#i think its really important that we talk more about mike's mental health and some of the physical results of it

[your-stranger-halfblood-things]

TW sh implied

______

Mike's too scared to go swimming when the rest of the Party invites him. He's scared of the others seeing his scars. He's scared that they'll judge him. He doesn't want to deal with that. Instead, he just dips his feet in and watches his friends swim

[marcspectrr]

A word or two on Kiara's mental health...

Before I attempt to summarize the 39 page slideshow living rent free in my brain, a preface! This will include spoilers for s2, as well as a few mentions of suicidal thoughts! Also. I love Kiara Carrera with all of my heart so if you're not a fan of her, you might wanna keep scrolling. If you don't vibe with her that's perfectly fine, but this post is heavy with Kiara appreciation, be warned, my respect for her runs deep. The choice is yours, of course, just understand that I'm writing this bc @yellowlaboratory among others have encouraged me to get it out there because it's all I've been thinking about since I watched s2. This is not to start anything.

(This is also not me hating on Pope because I genuinely like his character, he's just made some very questionable choices throughout the show, some I can forgive and some that still don't sit right with me.)

Deep breath, here we go.

It's no secret Kiara has been poorly handled by the writers and therefore the characters at times. We got little development in s1 compared to other main male characters, leaving us to fill in the gaps as far as her ambitions, motivations, family, overall interest in the boys, etc. While I do keep this in mind, I could rant about it for days so for this I'm going off of what we have as well as what's been implied.

Kiara didn't have the same upbringing as the boys but it's clear the Carrera's had/have their struggles. She's got her foot in both worlds, not quite 'rich' but not entirely 'poor', inevitably giving her a fragile sense of belonging and identity. 16 is a hard age even without societal pressures and growing up in a classist environment, but here is where we're assuming the boys come in. They give her a place to feel comfortable in her own skin, with shared interests and accepting her for who she is, which we know the kooks don't provide. Just being around them helps ease those deep insecurities, helps her form meaningful bonds. We weren't given an explicit scene where this was shown but over the course of the two seasons it's clear how she feels about them and what they do for her mentally.

Her relationship with the pogues, however, puts a rift between her and her parents. Mike and Anna clearly want what's best for Kie but it's also obvious they've struggled with her even before the pogues. Anna wants Kiara to have the things she never got growing up, breeding a disconnect since Kiara doesn't share in her mother's interests. This leads into my biggest problem with Kiara's arc in s2, which was how Anna and Mike were written. 

Yes, Kiara didn't/doesn't treat them the best but it went both ways -- they all failed at communicating. Instead of finding a common ground and compensating for the things Kiara cares about, Anna shuts her down and ignores her, leaving her to feel like a problem rather than a person, further perpetuating even less healthy communication. Kiara even says in s2 that's why she doesn't like going home, because it always means walking into an argument and not feeling accepted.

I sorta expected a little more understanding from Anna considering her own background with pogues but instead it backfired. And Mike...he didn't contribute much at all. They could've all done better and need some work. Kiara could be more grateful and Anna and Mike are the parents, the adults, they need to make the space feel safe to talk. Kie didn't just wake up one day and decide to act out and keep her parents in the dark all the time, that stems from not feeling listened to when she does try and open up.

Expanding on this with...the whole Blue Ridge plot. Moment of silence for the show neglecting to acknowledge the academy,  even though it clearly had a big impact on Kiara's life. In s1 we got a brief look into how her 'kook year' affected her and it was not good. More isolation, blurred identity, insecurity and this time suicidal thoughts, with no one to turn to for support, assuming she was not on good terms with her parents then either. I'm assuming this because for them to send her to the academy, hoping to give her better opportunities only for it to end with her wanting to cut her wrists, to then thinking the best option is to send her away again? At this point I hope they didn’t know how badly the academy affected her because sending her away a second time with that knowledge is such a hurtful and oblivious move.

Kiara already thinks her parents see her as a burden, hurting her sense of worth as is. I really wanted to like the Carrera's and I still feel like they genuinely love and care for Kie, I just need to see more communication maybe. And if they choose to include the Blue Ridge plot, which I'm leaning towards yes on that one, I hope it's handled somewhat well, preferably not a tool to create drama even though I know a lot of people want to see it be used that way. I'm very particular, I'm sorry I'm this way.

Things I've seen her being criticized for in s2 is her behavior. The thing that people have to remember is that she's 16 and teenagers are just not the best with navigating their emotions. She made questionable choices (the 'murderer' thing and 'abusing' Pope) but these are both things that fit the plot and her character. She was by no means the only one grieving so I don't know why she's being targeted for it (although I'm not surprised, the fandom treats her horribly). Some of her core characteristics are her high moral integrity as well as her headstrong belief in people and causes. She's never been one to make herself palatable for people and s2 shows a lot of this (calling out the Cameron's, going off in front of the court, etc). Even if it caused them problems and even if they are flaws, that doesn't make her an inherently intolerable character, it makes her realistic. She was not in a good place emotionally and it would've been wrong to shy away from depicting it any other way, especially in a show where the teenage experience is decently represented.

