re 100% spoiler-averse, I’d suggest bookmarking this and reading it after you see the film. Our interview follows.

***

For me, watching this movie was like walking through a beautiful nightmare. I have not read Jeff VanderMeer’s book yet, but can you tell me about how you crafted the visual aspects of being inside The Shimmer?

Isaac: Sure. (laughs)

Garland: (To Isaac) Go on, do it. (laughs) Yeah, we knew we wanted it to be beautiful and disturbing, often concurrently within the same shot. So really, what happened was, there’s a script. And in the script it’s straightforward in many respects, because it says, like, say, this scene, you’d say, ‘INTERIOR. HOTEL BAY. Three people sit around a coffee table.’ But then of course, production designers and set decorators need to make it something where you can stick a camera. So the script was disseminated among the collective, the group of people who work together, many of whom I’ve worked with for a long time – some of them twenty years. Me and [set decorator] Michelle Day and Mark [Digby] on the production design team, [producer] Andrew [Macdonald] – we’ve worked together on seven or eight movies, so we know each other backwards.

It all goes out, and really what happens is, a conversation starts. Everybody’s got a voice, and everybody’s chipping in, and an organic, evolutionary process begins and it doesn’t really stop. It doesn’t really stop until the picture’s locked. Right in the 59th minute of the twelfth hour, or whatever the right thing to say is, in the grade, these things are being affected hugely. How much do you saturate the colors? Where do you choose to desaturate? Where do you choose to put a bright point in the screen and do we have a vignette on the shot to focus? So it never really stops. It’s a big collective all working together and getting there organically.

Isaac: But at the same time, nudging it towards ‘What’s most disturbing?’ As an example, without trying to give away too much stuff, the ‘fight’ scene at the end between the alien and Lena. I was there for a lot of those rehearsals, and just seeing – it’s such an ephemeral thing. Why is it more disturbing if she’s less aggressive here, but pushing into her? Why is it weirder if this movement happens as opposed to this movement? It’s hard to say why, but it’s one of those things where we wouldn’t think of it, but then (nods to Garland) you’d suggest it, and suddenly we were all like, ‘Yep. That’s definitely creepier.’ Something as subtle as, this alien being, all it is is intention. So seeing the physicality of that idea happen. The collaborative part is, you say that, and then we have to interpret that. How do you physicalize just intention? Then somewhere that alchemy comes together, and everyone gets on the same page and creates something really crazy.

By the end, Kane turns out to be unlike any character you’ve played before. But in the beginning, I was noticing a couple of similarities to the soldier you voice in the Homecoming podcast. Did you think about that character at all when you were making this?

Isaac: Oh, is that right? No, I didn’t. That one, he was a private. Sure, he had kind of gone through some weird stuff, but I think with that one, there was a bit of an innocence. Kane maybe has…it’s a little bit of a different thing. There’s a deeper, darker bubbling thing underneath him.

As the film goes on, it feels increasingly impressionistic and almost experimental at certain points. Were you worried at all about audiences not being able to keep up?

Garland: No. Not really. That’s not to say there’s anything to do with ignoring audiences. It’s not that. But it has to do with what you’re concerned with in relation to the audience, you know? For example, the kind of area where I’d think about it a lot would be to do with strangeness. So the film was, in some ways, conceived backwards. There was this crucial aspect to me that began as Natalie’s character is walking along the beach, and then contains the sequence within a lighthouse. I knew that was the goal, and I knew that I wanted us collectively to achieve a particular level of strangeness and beauty and oddness. Things like the dance sequence that Oscar was just alluding to. It needed to have information, but not information that was stated. It was more inferred. They key thing would be about strangeness, right? What it feels like to watch it. The crucial thing is what would it feel like? So then, you have to think, ‘How do you construct feeling?’

One of them, say in the case of strangeness, is that there’s a diminishing return with it. So if you begin strange, by the time you get to the end strange, you’ve got acclimatized to it and you’ve lost the thing that you’re shooting for. So that created a built-in structure, which on set and in pre-production, we used to call ‘suburbia to psychedelia,’ because it sounds neat and it’s a nice reduction. It’s a nice sound byte, isn’t it? But it’s got truth in it. Because if you start in suburbia, you start in our world, it gives you the chance of getting truly strange, in a way. So everything was sort of structured that way.

Along those same lines, there were some heavily publicized behind-the-scenes clashes about the making of this movie. I know you’re someone who’s not afraid to speak your mind, so I’m just wondering if you’re pleased with how it all turned out.

Garland: I only really give a shit about the film, OK? That’s actually all I care about. So as long as the film honors the intent of the collective, I’m basically happy. That’s what I care about. I think we did everything we could, and I’m proud of it, and I love it, so I’m fine with it.

I’m curious about your process. What kinds of conversations did you guys have about Kane, and was there a moment when you were developing your take on him where everything clicked for you?

Isaac: (Jokingly) Yeah, I had it all figured out, and I walked in and said, ‘Shut up. Sit down. And point the camera at this.’ (points at his own face)

Garland: He set the lens. There was some discussion about the lighting, but Oscar won. That’s the way it goes.

Isaac: (laughs) Yeah, we talked. That’s what we do. We like to talk a lot and we think about things in similar ways, I like to think, and we have a similar sense of humor. So I think my first question was, ‘I know it’s not Predator with girls, but tell me why it’s not Predator with girls.’ No, I’m kidding. I just read it and thought it was fascinating and thought it was so strange and so beautiful, and I wanted to play this character. What was so cool is that he has all this stuff bubbling underneath, as I was saying, so that’s what was most interesting to me. There was almost a Pinter-esque quality to it, where there’s all these pauses and all of this subtext that’s just emanating out of these two people. But they don’t say it. Like Alex said, it’s inferred. So we spoke a lot about that. ‘What is it that’s happening underneath, and what is the nature of this relationship? What do I know now that I’m not saying? In this scene, now what do I know? What does she know?’ Trying to map those things out. Everything had a palpable energy between the characters.

Then coming up with different ideas: ‘Where might he be from? What if I try making his voice sound a little like this? What do you think about that?’ And then at the end, just the nature of the energy of how do we do this speech at the end that’s being filmed? What’s the reason we’re filming it? What’s the intent of it? Getting very specific about that stuff. That’s what a lot of it felt like. And with Alex, it always feels like we’re building a motorcycle together, or building a car. We’re just kind of handing each other the tools and making it together. That’s what’s really fun about it.

