#i think having gone through that s8 episode might have shifted things just slightly

[gardenerian]

Do you have any headcannons on Ian and religion? Like do you think he believes in any god or is it just when he's manic? It seems like it might have a lot to do with fear. When he had yevgeny he was asking the cops if Jesus sent them to take his baby. I find that interesting

oh boy howdy wow wow wow hello! what a Q, what a Q. and do i have an A? i... don't know. but i sure do have some THOUGHTS.

getting my charlie kelly on under the cut:

okay. so.

ian is someone who does not do well with uncertainty, right? so much of his story is pushing and reaching and grasping for answers. in his relationships, with his sense of self, for his future.

i think he does look to things bigger or grander than himself for order and meaning, but it's not god (at first). it's things like the allegiance to serve, or the oath he takes as an EMT.

we don't seen much religion in early shameless, except for the odd (sarcastic) reference to irish catholicism or to stealing from/scamming their church. they have some (if minor) relationship with the place, and i do have a headcanon that they may have spent some time there pre-series as a place to get food/stay warm.

so when ian gets to his s5 manic episode, i think that's where the foundation of that delusion would lie, or at least, the vocabulary for what he's afraid is happening? jesus, gabriel, and demons stealing yevgeny is such a specific vision, i would think he had some religious grounding to come to that conclusion.

religious delusions are incredibly common in mania, even if a person is not particularly religious. and i totally agree with you that ian's is triggered by fear. the last thread kind of snaps in that moment. his paranoia is ramped up until it reaches the only end it really can - crashing down.

and we don't see religion for ian again until monica dies. ian turns to his job as an EMT and his relationships to help him make sense of the world. but losing mickey and monica all at once... he's lost at the start of s8. and i think the mania and religion are a little more closely intertwined in this episode. it appears far before the breaking point, and they kind of go hand in hand.

ian spends half the season looking for something to help him feel better and when he finds it, he locks in. trevor, the kids he helps, the shelter, the pastor, the religious movement - it all becomes this warped mission for ian. and it's both way bigger than him and largely self-serving. he's actively reading the bible and finding a calling that he believes is his alone.

the delusion here is less about paranoia and terror, and more about righteousness, grandeur, and sensing a calling - it's filling a void and lifting him higher than he can handle. but i will still argue there is still fear laced in it. fear is a powerful motivator for ian, it always has been.

and i think the s8 episode had a long, difficult recovery. one thing i'm always wishing we had was the mourning period - there is a grief that follows losing a delusion like that. we see it just a bit, with ian still looking for shim back at home. to have such strong conviction, only to suddenly face the reality that it was, in fact, a symptom of mental illness... that hurts. and to go to prison for it? yikes.

so i do wonder how ian let go of religion. does he purposefully not mention it again, or is this episode another victim of the show's goldfish memory? how does he explain it all to mickey? is the shame compounded by this religious aspect?

it doesn't play a role in their wedding, or ian's sense of right and wrong, it doesn't guide him after prison. so in canon.... you can say it's just gone. maybe it recedes until the energy returns? i don't know.

in my head, though... it's more complicated than that. i don't know if i think that ian actively believes in abrahamic religion. but i think there is certainly part of him that wrestles with the big questions and might find the idea of god (in whatever form) comforting at times.

i think they all grew up too cynical to think that someone is specifically listening to their prayers but... i don't know. in my head, ian at least remains sensitive to the idea of god, and won't bring himself to write it off entirely, even if he's not actively praying or searching for it.

i have rambled enough! what do you think?

[themegalosaurus]

I have a question, but it could be interpreted as anti-Wincest or just a bummer, so please only reply if you enjoy it, ok? You mentioned only having gotten into Wincest on s9, which surprised me. For me, early seasons are just air-crackling-MEANINGFUL-glances-slashy, and later seasons often make me sad, I don't know if they even like each other.... I'd very much want to change this perception. Would you write about what made you fall for them? What made you say - those two are into each other?