Now with the Pope thing. I think it was handled as well as it could've been considering the circumstances. It really should've never happened but to justify it, emotions are messy, relationships even messier and they were both spiraling at the end of s1. I don't agree with the way it started (why give Kie the line of literally telling him she wanted something different only to show them together next episode, I'm forever confused) but I'm not mad about how it ended. They were both in the wrong at times so only bringing up Kie's faults is just unfair.

I believe they both tried their best and even wanted to feel the right things but learned quickly that's not exactly how it works, which was how it was supposed to be shown. Not as this romanticized, idealistic healthy relationship but as one that has its bumps and was bred out of all the wrong things. All of their body language pointed towards this. Pope didn't deserve to be hurt but Kie clearly didn't intend for things to turn out how they did. She wasn't mentally comfortable enough for a relationship and I can appreciate them showing this in the ways the writers framed it. Even the conversation with Kie describing their night on the beach, I think it was perfect. It was awkward but it was honest, which is so important.

Overall, I think Kiara's gone through a lot mentally that the show could be better at exploring. It doesn't have to be big, obvious lingering shots, they can be subtle and still mean so much to people who relate to her. Seeing someone on screen grapple with real life struggles (even if the show walks a painfully fine line as far as realism), it means a lot. Especially when mental health (more prominent than ever) is so rarely portrayed to translate in any significant way in media now. It's definitely something I would love to see get more time and effort so until then, just know I'll be manifesting the screen time Kiara Carrera deserves.

[verobatto]

Destiel Chronicles

Vol. XCVI

It was a love story from the very beginning.

And You are not here... (Part IV)

(13x05)

Hello my friends! How are you? We arrived to the episode in which Castiel comes back. Yay!

Okay, Dean will be particularly suicidal in this one, and we will have a lot of foreshadows for the incoming possesion.

So, let's talk about this...

Dr. Meadows and The Open Door

The ghost of Dr. Meadows was a blatant foreshadow of AU!Michael. They wore the same apron, experimented with people and monsters and also, the doctor made lobectomies and literally, git inside the patients' heads. Is a symbolism for what Michael will do with Dean.

Look at the doctor...

(gif credit @aborddelimpala)

Yep, the same apron and he burns... Just like Michael will do.

Also this scene...

(gif credit @celestialsonata7 )

The masks, different mask the crazy doc wore, are a symbolism of the different faces Michael will take through season 14.

Another clue of how the season 14 will go, is this tiny dialogue between the two boys at the beginning of the episode, before trying to get inside the Dr. A Meadows Mental Health Center.

Evan: I told you it’d be unlocked.

Shawn: Why would they leave it open?

Leaving the door open, will be seen again in episode 14x02, and it plays a symbolic foreshadow for what will happen with Dean, Michael will leave him but then, he will possesse him again in 14x09. "Leaving the open door for the second possession."

So, if we follow this same statement, we can say Shawn is Dean here. He represents Dean after being possesed, the PTSD.

Penny: Shawn, he….won’t talk. He can’t.

Sam: What do you mean?

Penny: The doctors say…he’s okay physically, that it’s psychological. You know, trauma, like he…he…saw some – saw something so…awful. God I don’t even know what he was doing out that late.

This is a representation of how Dean will be trying to face all the whirlwind of feelings and trauma after Michael leaves him. The kid is muted, just like Dean will avoid talking about the possession. And Shawn draws obssesively, the doc's masks, as Dean will be obssesed in kill Michael after being possesed. (14x03).

Then...

Penny: And, uh, Evan, he’s still missing. Uh… He, Shawn, and their friend Mike Ramos, they’re inseparable.

This is how TFW will be separated because of Michael.

We have another visual narrative clue in Shawn's room, when his mother gets in because he was having a nightmare.

There's a pic on his wall, and is a foreshadow of this scene from 14x04...

The picture shows a red background and a terrifying silhouette of a person. The entire room is Dean's mind. The red color talks about his toxicity. The monster is Michael/John Winchester and his own fears, guilts and toxic behavior, like violence.

The mother is wearing green, as a reminder of Dean Winchester's innocence, usually Scooby Doo represents that too.

The monster doc appears inside of his dreams (head) and also in his own room, as a foreshadow of Michael looking though Dean's eyes, and his possesion.

Dr. Meadows appears in his room, literally possesse the kid, he grabs the mask and put it on his face! Is a blatant symbolism of AUMichael!Dean! and they leave the house. Just like Michael will do with Dean at the end of the season. And also, the meaning of Shawn that escapes the first time but not the second one, is talking about the dynamics of season 14: Michael will leave, Dean will be free just for a few days, before being possesed again, more strongly than before, in season 9.