Garland: It was actually all built backwards. So for me, for what it’s worth, the whole thing was about earning the speech that Kane says at the end in this locked off shot that just sits there and lets him do it. It’s about the words that are contained there and the things he’s expressing there. Everything else is in support of that moment. The whole film actually is in support of the last thirty minutes, basically. Which sounds like a sort of stupid thing to say, because truly all films are. But actually that’s not exactly true. In a way, every single thing that happens is just inching your way towards this strange metaphysical sequence. And having it not as just abstract firework fun, but having content.

Isaac: Or pain. I think what the last thirty minutes are just this metaphysical pain and despair in some ways.

Garland:(To Oscar, jokingly) That’s how you’re choosing to sell the movie? Are you out of your fucking mind?

Isaac: Let’s go back to Predator with girls. Predator with girls! (laughs)

Garland: It’s true, though. It’s true.

With this and Star Wars, you’re a part of two big recent sci-fi movies that proudly feature women at the forefront of the cast, which is really cool. I know you’re separated from a lot of the ensemble here, but tell me about working with Natalie on this.

Isaac: I was shooting Star Wars at the exact same time, too, so that was a wild thing to –

Wait, you were jumping back and forth between sets?

Isaac: It was literally the same studio.

Oh, cool.

Isaac: So some days I would walk from – I think I still used my trailer from Star Wars…

Garland: Yeah, we didn’t have trailers. But there were days where you were, on the same day, shooting both things.

Isaac: Yeah, there were. I would shoot something in the morning and then have a little bit of down time and then switch it up. So that was wild.

Garland: We’d catch him at his lunch break and say, ‘We’ve got to shoot this now!’ (laughs)

Isaac: I think I visited, too, still dressed up as Poe on the set.

Garland:Yeah, totally.

Isaac: It was pretty wild. It reminded me a little of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, when he’s on the lot and you see all the different actors walking around. There was something very classic about it. So there was very little time, and not a lot of rehearsal time, and Natalie and I didn’t know each other. It happens in movies, obviously – you have to suddenly be very intimate with someone very quickly. I think the fact that she was willing to trust me and I was trusting her, and we just went in there and did it and tried to find a real intimacy. Which is always a weird, awkward, strange thing to do suddenly in front of a bunch of people. But we found that, and I really enjoyed those scenes with her. She is very focused, but also in those scenes, very emotionally available as well, so I really enjoyed that.

Garland: It makes me want to name-check Rian [Johnson] and Ram [Bergman], the producer on Star Wars [The Last Jedi]. I think because they come from an indie film background, here they are making like the biggest movie of all time, and they were unbelievably helpful and accommodating to us. And they really didn’t have to be at all. Most big productions would not even dream of doing that. And they went out of their way – whilst making fucking Star Wars, for Christ’s sake – to help this really small movie next door. It was very cool and I’m truly grateful for it, actually.

Making a movie with all female protagonists almost feels like a political statement today. Was that something that specifically drew you to this?

Garland: I really just want to dodge that question.

Really?

Garland: Yeah. The answer that I’m saying – which I’ve said before, so I apologize for it, but I’m in a position where this is the answer that I have – is that the previous film that Oscar and I worked on together [Ex Machina] had within it a very conscious set of deliberate arguments which related to gender and objectification. As well as other stuff about sentience and AI and all of that kind of thing. And what interested me about this project was the absence of an argument. So if I now talk about that, I dismantle the absence of the argument. So I’d just like to leave it at that.

Understood. You wrote this long before the Times Up and Me Too movements came to light, and I certainly don’t want you to explain the ending of your movie, but there’s some symbolism and imagery at the end that could be interpreted as being aligned with those causes. Does the film feel even more relevant now than when you wrote it, considering what’s going on culturally?

Garland: No, it doesn’t. I can’t lay claim to that. I wouldn’t want to. For me, it was a film, internally – by the way, let me just say, any time you present a narrative, in a book or a film or whatever the fuck it is, what is really happening is that fifty percent of the narrative is not provided by you. It’s provided by the subjective nature of the person receiving the narrative. So they fill in gaps, they provide stuff, they create agendas, whatever it happens to be. That is not problematic to me, that is just in the nature of the job. Right? For me, personally – so it doesn’t have to be for you – in as much as it is about something, which it is, to me, it is about the nature of self-destruction. It was about an observation I made, which is that everybody appears to be self-destructive. Some people are very obviously self-destructive because they’re addicted to heroin or alcohol or they act in a psychotic way or whatever, and they offer their self-destruction to you. Other people are very comfortable in their own skin, and they’ve got a fantastic job and a fantastic life and everything seems to be bulletproof. They feel like they’ve sort of cracked something about life. But then when you get to know them, you discover odd bits of self-destruction, which then become significant bits of self-destruction. It was the universality of it, that even the people who’d cracked it all had not cracked it all. And then I started trying to think –

Isaac: Where does it come from?

Garland: Where does it come from? Why is it that you have a really good marriage and you dismantle it? Why do you have a really good friendship and you dismantle it? Why do you have a really good job and you dismantle it? Whatever it happens to be. And the film essentially presents that question and an answer to that question by inference. To me, that is what it’s about.

*****

Annihilation hits theaters on February 23, 2018.

[elizabethrobertajones]

I think Destiel is the show's end game but they want it to be the very last thing. So they set up the story around season 8/9 because they didn't really know if they were gonna get picked up and they had to dial it back up when it continued. Now it started again during season 12 knowing the show is gonna end in the next couple of years for sure without it being cancelled. Maybe? Thoughts? Love your meta!

Hi! Love you too!

I weirdly had a conversation about this yesterday in private so I’ve managed to actually coalesce some thoughts about this… Lots of thoughts.

Seeing as I joined fandom in the end of season 9, I basically joined a fandom that had been pretty hurt by the spec that season 8 might have been endgame if the show was cancelled… Obviously we’re never going to get any sort of statement on it until after we know the definitive line on whatever else they were doing with Destiel after the point it matters, so it’s going to be small potatoes if it was or not. 