OK so I think I must be responsible for this confusion, which is to say, it wasn't that I started shipping Wincest in S9 but that I only started watching the show while S9 was airing. So I guess that technically it's true I started shipping Wincest then, but it wasn't like I was watching all the seasons before like 'lalalala' and then got to S9 and was like 'oh wait NOW i think they're banging' (or, like, 'am suddenly interested in them banging' or however you describe the act of shipping something, which is... hard to do, hahaha). So no I mean chronologically during the period S9 was on TV but in the course of my watching the show... I'm not actually sure, I can't remember now at what point in show I went from 'omfg Wincest is the most hilarious ship name and I kind of love it but it's not my bag' to 'allow me to bestow 9k words of NC-17 viagra-fuelled Wincest crack!fic upon the world'. WHO KNOWS.

That said, most (like, nearly all) of the Wincest I've written has been later seasons so I guess a lot of what you are asking me still applies. 

I definitely agree with you that there's a shift in their canon relationship through the later seasons which complicates things. It's not possible (for me) to write the kind of dreamy, life on the road, wrapped up in one another fic of the early seasons about later-seasons Sam'n'Dean. I guess I deal with this either by headcanoning a slightly fluffier version of their relationship which handwaves some of the more troubling things about their dynamic and readjusts them to how I'd ideally like them to be (this is my solution when I'm writing straight-up smut, or comic stuff), or sometimes by writing fic which tries to deal at least partially with some of the unresolved issues that the later seasons have thrown up between the guys. (One of my favourite tropes is late-seasons first-time-in-a-long-time Wincest, which acknowledges a split between them - like, how can you not after S8 and S9 - but then has them brought back together, with varying levels of success/healthiness/resolution.) I actually... I think I find it almost more interesting to write them like this, so where I can think about the problems that are thrown up in their relationship onscreen through the prism of what it would be like if they had a sexual relationship complicating things even further. One of the earliest fics I wrote, ‘Ashes’, was essentially based on that premise - like, how much more fucked up would the Gadreel situation be if Dean and Sam were having sex at the time Gadreel was occupying Sam's body? When I'm not writing silly crack or PWP, I'm interested in fics which explore difficult or complicated relationships and late-seasons Wincest is actually perfect for that.

I think related to this is the fact that I generally have little interest in tropes like soulmates or, I guess, 'this couple have always been destined to be together, their love is holy and eternal, truly since the day they first set eyes upon each other they have been one another's everything, age shall not wither them' etc etc etc. Like... for whatever personal reasons explain these things, I find the idea almost squicky?? I am very interested in established relationships with areas of commonality and areas of difference and conflicts and affection and a long history of love, but the kind of super-romantic, 'you are my everything', starry-eyed stuff that I know a lot of people love (and more power to you if you do, I'm definitely not seeking to imply any judgement) makes me feel almost claustrophobic. So the fact that late-seasons Wincest is riddled with tensions and conflicts and unspoken issues actually appeals to me quite a lot.

That said. I do think there's an element of doublethink happening for anybody who is a Wincest shipper and (at heart) a bitter Sam girl. Even in my most ~realistic late-seasons Wincest I haven't necessarily gone as dark as I think Sam and Dean's relationship has done in parts of later canon. Partly that's because fic has a fix-it sort of purpose to me - I like to try and think about how things could have been resolved more satisfactorily - and partly because like any fic author I am writing at least partly with an eye to an audience, and I feel like the Venn diagram crossover between 'bitter Sam girls' and 'people who would want to read reasonably dark, reasonably explicit Wincest' is fairly small. I think people generally want this kind of shippy fic (OTP shippy fics) to be happy. But I have like... one episode coda (from S11) half-finished which sort of gets towards this territory, and another fic idea that I've been incubating for like, six months at least based on a kinkmeme prompt that would also do something like this. But I haven't finished either yet, I guess because (and this probably shows a lack of integrity on my part) I think they might upset my readers. Idk.

(I just realised that I never answered the Q about why I ship them in the first place, not properly. I think they’re just... they’re so present in each other’s lives, they are the main person for each other in so many ways, their relationship is so intense, that it’s not a difficult slide sideways into the shippy mode of reading them. Add to which the fact that they’re so pretty and that they’re different - emotionally, sexually, temperamentally - in ways which are fun to explore, and it’s easy to get on that train. Or it was for me!)