Suicidal Dean and Sam trying to cheer him up.

If we recall the previous episode, Sam was very shocked because his brother confessed to him he didn't have faith anymore.

At the beginning of the episode we had this dialogue between Sam and Dean...

Sam: Hey

Dean: Hey

Sam: PB&J for breakfast? Strong work.

Dean: Yep.

Well, we all know who was the one telling us that PB&J sandwich was his favorite, right? So... This is not a new observation, but that little clue over there is screaming DEAN MISSES CAS.

So we will have a very cheerful Sammy, giving Dean beer in the morning, pushing him to go to a strip house, and literally, trying to give his brother every usual item he runs into when he is depressed for losing people. He even let Dean being under the number of Agent Page. Their fav.

When Dean sees this, he faves his brother, asking him why he's been so nice to him.

Dean: Okay. Look, I-I’ve been down this road before and I fought my way back. I will fight my way back again.

Sam: How?

Dean: Same way I always do – bullets, bacon, and booze. [Rings front desk bell] A lotta booze.

This is very important, because Billie will refute it in this same episode...

So Dean eats a lot of bacon and stuffs, he drinks a lot, and he even goes to the strip house. But all is fake.

They had their first encout er with Dr. Meadows... And this alarming scene is showed to us...

(Gif credit @smartiespn )

Dean wanted to die here. He wasn't fighting back. He was accepting his death. Why? Is he so affected by Castiel's death and Mary that he wants to die? But why because of Mary, he had lost parents before, John, Bobby, and his convo of bullets, booze and sex worked back then. But why isn't working now? Because the variable her is CASTIEL. He lost the love of his life and nothing will be fine again. SO DEAN WANTS TO DIE BECAUSE CAS DIED. The convo would work with Mary but not with Castiel.

Then, Dean plans a suicidal way out to save the ghosts. He does it so quick, Sam can't react to it. Dean literally kills himself in front of Sam.

The dialogue between Billie and Dean shows again that Dean is in so bad shape, he doesn't want to live, he changed after Castiel's dead. He won't recover of losing the love of his life, his faith. He knows Sam can move on from him. He is able to keep going. But Dean wants to stop. Because Castiel is dead.

Dean: So… am I dead?

Billie: You killed yourself.

Billie is pointing at Dean's suicidal behavior with that plan, because this time is different.

Dean: No. Are you keeping me dead?

Billie: Now that depends on you.

Billie is saying this because she is supecting Dean is different. Dean wanted this. So she tastes waters.

After this there's a negotiation, because Billie wants to know about the AU, because is very important to balance. And the Winchesters just keep bringing chaos.

But Dean exchanges the freedom of the ghosts from the Meadows House for information, the ghosts are released but the deal caught Billie's attention that when she asked for WHAT DEAN REALLY WANTED, Dean choose the ghost and not come back to life.

Billie: Because I do. Because…this whole multi-versal quantum construct we live in, it’s like a house of cards. And the last thing I need is some big, dumb Winchester knocking it all down.

This is important because we do know now Billie hated Dean for this.

Then, the truth is revealed...

Billie: You’ve changed. When you bargained with me just now, you could’ve asked to go back, to live.

Dean: Well, I figured with you in charge, there’s no getting back for me.

Billies faces him with her suspicions, but Dean lies.

Billie: That doesn’t sound like the Dean Winchester I know and love. The man who has been dead so many times but it never seems to stick. Maybe you’re not that guy anymore, they guy who saves the world, the guy who always thinks he’ll win no matter what. You have changed. And you tell people it’s not a big deal. You tell people you’ll work through it but you know you won’t, you can’t and that scares the hell out of you. Or… am I wrong?

(Gif set credit @justjensenanddean )

Dean's silence confirms Billies suspicions. Dean's silence is affirming she just read his mind. He won't be okay, never again. Because this time is different, this time Castiel is dead, forever dead, and he really believe Cas won't come back. Life lost its meaning to him.

Dean: What do you want me to say? Doesn’t matter. I don’t matter.

Billie: Don’t you?

Dean really want to stay dead. He is so sad and lost, he doesn't want to live anymore. Nothing matters if Castiel is gone.

Dean: I couldn’t save Mom. I couldn’t save Cas. I can’t even save a scared little kid. Sam keeps trying to fix it, but I just keep dragging him down. So I’m not going to beg. Okay, if it’s my time, it’s my time.

Dean even is feeling guilty because Sam had lost his faith in the previous episode, and because now he is very worried about him.

Billie: You really believe that. [Dean shakes his head yes] You wanna die. Dean…every notebook on this particular shelf tells a version of how you die. You specifically, heart attack, burned by a red-haired witch, stabbed by a ghoul in a graveyard, and on and on. But which one’s right? That depends on you, on the choices you make.

Dean: Well, I guess I made my choice.