But I don’t particularly think that it actually WAS - and the different way Cas, and his and Dean’s relationship, was portrayed in season 8 immediately threw a whole bunch of fuel on the fire but it was shocking in a way that it was being given attention rather than specifically being romantic, and it’s hard to tell the two apart, especially when you’re looking in the subtext and seeing romantic stuff, which when you’re a starving shipper suddenly seems like a feast of both charged interaction AND the old subtext, which is suddenly slathered all over everything when Cas is a major part of Dean’s emotional arc for the first time (in a good way). 

(LOTS more under the cut)

Whether there was an intent or not, season 8 changed the game and without knowing what they were doing or where it would lead (aka hello I am Hindsight from the future) it would look pretty shocking and suggestive that something might come of it. Because I know I’d flip out in the same scenario just from wondering, and kind of feel like I’m in the same place after season 12, because again it feels like the game changed.

I’m trying hard not to leap to conclusions to be honest, and I do *not* want to be in the middle of it which is partially why I’ve reacted so strongly to twice in the last month people using me as some sort of fandom leader whose words mean more than others’, because I really really hope not and I wish I didn’t have to disclaimer it because it makes my ego look enormous but on the other hand twice in a month is a pretty frightening wake up call about how people see me?

So. 

Even if it was written with intent in season 8, we’re so far past the point that if that was their plan they could have delayed it over and over without doing something substantial *in Carver era* about it, that it twists the fandom narrative about this into the show being very cruel. This narrative is a great one for people who feel wanky, to feel like they’ve got justified reasons to be upset that it didn’t happen and that they’re getting strung along. I’m not saying everyone who thinks that Destiel was slated to go canon in season 8 does, but it is a great narrative for those who do to feel somewhat certain the show is deliberately dangling and then holding back on Destiel, because nothing bonds a community like feeling as if some more important group of people is mistreating them. Justified rage and all that. If you don’t like the show because you feel it got kinda shitty over the last few years but instead need to take it as a personal betrayal in order to break up with the show, it’s a great thing to get riled up about. The bait and switch seems clear to them, and there’s been many discussions of the way they seem to build up only to yank away, in every season since 8. And part of the build up is meta writers freaking out about how canon it all looks and being naturally excited to see what happens with the story they’ve been reading positively (and this isn’t our fault, though some people think we’re complicit in queerbaiting just by wanting to analyse the show and give any credit to teasing the ship by pointing out its structural integrity).

Some people who see the idea it was going to be canon in season 8 positively also tell this as a way of making themselves feel good that it has been on the books and therefore has a chance of going canon in the future. 

You can get the same story of the show’s intent in two different places, but the ONLY way we can ever construct this narrative is by reading into the show and trying to guess at what they’re doing because they’ve never admitted to writing a Destiel narrative. 

A side effect of the 9x03 wank was a bemused message from someone waaaay up the chain and out of the writers’ room, who said they’d never been pitched the story. I’m inclined to believe that, because I don’t believe in any conspiracy except for the NHI (shh don’t ask if you don’t remember :P), meaning that at no point in season 8 was it EVER anything more than subtextual fun from the writers among themselves. And nothing that was on the books at least in the first half of season 9. Like, at the most generous thought that it might be later if you REALLY want to go hard on theorising about what they’re up to, it wasn’t at that point. 

(The NHI sprang from 10x10 so I’m covered there.)

(Also if you see people handwave 9x03′s wank as a conspiracy to cover it up and that it HAD been real but NDAs mean they’d say it wasn’t, don’t use a pinch of salt, put a whole salt circle around that thought and run away.)

Another thing about this sort of expectation or narrative is that I feel the recent meta writers wank has made it really obvious there’s still people in fandom hanging on for fanon content and character stanning who really don’t need more canon to unfurl, ever, and are only going to get more angry about it, and were hurt at some point in one of these mass-wanks about the show, probably one of these early positivity bubble bursts, but who nevertheless feel like meta still has some sort of mystical power or social influence or… something or other… that from how it sounds, seems like they were once all in on the “it should be canon at the end of season 8″ hype or equivalent for their season, and of course were shattered when it didn’t happen. 

And if season 8 didn’t finish them off, later things did - season 9 was a horrific obstacle course even just with 9x03′s wank and then JIB at the end of the year and the “we don’t play it that way” comment. Which I am contractually obliged to repeat every time I quote Jensen to give context of “as in a secret relationship where they’ve been fucking off screen as per whatever dirty fanart he was shown to get the concept of what he thought Destiel was”

I am fairly certain that season 8 hype was partially manufactured (a Known Fandom Cultist was in the mix and the heady combination of a new big fandom flooding tumblr from Netflix and all the season 8 subtext AND the chance for attention and followers is a wonderful mix for exploitation when the fandom hasn’t been hurt before from this particular direction), and definitely this hype was used to whip the fandom up into a frenzy of expectation that a lot of people either innocently repeated or expanded on in their own meta because the idea sounded interesting or halfway plausible based on their theories (as it was a positive growth of Destiel subtext and narrative ANYWAY) or they thought we deserved the best world of the show, or else they weren’t meta writers and just read it and bought into it and allowed this narrative to have *incredible* power over them by putting all their thoughts into someone else’s basket, and sharing the ideas and being excited in gifsets and fic and other fandom contributions for how the show had become a romance overnight.

(Spoilers: it hadn’t.) 

I don’t like theories which use abstract examples to hold up to the show like basic plot structures, character arc templates, etc, pretty much exactly for this reason, because you can ONLY apply those as analysis backwards on finished arcs without immediately being wrong about something, and that’s a generous thought for if you’re not trying to whip up a frenzy of enthusiasm for fake emotional currency of Tumblr followers :P Essentially I have no problem with meta written about this sort of thing so long as it isn’t “they ARE using this trope so this HAS TO MEAN that this WILL happen,” or “they ARE employing such and such narrative structure and that means they WILL do this next step exactly as it says here” 

… I could crack open my copy of The Seven Basic Plots right, now, pick one at random, apply it to the season 13 spoilers with dead certainty that it all adds up to Destiel and cash in my entire reputation on a 1/7 chance of being utterly right that the structure will look like it’s going that way to the letter, and hope I’d only lose a third of my new followers in the resulting storm when I’m not right about the pay off :P 

If you just think it’s interesting and might be USEFUL to try and UNDERSTAND what will happen next, then by all means as long as you’re not using it and hoping that it sounds academic will mean people without a good grounding in rationalising these things for themselves will just assume you’re smart and know what you’re talking about. And then you use it to push home ideas which you can’t possibly know like that Destiel is being built up to go canon at the end of the season/endgame or whatever, some people will go right along with it because it’s tantalising.

Whatever happened, though, I have heard more than enough since joining fandom about the end of season 8 wank and people quitting the fandom and basically the first positivity bubble shattering (over an episode I feel does no harm and considerable good to the ship without making it canon), so that even before season 9 the wank and bitterness about many things such as the disproportionate freak out about Tracey Bell being a love interest or rumours spread that April or Nora would be multi-episode love interests for Cas, had everyone behaving like the way fandom does before every season or character announcement now. Which is to get disproportionately upset about things which have not yet happened, because they’re already feeling *so hurt* by the things which have, for not living up to the expectations, that surely everything is IT, the END, the thing that will kill Destiel out of the show forever. Every female character is a threat and everyone’s always certain the show is out to damage the thing they love just out of spite.

(I know some people will pop up like, it’s not about the ship, it’s about Cas! but I really can not help feeling that it’s just a sliding of feelings from the ship, because of feeling Dean was horrible to Cas over season 9 and 10 for example, to being over-protective of Cas in particular, and, like, I get it. I do. I don’t feel it that way because I never got invested in any particular pay off that I then didn’t feel happened, and that by whatever point, Cas should be living with them or getting his own episodes on the regular or that Dean should have apologised for whatever, or that they should now be dating. I have a personal investment in this tailored to look for positive things and see good changes like Cas getting more episodes ABOUT him, a strong place in the narrative, a in-depth personal arc, and love from the cast and show. For others, almost nothing will go far enough towards what they want, so even these huge positive changes from what I experienced in season 10 as a Cas fan will get over the hurdle.)

I also think there’s a serious secondary problem that for some people the promise of “it’s going canon at the end of season 8″ turned into “well of course it got renewed so it’ll be whenever the show ends INSTEAD” but carried on essentially giving the same super positive message that Destiel was absolutely 100% on the mind of all the writers all the time as the overall conclusion of the character arc. Which is something you can almost never tell when people write about it and I think again is more like an idea that moved into general conversation so I don’t think there’s really anyone out there I encounter who is angling for anything. But it can be misleading about the concept that just because meta writers find a consistent narrative and are optimistic it will continue and be honoured through the show, that we’re saying that there’s a guaranteed endgame and everyone ought to hang onto it. 

Honestly if you can’t hack the wait, I’d much rather people went full-fanon, didn’t cast opinions on the show at all, put away the negativity in favour of enjoying the stuff they like - fics, art, canon-free headcanons, etc, and when the end of the show came, if they even halfway liked the sound of what people were saying about it, went and re-watched from the start to re-immerse themselves and try a positive take on it knowing what they were in for, canon or not. I’ve stopped watching several times out of DGAF feelings towards the show (weird dog episodes :|) and come back and again I can’t really claim to have the most healthy attitude, everyone follow my lead, but I do think I can be objective and careful about how I engage with it and try and not get sucked into negativity OR positivity rollercoasters that only go to hurt town. >.> 

I mean, I honestly feel in season 12, it’s the first time we’ve had an entire writers’ room of writers I even think *know* about it as a solid narrative construct (and yes I am including Buckleming because they DO write Destiel into the show, they just also write all the racism and rape and whatever else in along with it :P) Between the scattered application of serious subtext through Carver era and the approach to canon they occasionally winked at, they never seemed particularly competent at the work needed to actually make Destiel canon if it was EVER supposed to be building up towards it. I think the bait and switch yank away is too clever for them and their handling of the narrative :P I don’t think they’re stupid but, NHI aside, they are not up for complicated conspiracies.

To be serious, though… I know people say they saw it all the time from space, and their casual viewer mom did etc, but the fact remains they never wrote a CLEAR romance narrative except for the splitting Dean and Cas at the start of season 10 and *paralleling* their narratives with Crowley and Hannah, while everything else has been situational tropes or strong emotional narratives which could work either way. A slow burn romance in a show that will admit it’s one will use many similar tropes but also ones which expressly make it a romance that everyone’s supposed to read as happening, usually quite corny, on the nose ones, and Destiel has more of the subtextual or emotionally bonding romantic tropes than like… anything else ever… but very few of the “oops walked in on him changing, let me just accidentally turn around again on the way out the door” type nonsense that broadcasts to people on Mars that they’re going to bang, and probably soon. I say very few because there’s little outliers like the boner scene or “i can’t let you do this” which are copy pasted from corny romance, but of ALL the Destiel that happened in season 12, ONLY the mixtape crosses boundaries like that and even so people CAN argue it’s platonic love, and the only thing we can really say is nonsense is that it’s not conveying any love at all. 

Something like Crowley mourning his romance with demon!Dean and looking at photos to some sort of “all by myself” level song was very clearly a rom com trope and the one that for me sealed the deal that Drowley was intentionally meant to be seen in canon. Something like Dean and Aaron is disproportionately powerful because their main interpersonal interaction was literally described as being something from a rom com BY the director’s commentary :P Destiel is a 10 year old behemoth, largely NOT defined by rom com tropes, but with a few peppered here and there in a low enough concentration that it’s not the absolute norm to assume it’s going to happen.

But in season 12, like in season 8, Cas got a LOT of attention in the story, a good chunk of that was through Dean because Dean’s got the old profound bond, and Cas and Dean are intrinsically and inseparably connected in some ways that no amount of bro-ing up with Sam or forging a tentative friendship with Mary will do to NOT make it seem like Cas is talking to Dean first and foremost, especially when all 3 Winchesters pile through the door and Cas just says “Dean” :P 

This season has a STRONG narrative about Cas’s relationship to the Winchesters and through Dean in particular, and there’s one of the stand out romantic tropes in basically ever in this season, along with several other hallmarks of the things that made season 8 such fertile ground. 

12x10 had the crypt scene rehash to hopefully end these loops around Dean and Cas with the positive conclusion it needed, and a lot of the meta about season 8 flipped out about the human/supernatural relationships (with Charlie and Gilda foreshadowing the crypt scene perfectly, because Robbie) so 12x10 filled in a missing link from season 8, of a story about how angels might be into humans too. 

And it was the season with Aaron which was Dean’s personal stand out bi moment which made a lot of people feel the show was going to start taking it seriously on his behalf, and season 12 had Aaron back, even if it was only one scene, it was a reminder he existed and the main interesting context for most people was him and Dean. 