Here people, here! Billie makes the diagnosis and confirms his suspicious. Dean wants to be dead. And then she gave a him again the opportunity of come back to life, but Dean doesn't want to come back. He wants to remain dead! He's sure about it! He confirms it again when he says I GUESS I MADE MY CHOICE.

Billie: But…unfortunately none of these books say you die today.

The word unfortunately is not just for her but for him too. Because Dean really wants to be dead.

After this revealing and scaring dialogue, we were shown how deep Dean was into his depression for losing Castiel.

Then, another sad dialogue with his brother...

Sam: You okay?

Dean: No. Sam, I’m not okay. I’m pretty far from okay. You know, my whole life, I always believed that what we do was important. No matter what the cost, no matter who we lost, whether it was Dad or – or Bobby or –. And I would take the hit. But I kept on fighting because I believed that we were making the world a better place. And now Mom and Cas… And I – I don’t know. I don’t know.

Sam: So now you don’t believe anymore.

Dean: I just need a win. I just need a damn win.

Dean is tired, and now he has to live, without Cas, in the real world, and he's tired.

But then... And because "Cas wanted to come back to him with a win" and Dean had just asked for win, Castiel comes back to him. Castiel is his win.

The face Dean puts when he receives Castiel's call is priceless. He is in shock, he can't reply, he can't talk. Is a mix of feelings. He can't believe Cas is alive.

Then the encounter, adorned as if it was a wedding, or how some people described, a parallel to Romeo and Juliet encounter, with the Sam cross as the witness, and the song playing in the background, exhaustively analyzed, "It's not too late to start all over again."

(Gif set credit @codestielckles )

To Conclude:

This episode was magnificently written by Yockey, it was full of symbolism that pointed out to foreshadows to season 14, Michael and Dean's possesion.

But it also showed us how deep was Dean's depression, and which was the real cause of it: CASTIEL PERMANENT DEAD, the idea of not getting him back made Dean's life to lose its meaning. He didn't want to be alive in a world where Cas wasn't there.

Hope you like this meta. See you in the next one!

Tagging @magnificent-winged-beast @emblue-sparks @weird-dorky-little-d @michyribeiro @whyjm @legendary-destiel @a-bit-of-influence @thatwitchydestielfan @misha-moose-dean-burger-lover @lykanyouko @evvvissticante @savannadarkbaby @dea-stiel @poorreputation @bre95611 @thewolfathedoor @charlottemanchmal @neii3n @deathswaywardson @followyourenergy @dean-is-bi-till-i-die @hekatelilith-blog @avidbkwrm @anarchiana @dickpuncher365 @vampyrosa @authorsararayne @mybonsai1976 @love-neve-dies @dustythewind @wayward-winchester67 @angelwithashotgunandtrenchcoat @trashblackrainbow @deeutdutdutdoh @destiel-shipper-11 @larrem88 @charmedbycastiel @ran-savant @little-crazy-misha-minion @samoosetheshipper

@shadows-and-padlocked-hearts @mishtho @dancingtuesdaymorning @nerditoutwithbooks @mikennacac73 @justmeand-myinsight @idontwantpeopletoknowmyname @teddybeardoctor @pepevons @helevetica @isthisdestiel @dizzypinwheel @jawnlockwinchester @horsez2 @qanelyytha

@destielle @spnsmile @shippsblog @robot-feels @superlock-in-the-tardis @superduckbatrebel @2musiclover2 @madronasky @anon-non2 @cea1996 @lisafu02 @asphodelesauvage @destiels-canonahhhhhhhhhh

If you want to be added or removed from this list just let me know.

If you wanna read my previous metas from season 13 here you have the links:

Vol. XCIII, XCIV, XCV

Buenos Aires, January 10th 2021 1:03 PM

[holyhellpod]

Holy Hell: 3. Metanarrativity: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship? aka the analysis no one asked for.

In this ep, we delve into authorship, narrative, fandom and narrative meaning. And somehow, as always, bring it back to Cas and Misha Collins.

(Note: the reason I didn’t talk about Billie’s authorship and library is because I completely forgot it existed until I watched season 13 “Advanced Thanatology” again, while waiting for this episode to upload. I’ll find a way to work her into later episodes tho!)

I had to upload it as a new podcast to Spotify so if you could just re-subscribe that would be great! Or listen to it at these other links.

Please listen to the bit at the beginning about monetisation and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to message me here.

Apple | Spotify | Google

Transcript under the cut!

Warnings: discussions of incest, date rape, rpf, war, 9/11, the bush administration, abuse, mental health, addiction, homelessness. Most of these are just one off comments, they’re not full discussions.

Meta-Textuality: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship?

In the third episode of Season 6, “The Third Man,” Balthazar says to Cas, “you tore up the whole script and burned the pages.” That is the fundamental idea the writers of the first five seasons were trying to sell us: whatever grand plan the biblical God had cooking up is worth nothing in face of the love these men have—for each other and the world. Sam, Bobby, Cas and Dean will go to any lengths to protect one another and keep people safe. What’s real? What’s worth saving? People are real. Families are worth saving. 

This show plugs free will as the most important thing a person, angel, demon or otherwise can have. The fact of the matter is that Dean was always going to fight against the status quo, Sam was always going to go his own way, and Bobby was always going to do his best for his boys. The only uncertainty in the entire narrative is Cas. He was never meant to rebel. He was never meant to fall from Heaven. He was supposed to fall in line, be a good soldier, and help bring on the apocalypse, but Cas was the first agent of free will in the show’s timeline. Sam followed Lucifer, Dean followed Michael, and John gave himself up for the sins of his children, at once both a God and Jesus figure. But Cas wasn’t modelled off anyone else. He is original. There are definitely some parallels to Ruby, but I would argue those are largely unintentional. Cas broke the mold. 

That’s to say nothing of the impact he’s had on the fanbase, and the show itself, which would not have reached 15 seasons and be able to end the way they wanted it to without Cas and Misha Collins. His back must be breaking from carrying the entire show. 

But what the holy hell are we doing here today? Not just talking about Cas. We’re talking about metanarrativity: as I define it, and for purposes of this episode, the story within a story, and the act of storytelling. We’re going to go through a select few episodes which I think exemplify the best of what this show has to offer in terms of framing the narrative. We’ll talk about characters like Chuck and Becky and the baby dykes in season 10. And most importantly we’ll talk about the audience’s role, our role, in the reciprocal relationship of storytelling. After all, a tv show is nothing without the viewer.

I was in fact introduced to the concept of metanarrativity by Supernatural, so the fact that I’m revisiting it six years after I finished my degree to talk about the show is one of life’s little jokes.

 I’m brushing off my degree and bringing out the big guns (aka literary theorists) to examine this concept. This will be yet another piece of analysis that would’ve gone well in my English Lit degree, but I’ll try not to make it dry as dog shit. 

First off, I’m going to argue that the relationship between the creators of Supernatural and the fans has always been a dialogue, albeit with a power imbalance. Throughout the series, even before explicitly metanarrative episodes like season 10 “Fan Fiction” and season 4 “the monster at the end of this book,” the creators have always engaged in conversations with the fans through the show. This includes but is not limited to fan conventions, where the creators have actual, live conversations with the fans. Misha Collins admitted at a con that he’d read fanfiction of Cas while he was filming season 4, but it’s pretty clear even from the first season that the creators, at the very least Eric Kripke, were engaging with fans. The show aired around the same time as Twitter and Tumblr were created, both of which opened up new passageways for fans to interact with each other, and for Twitter and Facebook especially, new passageways for fans to interact with creators and celebrities.

But being the creators, they have ultimate control over what is written, filmed and aired, while we can only speculate and make our own transformative interpretations. But at least since s4, they have engaged in meta narrative construction that at once speaks to fans as well as expands the universe in fun and creative ways. My favourite episodes are the ones where we see the Winchesters through the lens of other characters, such as the season 3 episode “Jus In Bello,” in which Sam and Dean are arrested by Victor Henriksen, and the season 7 episode “Slash Fiction” in which Dean and Sam’s dopplegangers rob banks and kill a bunch of people, loathe as I am to admit that season 7 had an effect on any part of me except my upchuck reflex. My second favourite episodes are the meta episodes, and for this episode of Holy Hell, we’ll be discussing a few: The French Mistake, he Monster at the end of this book, the real ghostbusters, Fan Fiction, Metafiction, and Don’t Call Me Shurley. I’ll also discuss Becky more broadly, because, like, of course I’ll be discussing Becky, she died for our sins. 

Let’s take it back. The Monster At The End Of This Book — written by Julie Siege and Nancy Weiner and directed by Mike Rohl. Inarguably one of the better episodes in the first five seasons. Not only is Cas in it, looking so beautiful, but Sam gets something to do, thank god, and it introduces the character of Chuck, who becomes a source of comic relief over the next two seasons. The episode starts with Chuck Shurley, pen named Carver Edlund after my besties, having a vision while passed out drunk. He dreams of Sam and Dean larping as Feds and finding a series of books based on their lives that Chuck has written. They eventually track Chuck down, interrogate him, and realise that he’s a prophet of the lord, tasked with writing the Winchester Gospels. The B plot is Sam plotting to kill Lilith while Dean fails to get them out of the town to escape her. The C plot is Dean and Cas having a moment that strengthens their friendship and leads further into Cas’s eventual disobedience for Dean. Like the movie Disobedience. Exactly like the movie Disobedience. Cas definitely spits in Dean’s mouth, it’s kinda gross to be honest. Maybe I’m just not allo enough to appreciate art. 