And season 8 had the angel fall spell, including the cupid nonsense in 8x23, and the nephilim which was the early forerunner of the suggestion of 12x10, that angels and humans can couple up, while in season 12 the angel fall spell was directly mentioned, 12x15 mirrored the first Hell trial, nephilim were back, and Crowley offered to close the gates of Hell. So season 8′s mytharc was slathered all over the season. 

And in the crypt scene Dean was supposed to say “I love you” and in 12x12 they found a way to make Cas say it instead, which I agree was the more logical progression, that Cas would crack first :P 

Anyway, season 8 was all over this season but season 12 felt amped up and going places season 8 didn’t, going several steps further and as I’ve said before to go straight from season 8 meta mindset to season 12, would utterly blow your mind. 

BUT to go right back to the start, I don’t think season 8 was building to canon Destiel ever, not even as a failsafe for cancelleation. I don’t think that the planned “I love you” was going to do more than make the fight about canon that much more bloody if it aired and doesn’t help even without it airing, knowing it was going to happen. Jensen was the one who argued it away, and they agreed for character reasons supposedly, so there was no meddling from above to say, wait, hit the brakes, we can’t barrel right into the canon build up.

I think season 8 was supposed to be used to bring Cas back in from the cold - kind of literally with using Purgatory to stagger his return - because after season 6 & 7 showing Dean cared about him in ANY way was important, and to establish that whatever Cas had done, Dean would forgive and want to rescue him and have him back in the family. I don’t think season 8 is a clean slate for Cas despite his attempt to put on the old uniform and carve a new path for himself in like… 2 episodes after he got back while he was still being fucked around with by Heaven unknowingly to him. He’s still burdened with guilt, and if anything, the season renewal is probably more to blame for stretching out Dean forgiving him than smooching him, with a lil more manufactured drama and Dean lashing out at him for season 6 & 7 in 8x22. He lashes out again in 9x22, but by season 10 he’s pretty much moved on, to be angry about like… everything else to push Cas away at the end of the season. I guess they’re living in the moment rather than the past by 10x22 :P Pfft. Sorry, got to be facetious about some things here.

I think the focus on Cas in season 8 was much more about his repentance and forgiveness from others - Metatron snags him by seeing he still wants to repent for Heaven, WHILE he’s in the gas station trying to buy stuff to repent to Dean for OTHER stuff. I think it makes perfect sense to read the season 8 narrative as a strong emotional narrative between Dean and Cas specifically engineered to delve into their relationship issues, let Cas back in to TFW, let him back into Dean’s heart, and try and establish for US what Cas is truly like as we’ve never been so deep in his head as in season 8 as a whole, except for in 6x20 where we learned A: he loved them and Dean in particular, and B: he was busy lying and betraying them and justifying it all on the slimmest reasons to keep himself going. If you love Cas, 6x20 is a goldmine. If you’re indifferent or don’t like him, as a one episode event, it might not warm your heart especially with the end of season 6 and his resulting failures, especially perceived moral ones against his friends. 

Season 8 let us right into Cas and showed us his inner processes, desires, and a narrative about how he wanted to do penance for season 6 and 7, and a feeling that Sam and Dean love him back, of course, but to them Cas is still a shaky person to depend on and Dean is going a great deal on faith that Cas is good even while thinking he’s sketchy and lying the entire time between 8x07 and 8x17, showing a conflict between Dean’s baseline faith in Cas and Cas’s behaviour towards them. Being in his head and seeing Naomi all season makes US insiders to Cas’s issues and puts us on his side firmly by knowing WHY he’s acting this way, so it’s a good storyline to nurture us through Dean’s issues with Cas while being given an inside line to being sympathetic to Cas since we know what Dean doesn’t about how he’s being controlled the entire time. 

Taken in that spirit, I can see the show just wanting to reconcile TFW and Dean and Cas in particular as a goal to shoot towards and the conclusion might just have been that they all make it good before whatever ending they had in mind for the main plot stuff. Along with a healthy dose of subtext to keep you guessing about how that relationship was. 

Anyway, as I said, I don’t like subscribing to theories which are too speculative and treating them like they’re too real and like… definitely what the show is doing… makes me really itchy for the above reasons in the fan wank section of this reply… so the one that Destiel is now being woven into season 12 to the same way it was in season 8 to the eventual aim of canon puts me off for the reasons I hope you can guess from all that rambling :P 

Even if I have hope that it MIGHT be on the books doesn’t mean I’ll really commit to saying it’s narratively going anywhere for sure, because that seems like a great way to start a cult and end up in the shame bin and reviled by people one day. I want to see fandom through to the end of the show and see what happens with you all, so short-sighted plans about building a rocket to Mars in my back yard seems like a great way to end up sitting in a fizzled out rocket still on the ground in my yard with a bunch of people who want their money back :D

I do think the endgame the show is working towards is going to be positive for Destiel fans and probably at the very least a good final touching moment, although I think the show will pretty much certainly end on Sam and Dean together as the sign off moment, even if the moment before that is Dean smooching Cas in the kitchen before grabbing a couple of beers to go hang with his brother just the 2 of them out on the front porch of their weirdo hunter commune house. Or whatever happens. But you know, even in the Destiel is totally canon and it all ends happily world, it’s not ABOUT them, it’s about Sam and Dean and as much as it’s about everyone else they love too, they’d be there to show there’s a world for them to save/that they have saved and can retire to, if Mary and Cas survive to the end. 

But there are many subtextual ways between that hazy dream ending and, like, total character death save the world through mass sacrifice kinda ending, and all of which can make Destiel look like it was where things were/would have gone. At the current point in canon you can say the exact same thing, which is the point I was making that went right over some heads where they got fixated on me dancing gleefully around Cas’s dead body fulfilling my prophecy or whatever. If the show ended there, with the way Dean and Cas were connected over the season, you could argue their hearts belonged to each other, but they never got a chance to really do anything about it. 

It’s the shitty subtextual Cas is dead ending I’d always dreaded if the show really wanted to fuck with us, but it’s one they could have done, and it would have left things open ended enough for academics and fans and whoever else to yell forever about if it had all meant what we thought it did, to a collection of contradictory comments from cast and crew.

The only way is up from here for Cas’s personal development, seeing as he’s finally doing the truly transformative death experience, and Cas’s personal development is where Destiel subtext is most closely tied, while Dean’s personal development has been a mess of performing Dean and bi Dean and issues with his parents and the codependency, and he’s opening up like a beautiful flower, but it’s still largely a sort of concept that Destiel can just sort of happen when Dean’s got far enough down the line on dealing with all these issues as a kind of lump problem, and Cas’s arc is much more mythological, tied into identity and belonging, but the target has been clear since like… 4x22… (and I mean “clear” rather than “oh shit it’s going to haaaappen” like it is from the start of the season :P) that it’s going to all land on Dean. And clear since like… idk, 6x20? that the feeling is pretty romantic from his end so in an ideal world he lands on Dean romantically. 

And all subsequent positive development on the ship’s possibility has been clearing hurdles and tidying up character development that’s all pretty much check lists made back in season 8 or after the wank when with clearer heads people began to wonder just what was standing in the way of them if they were going to go canon, but not right then. Stuff like Claire and the vessel occupancy issue. Or the slow progress of Cas putting words to his family to call them that and the Bunker home and so on. Steps that all the stretching of the story has let them explore in minute detail.

So I can see that it’s possible that this all develops into something that works incredibly well for the chances of Destiel and since season 10 I’ve had the suspicion, thanks to Claire and the Dean-focused character development episodes, that they were working on the same tick list as us. But I’m not sure if it will pay off exactly as we want to see, while at the same time  being over the moon delighted when another step forward happens. And season 12 moved a lot of ground, some of it unexpectedly quickly, and other things like, unburying them from ruts they’d been stuck in forever. 

I don’t think going on from here season 13 will be immediately disappointing if Cas and Dean aren’t desperately romantically linked all the time because the show still acts like they have their own personal dramas when it’s not letting them see each other as the only people in a room. I don’t think it would be very productive to tally up events as if they’re constructing a narrative where we have to wait for pay off at a very set date, because even though I think that pay off will come at a very set date if we’re lucky and they honour their subtext. The show doesn’t seem to have an end, I honestly don’t trust Dabb as far as I can throw him not to just randomly make Destiel canon because he thinks it’ll be funny and make us happy because I have no grasp on his showrunning except he’s a massive troll with his finger on the fandom pulse. And honestly I don’t get much pleasure from constructing the elaborate forward narratives when I can be much more excited about the immediate stuff, living in the moment, and taking the Destiel subtext as it comes. 

After the mixtape moment there was a lot of spec about if we’d see it again or what it meant building forwards, and I felt it wasn’t going to be mentioned again, and that it was much more valuable for that moment and what it told us about Dean and Cas, than using it for a forwards sign, which to me often just means taking quick stock of a thing happening in present canon then barrelling ahead into the future. While to me the richness in the story is wallowing in what has been opened up about the past, about Dean making the mixtape, when he gave it to Cas, and all the backstory implied by the 5 second moment of that exchange, because it implies so much more going backwards than it ever meant going forwards, as it wasn’t mentioned again all season. We could go forwards knowing Dean and Cas were at the sort of stage of the relationship where mixtapes happen in such a way, but we can’t use it to divine an entire forward plot about it, because that way lies the sort of “make everything Cas ever does about guinea pigs and bees” nonsense because fixating on passing moments as information about character stuff we need to know for later, that there’ll be a bigger pay off later, to me does sort of ruin the fun of the present.

There’s manageable foreshadowing and speculation like guessing what the turducken sign is all about, because its original context was very Destiel, and there’s stuff like guessing about the PB&J where it has so many contexts that even when it connects to Cas I saw that as somewhat connecting him with *Kevin* and lil baby Sam in 9x07 when Cas was eating it in 9x11, and the Destiel connection was the link to humanity, and Dean as being somewhat connected as the PB&J provider to their weirdo family. But he also brought Kevin prune juice as a far more loving gesture, you know? :P Until we have context on these things I hate to get invested in many forward spec things as Destiel related or feeding a larger narrative.

I also think there’s a big difference between meta and spec and I am much more comfortable offering analysis of what has already happened and maybe venturing an idea of how things will play out but not wedding myself to it, especially as that’s how I’ve seen people get fandom burn out, and also I hate looking wrong :P So for my own ego, again, it’s nice to sit and enjoy spec as entertainment but not get so involved I’m writing convoluted theories about it.

Tl;dr, I’m hopefully understandably wary about what canon positivity can do to a fandom, even just from second-hand tales and snooping old blogs back in season 9 when it was all a bit closer to the surface. I have a very comfortable place I’m sitting, which has been rocked about a bit by how on the nose season 12 was, but until I can be sure I really do not want to ever commit to a speculation about anything being set up for canon that we can see in the narrative. I think we’re at an AMAZING place with where we’ve progressed in canon but I’m trying so so hard to keep it contained as if season 12 is where it all ends for now, and I will try and take each episode as it comes when it’s what people might read about what happens next with Destiel, because none of us are qualified to answer it. And the meta community seems to be in a really weird place again with an up surge in positivity that’s making the gold standard of speculation rise, and I’d rather learn from the past and be OVER CAREFUL than get involved in a huge fandom fuck up about all this :P And I hope if I really am supposedly that influential, I can try and be an example of not counting chickens, even when I think I’m holding a very full basket.

[foxandfiction]

so i havent written anything in a LONG while (since 2017?) for a very good reason: i was going to school fulltime. good news: i finished! i finished in december and i walk at graduation in may. hopefully i learned something about writing. i enjoyed myself, at the very least, and i was grateful to have made myself write frequently about literature, even if it wasn't the way and type of lit we were looking at in school. i don't know that i will come back to this frequently. after all, it's february and i've been free from the school grind for months now. but sometimes a book sparks an idea in me that i have to write out. so here we go. niko rides again.

truly devious / the hand on the wall by maureen johnson.

so here is a thing: i like maureen johnson enough as a person that i will usually read her books, despite the fact that she writes mostly YA hetero romances, and infrequently anything fantasy and never sci fi. when she announced she was writing a mystery i was interested because i do like mysteries but the genre as a whole is often difficult to enjoy for other reasons. and so, expecting it to be a stand alone novel because i am a fool and an imbecile, i picked up truly devious.

this isn't to say it is a bad book. it's just 3 books.