When Eric Kripke was showrunner of the first five seasons of Supernatural,  he conceptualised the character of Chuck. Kripke as the author-god introduced the character of the author-prophet who would later become in Jeremy Carver’s showrun seasons the biblical God. Judith May Fathallah writes in “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural” that Kripke writes himself both into and out of the text, ending his era with Chuck winking at the camera, saying, “nothing really ends,” and disappearing. Kripke stayed on as producer, continuing to write episodes through Sera Gamble’s era, and was even inserted in text in the season 6 episode “The French Mistake”. So nothing really does end, not Kripke’s grip on the show he created, not even the show itself, which fans have jokingly referred to as continuing into its 16th season. Except we’re not joking. It will die when all of us are dead, when there is no one left to remember it. According to W R Fisher, humans are homo narrans, natural storytellers. The Supernatural fandom is telling a fidelitous narrative, one which matches our own beliefs, values and experiences instead of that of canon. Instead of, at Fathallah says, “the Greek tradition, that we should struggle to do the right thing simply because it is right, though we will suffer and be punished anyway,” the fans have created an ending for the characters that satisfies each and every one of our desires, because we each create our own endings. It’s better because we get to share them with each other, in the tradition of campfire stories, each telling our own version and building upon the others. If that’s not the epitome of mythmaking then I don’t know. It’s just great. Dean and Cas are married, Eileen and Sam are married, Jack is sometimes a baby who Claire and Kaia are forced to babysit, Jody and Donna are gonna get hitched soon. It’s season 17, time for many weddings, and Kevin Tran is alive. Kripke, you have no control over this anymore, you crusty hag. 

Chuck is introduced as someone with power, but not influence over the story, only how the story is told through the medium of the novels. It’s basically a very badly written, non authorised biography, and Charlie reading literally every book and referencing things she should have no knowledge of is so damn creepy and funny. At first Chuck is surprised by his characters coming to life, despite having written it already, and when shown the intimidating array of weapons in Baby’s trunk he gets real scared. Which is the appropriate response for a skinny 5-foot-8 white guy in a bathrobe who writes terrible fantasy novels for a living. 

As far as I can remember, this is the first explicitly metanarrative episode in the series, or at least the first one with in world consequences. It builds upon the lore of Christianity, angels, and God, while teasing what’s to come. Chuck and Sam have a conversation about how the rest of the season is going to play out, and Sam comes away with the impression that he’ll go down with the ship. They touch on Sam’s addiction to demon blood, which Chuck admits he didn’t write into the books, because in the world of supernatural, addiction should be demonised ha ha at every opportunity, except for Dean’s alcoholism which is cool and manly and should never be analysed as an unhealthy trauma coping mechanism. 

Chuck is mostly impotent in the story of Sam and Dean, but his very presence presents an element of good luck that turns quickly into a force of antagonism in the series four finale, “Lucifer Rising”, when the archangel Raphael who defeats Lilith in this episode also kills Cas in the finale. It’s Cas’s quick thinking and Dean’s quick doing that resolve the episode and save them from Lilith, once again proving that free will is the greatest force in the universe. Cas is already tearing up pages and burning scripts. The fandom does the same, acting as gods of their own making in taking canon and transforming it into fan art. The fans aren’t impotent like Chuck, but neither do we have sway over the story in the way that Cas and Dean do. Sam isn’t interested in changing the story in the same way—he wants to kill Lilith and save the world, but in doing so continues the story in the way it was always supposed to go, the way the angels and the demons and even God wanted him to. 

Neither of them are author-gods in the way that God is. We find out later that Chuck is in fact the real biblical god, and he engineers everything. The one thing he doesn’t engineer, however, is Castiel, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Real Ghostbusters

Season 5’s “The real ghostbusters,” written by Nancy Weiner and Erik Kripke, and directed by James L Conway, situates the Winchesters at a fan convention for the Supernatural books. While there, they are confronted by a slew of fans cosplaying as Sam, Dean, Bobby, the scarecrow, Azazel, and more. They happen to stumble upon a case, in the midst of the game where the fans pretend to be on a case, and with the help of two fans cosplaying as Sam and Dean, they put to rest a group of homicidal ghost children and save the day. Chuck as the special guest of the con has a hero moment that spurs Becky on to return his affections. And at the end, we learn that the Colt, which they’ve been hunting down to kill the devil, was given to a demon named Crowley. It’s a fun episode, but ultimately skippable. This episode isn’t so much metanarrative as it is metatextual—metatextual meaning more than one layer of text but not necessarily about the storytelling in those texts—but let’s take a look at it anyway.

The metanarrative element of a show about a series of books about the brothers the show is based on is dope and expands upon what we saw in “the monster at the end of this book”. But the episode tells a tale about about the show itself, and the fandom that surrounds it. 