a brief summary: stevie bell has just been accepted into ellingham academy, a prestigious private boarding school with a checkered past. the site of several famous kidnappings and murders of the ellingham family that established it, the school is known for inviting brilliant students with very specific passions to study there. stevie is invited because of her expertise on the ellingham case-- her goal being to solve the murder while she attends the school. of course, when accidental deaths seem to be more than accidents, the case may not be solely located in the past.

intriguing.

the case itself is interesting and fun, relying on the weird school and its strange inhabitants, both presently and in the past, their penchant for secret passages and riddles, to propel the mystery forward. yet the mystery is not the sole content of any story. recently i caught up on the magnus archives (if you like audio horror.... please give it a go) and in the q&a after the most recent season they were discussing constructing a mystery. horror, of course, must have some sort of mystery. as they discussed character arcs coming to head, they brought up how such a thing can sacrifice the mystery-- poirot's character development consists of not knowing who killed someone to knowing who did it.

this is not to say that truly devious sacrifices some mystery or some character development for the sake of the other. rather, truly devious operates as two different stories with the same cast, contained in one trilogy. stevie solves the mystery. and stevie gains friends and a romance.

i prefer the mystery.

the mystery, at the very least, does not stand on weak willed politics.

there's two main issues here, in my opinion. one is the issue of representation while still wanting to write a straight romance between two white teenagers. the second is that johnson wrote this during the results of the 2016 american election and its awful aftermath. these are understandable-- at least the latter one-- because no one worthwhile has been positively impacted by this. there are of course several problems with this. the first is what i'll call representation lite. "representation" or "diversity" is something in these cases that are dolled out to a larger cast of characters so there is a variety, instead of any real issues impacting a singular person. instead of any real depth these "representations" get to have, the audience can see them and, if they want, feel included. or they can ignore them. the audience in the know can pick up on them -- stevie's best friend janelle is a lesbian, and janelle's partner is nonbinary. there is a minor character with a physical disability. stevie herself suffers from an anxiety disorder, which is the only one of these things that is talked about beyond mentioning for mentioning's sake.

one thing that struck me as a very sour note occurs in a chapter from the perspective of a witness to the original crime, a friend of albert ellingham, founder of the school. leonard holmes nair (subtlety is for adult novels), talking to some students about how he knows dorothy parker, says, verbatim, "i am a friend of dorothy's".

now. several things. i didn't need this line to know he was gay. you nailed that one maureen, without having to discuss sexuality at all. to a modern audience, that's what this line specifies. in certain contexts it would be amusing-- it is innocuous in 1935, but in 2020, it's full of meaning. the film did not even come out until '39, and i'm not sure when the phrase came to mean what it means now. a kind of circular joke, that is meaningless both to the joke teller and his audience, yet full of subtext to both the author and the readers. it's interesting. it's also a little bit insidious and what i dislike about this novel revolves around it. it is a joke under layers and layers that you must already know something about to know what it means. and yet if you don't you miss it and you miss nothing. it's the "representation" in this novel-- it's buried and it's minor and you can miss it easily, and while it may be well intentioned, its existence is more insulting than inviting.

it's second major flaw is its attempt at a political message. it suffers as much liberalism suffers, by drawing an arbitrary line in the sand where doing the right thing is the goal, if you have someone you like pushing you to do it, but it's ok to fall short if it inconveniences you, scares you, is considered illegal in any way.

here is a minor example: a character who studies environmental science talks about writing a paper about all of the plastic in the ocean. not two chapters later he talks about how he likes tuna salad, as if the majority of plastic in the ocean didn't come from the fishing industry. i'd chalk this up to author ignorance (and not character ignorance because i think teenagers are smarter than that) but johnson is vegetarian, maybe vegan; she is at the very least a big fan of isa chandra moskowitz, noted vegan cookbook author. (if you care about the environment.... go vegan).

here is a bigger example: throughout the novel there is a commentary on a fictional senator who could very well be a number of real senators. he's your run of the mill republican, in my opinion: racist scaremonger who wants a "return to personal responsibility". stevie's parents work for his campaign, despite her personal objections to him. after making out with a housemate several times, she discovers he is the senator's son. the kid is supposed to be just as against his father as stevie is, although he is, in perhaps the politest way i can phrase it, chaotic as fuck.

maybe i am just jaded but i can't imagine anyone with money not being tainted by their parent's politics that work to get them this money. yet they do end up together, and a large part of the secondary, non-mystery plot is her love interest's work to ruin his father's bid for presidency.

there is a turning point where, the boy and some friends (not stevie and her friends, because it Felt Wrong) find out that his father has been blackmailing shady people for campaign finances. great. until, instead of exposing them, they decide to destroy the information, because it is less illegal.

oh..... ok? i mean, if he got dirt on these people i don't think he couldn't do it again. if he reports it to the press, he destroys his father's bid for presidency and the lives of the awful people he's extorting. it's a win-win scenario. will the kid go to jail? maybe, but even if his father is pressing charges against him, he's still a rich white boy. he'll be ok. doing something illegal for the greater good is ok. lots of things were once illegal. that doesn't make them immoral. maybe doing the right thing, like absolutely destroying any chance your awful father has at holding a position of power, is better than taking an easy way out.

maybe, if you want to write a mystery, write a mystery, and if you want to write something political, don't feature the police as a trustworthy organization.

but what do i know.

[mild-lunacy]

It is what it is (so here we are)

I've just said recently that I do still see implicit Johnlock, and even if I'm not blindingly happy with S4, then at least I'm not turned off from the canon (just from fandom, but then it doesn't take much). I enjoyed it a lot, particularly the pulp genre stuff and the clever bits. It's hard to remember when I'm on Tumblr, but I did. It's my sort of thing, story-wise. Of course, it could have been more. And I do think it *should* have been more. But it is what it is. I want to celebrate that and not drown in negativity for the characters I adore and writers I still admire, but at the same time, I'd certainly like to support fair critiques. And in that spirit, I feel the need to push back against the negativity directed at all the people who expected implicit subtext to become explicitly canon, and are now disappointed. Quite rationally so.

Basically, I feel sort of on the fence right now. As I recently said, in many ways, TJLC as a fandom phenomenon has left me behind. And I do understand @unreconstructedfangirl's frustration at the state of fandom-- squee harshing has been an understatement, and my own squee balloon is definitely in danger of popping. But frankly, I'm never going to apologize for having been a TJLCer (and other people's beliefs or behavior have nothing to do with me; I claim neither fault nor credit). Just because some people do things one disagrees with doesn't mean a title (eg, feminist) shouldn't apply to everyone else, so I'd embraced the TJLC label although I had usually referred to it as 'canon Johnlock'. To me, it's simply been about analyzing the direction of a TV show to the best of my ability. It turned out that it wasn't as internally consistent or as groundbreaking a narrative as we all thought (and hoped), even though it remains a wonderfully made, clever, fun and moving story that I'll always love.

I feel very entitled to speak about this 'cause I know 100% I'm not being hormonal or emotional. I'm absolutely not speaking out of shippy feeling (though of course I have feelings). This isn't about feelings for me, and it's not about shipping. It's continuously frustrating that after all this time, Johnlock-friendly people in fandom still think this is about shipping. Canon Johnlock was the result of my *analysis* and my understanding of narrative construction concepts as a writer and critic. In my reasoned opinion, this awareness should be part of the analysis of the show's character arcs made by any halfway intelligent or literate person. This actually includes Moffat and Gatiss, even *if* the subtext wasn't intentional (which I find very hard to believe). The fact is that the overall narrative doesn't really make sense unless you integrate the subtext of the show, and that subtext is that John and Sherlock have romantic feelings for each other. This is explicitly referenced by many characters, supported by multiple mirrors, and overall just hammered into the textual themes and is central to Sherlock's humanization arc.

To make it absolutely clear, this isn't about my fangirl's shippy need to see John and Sherlock kiss and live happily ever after. I literally do not even *care* about my favorite characters' happiness: I'm an angst fan. I also don't really care what fandom does or *can* do in terms of shippy fanworks based on the text. I can never really relate to such arguments, or be glad canon Johnlock wasn't actualized for the sake of fannish diversity. Honestly, I find such claims to be derailing. I do love the fandom's creativity and I enjoy many, many different types of fanworks. But the fact is that I'm a canon-whore through and through, and I was *talking* about canon when I talked about TJLC and canon Johnlock.

So basically, talking about what fandom needs or could/couldn't use in fics is just alienating to the point of being meaningless to me. I don't see why it's relevant or why I should prioritize this in my analysis of a relationship I consider purely on its canonically-based merits. I also think that whole conversation can get especially derailing when we were talking about representation, which is (of course) a whole other kettle of fish, but not one to ignore or hand-wave. Certainly, it's not something to hand-wave like the BBC has done recently, with references to the creators' attention to queer charities. However, neither is it something to use as social capital in fandom wank, with constant references to being queer yourself or any other kind of 'queer cred'. This isn't about your and/or mine and even Mark Gatiss's queer cred (or the lack thereof). The very *idea* of queer cred and all the ways people from the BBC all the way across fandom feel the need to be defensive about it is fundamentally derailing. This is about the *story*, and secondarily-- but not less importantly-- about its impact on and meaning for its (often queer, often young, often vulnerable) audience.

Personally, I just want good, consistent writing that makes sense, that builds on its own themes and honors and develops the characters. I will admit, of course, that emotional pay-off and resolution is part and parcel of what makes fictional suffering work in an arc, unless you're writing a tragedy. Needless to say, Series 4 did not offer this-- not simply for Johnlock shippers, but for anyone who wanted to feel the pain in Series 3 and 4 was 'worthwhile'. I say this even though I personally don't really need such pay-off; I'm a cold-prickly type reader who's generally happy with implicit emotional resolution, but it's not how most audiences work, as any good writer would be aware. Story arcs come to explicit conclusions because that's how good stories work, not because that's how shippers want them to work. This may not always be relevant, but BBC Sherlock is *already* a Western-style genre narrative in the classic style, filled with many romantic cliches and queer-coded up the wazoo. It's already a traditionally structured narrative, and its main characters are already shown to be in love to anyone not being strictly limited by heteronormativity. Even people who don't label themselves 'TJLC' get this, either due to literary analysis literacy or a willingness to see what's right in front of them. Given that, the disagreement was only ever about the likelihood of there being an explicitly romantic resolution by intent. However, the fact is that regardless of Moffat and Gatiss's intent, good writing means following your characters' lead rather than doing what you apparently always wanted, whether it's to do with only 'flirting with the homoeroticism' in the narrative, the direction of the character arcs or plot-wise.

Of course, I disagree with many of the critiques that say TFP represented a complete break in characterization, and I agree with Ivy that TFP did work as a resolution of Sherlock's main arc; I also agree that it opens the door to resolving the 'rifle on the wall' of Sherlock's avoidance of romantic entanglement. Further, I don't really think Mofftiss have some sort of direct responsibility to their fans or to the world, and of course they should be free to write the story they wanted to write (just as others are free to critique). But at the same time, Moffat himself has said that good writing is "defined by whether or not you've written or created something people want and like", and it's not supposed to be self-indulgent. It's *supposed* to consider the audience, on his own terms. He's also called himself a fanfic writer, and he's failed his own measure of what makes a good fanfic work: writing "for other people". That approach is definitely not consistent with the fact that they admitted at SDCC in July that TFP was 'insane wish-fulfillment'. This is not up to the standard Moffat and Gatiss have set for themselves during the run of the show.

Like I said, though, I'm definitely on the fence-- I'm torn, because of course I *enjoyed* Series 4 and I'm not really that confused except insofar as wondering why Moffat and Gatiss have so often felt the need to deny what's clearly intentional subtext placed with care and affection into the narrative by the entire team. I'm definitely not enjoying the fandom imploding, or the fact that it feels pretty lonely around here in the post-S4 fangirl bunker. But the negativity about canon Johnlock is no more rationally justified simply because it has not actually happened (I mean *only* rationally, of course; obviously, irrational reactions due to bad blood are eternal). I'm definitely frustrated with the fact that I'm still one of the 'delusional fangirl' brigade when it comes to BBC Sherlock, even though I know perfectly well how rational I am. I will not be gaslighted so easily. And I've just tried to see the straight!John in ASiB, but it's just too hard. There's no way all that's an accident, somehow. So here's what we're left with, after TFP and the end of Series 4 of Sherlock: the good and the bad. And while I still think the good included implicit Johnlock, the bad unfortunately did include queer-baiting.