Where “The Monster At The End Of This Book” and the season 5 premiere “Sympathy For The Devil” poked at the coiled snake of fans and the concept of fandom, “the real ghostbusters” drags them into the harsh light of an enclosure and antagonises them in front of an audience. The metanarrative element revolves around not only the books themselves, but the stories concocted within the episode: namely Barnes and Demian the cosplayers and the story of the ghosts. The Winchester brothers’s history that we’ve seen throughout the first five seasons of the show is bared in a tongue in cheek way: while we cried with them when Sam and Dean fought with John, now the story is thrown out in such a way as to mock both the story and the fans’ relationship to it. Let me tell you, there is a lot to be made fun of on this show, but the fans’ relationship to the story of Sam, Dean and everyone they encounter along the way isn’t part of it. I don’t mean to be like, wow you can’t make fun of us ever because we’re special little snowflakes and we take everything so seriously, because you are welcome to make fun of us, but when the creators do it, I can’t help but notice a hint of malice. And I think that’s understandable in a way. Like The relationship between creator and fan is both layered and symbiotic. While Kripke and co no doubt owe the show’s popularity to the fans, especially as the fandom has grown and evolved over time, we’re not exactly free of sin. And don’t get me wrong, no fandom is. But the bad apples always seem to outweigh the good ones, and bad experiences can stick with us long past their due.

However, portraying us as losers with no lives who get too obsessed with this show — well, you know, actually, maybe they’re right. I am a loser with no life and I am too obsessed with this show. So maybe they have a point. But they’re so harsh about it. From wincestie Becky who they paint as a desperate shrew to these cosplayers who threaten Dean’s very perception of himself, we’re not painted in a very good light. 

Dean says to Demian and Barnes, “It must be nice to get out of your mom’s basement.” He’s judging them for deriving pleasure from dressing up and pretending to be someone else for a night. He doesn’t seem to get the irony that he does that for a living. As the seasons wore on, the creators made sure to include episodes where Dean’s inner geek could run rampant, often in the form of dressing up like a cowboy, such as season six “Frontierland” and season 13 “Tombstone”. I had to take a break from writing this to laugh for five minutes because Dean is so funny. He’s a car gay but he only likes one car. He doesn’t follow sports. His echolalia causes him to blurt out lines from his favourite movies. He’s a posse magnet. And he loves cosplay. But he will continually degrade and insult anyone who expresses interest in role play, fandom, or interests in general. Maybe that’s why Sam is such a boring person, because Dean as his mother didn’t allow him to have any interests outside of hunting. And when Sam does express interests, Dean insults him too. What a dick. He’s my soulmate, but I am not going to stop listening to hair metal for him. That’s where I draw the line. 

 Where “the monster at the end of this book” is concerned with narrative and authorship, “the real ghostbusters” is concerned with fandom and fan reactions to the show. It’s not really the best example to talk about in an episode about metanarrativity, but I wanted to include it anyway. It veers from talk of narrative by focusing on the people in the periphery of the narrative—the fans and the author. In season 9 “Metafiction,” Metatron asks the question, who gives the story meaning? The text would have you believe it’s the characters. The angels think it’s God. The fandom think it’s us. The creators think it’s them. Perhaps we will never come to a consensus or even a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps that’s the point.

The ultimate takeaway from this episode is that ordinary people, the people Sam and Dean save, the people they save the world for, the people they die for again and again, are what give their story meaning. Chuck defeats a ghost and saves the people in the conference room from being murdered. Demian and Barnes, don’t ask me which is which, burn the bodies of the ghost children and lay their spirits to rest. The text says that ordinary, every day people can rise to the challenge of becoming extraordinary. It’s not a bad note to end on, by any means. And then we find out that Demian and Barnes are a couple, which of course Dean is surprised at, because he lacks object permanence. 

This is no doubt influenced by how a good portion of the transformative fandom are queer, and also a nod to the wincesties and RPF writers like Becky who continue to bottom feed off the wrong message of this show. But then, the creators encourage that sort of thing, so who are the real clowns here? Everyone. Everyone involved with this show in any way is a clown, except for the crew, who were able to feed their families for more than a decade. 

Okay side note… over the past year or so I’ve been in process of realising that even in fandom queers are in the minority. I know the statistic is that 10% of the world population is queer, but that doesn’t seem right to me? Maybe because 4/5 closest friends are queer and I hang around queers online, but I also think I lack object permanence when it comes to straight people. Like I just do not interact with straight people on a regular basis outside of my best friend and parents and school. So when I hear that someone in fandom is straight I’m like, what the fuck… can you keep that to yourself please? Like if I saw Misha Collins coming out as straight I would be like, I didn’t ask and you didn’t have to tell. Okay I’m mostly joking, but I do forget straight people exist. Mostly I don’t think about whether people are gay or trans or cis or straight unless they’ve explicitly said it and then yes it does colour my perception of them, because of course it would. If they’re part of the queer community, they’re my people. And if they’re straight and cis, then they could very well pose a threat to me and my wellbeing. But I never ask people because it’s not my business to ask. If they feel comfortable enough to tell me, that’s awesome.  I think Dean feels the same way. Towards the later seasons at least, he has a good reaction when it’s revealed that someone is queer, even if it is mostly played off as a joke. It’s just that he doesn’t have a frame of reference in his own life to having a gay relationship, either his or someone he’s close to. He says to Cesar and Jesse in season 11 “The Critters” that they fight like brothers, because that’s the only way he knows how to conceptualise it. He doesn’t have a way to categorise his and Cas’s relationship, which is in many ways, long before season 15 “Despair,” harking back even to the parallels between Ruby and Cas in season 3 and 4, a romantic one, aside from that Cas is like a brother to him. Because he’s never had anyone in his life care for him the way Cas does that wasn’t Sam and Bobby, and he doesn’t recognise the romantic element of their relationship until literally Cas says it to him in the third last episode, he just—doesn’t know what his and Cas’s relationship is. He just really doesn’t know. And he grew up with a father who despised him for taking the mom and wife role in their family, the role that John placed him in, for being subservient to John’s wishes where Sam was more rebellious, so of course he wouldn’t understand either his own desires or those of anyone around him who isn’t explicitly shoving their tits in his face. He moulded his entire personality around what he thought John wanted of him, and John says to him explicitly in season 14 “Lebanon”, “I thought you’d have a family,” meaning, like him, wife and two rugrats. And then, dear god, Dean says, thinking of Sam, Cas, Jack, Claire, and Mary, “I have a family.” God that hurts so much. But since for most of his life he hasn’t been himself, he’s been the man he thought his father wanted him to be, he’s never been able to examine his own desires, wants and goals. So even though he’s really good at reading people, he is not good at reading other people’s desires unless they have nefarious intentions. Because he doesn’t recognise what he feels is attraction to men, he doesn’t recognise that in anyone else. 

Okay that’s completely off topic, wow. Getting back to metanarrativity in “The Real Ghostbusters,” I’ll just cap it off by saying that the books in this episode are more a frame for the events than the events themselves. However, there are some good outtakes where Chuck answers some questions, and I’m not sure how much of that is scripted and how much is Rob Benedict just going for it, but it lends another element to the idea of Kripke as author-god. The idea of a fan convention is really cool, because at this point Supernatural conventions had been running for about 4 years, since 2006. It’s definitely a tribute to the fans, but also to their own self importance. So it’s a mixed bag, considering there were plenty of elements in there that show the good side of fandom and fans, but ultimately the Winchesters want nothing to do with it, consider it weird, and threaten Chuck when he says he’ll start releasing books again, which as far as they know is his only source of income. But it’s a fun episode and Dean is a grouchy bitch, so who the holy hell cares?

Season 10 episode “fanfiction” written by my close personal friend Robbie Thompson and directed by Phil Sgriccia is one of the funniest episodes this show has ever done. Not only is it full of metatextual and metanarrative jokes, the entire premise revolves around fanservice, but in like a fun and interesting way, not fanservice like killing the band Kansas so that Dean can listen to “Carry On My Wayward Son” in heaven twice. Twice. One version after another. Like I would watch this musical seven times in theatre, I would buy the soundtrack, I would listen to it on repeat and make all my friends listen to it when they attend my online Jitsi birthday party. This musical is my Hamilton. Top ten episodes of this show for sure. The only way it could be better is if Cas was there. And he deserved to be there. He deserved to watch little dyke Castiel make out with her girlfriend with her cute little wings, after which he and Dean share uncomfortable eye contact. Dean himself is forever coming to terms with the fact that gay people exist, but Cas should get every opportunity he can to hear that it’s super cool and great and awesome to be queer. But really he should be in every episode, all of them, all 300 plus episodes including the ones before angels were introduced. I’m going to commission the guy who edits Paddington into every movie to superimpose Cas standing on the highway into every episode at least once.

“Fan Fiction” starts with a tv script and the words “Supernatural pilot created by Eric Kripke”. This Immediately sets up the idea that it’s toying with narrative. Blah blah blah, some people go missing, they stumble into a scene from their worst nightmares: the school is putting on a musical production of a show inspired by the Supernatural books. It’s a comedy of errors. When people continue to go missing, Sam and Dean have to convince the girls that something supernatural is happening, while retaining their dignity and respect. They reveal that they are the real Sam and Dean, and Dean gives the director Marie a summary of their lives over the last five seasons, but they aren’t taken seriously. Because, like, of course they aren’t. Even when the girls realise that something supernatural is happening, they don’t actually believe that the musical they’ve made and the series of books they’re basing it on are real. Despite how Sam and Dean Winchester were literal fugitives for many years at many different times, and this was on the news, and they were wanted by the FBI, despite how they pretend to be FBI, and no one mentions it??? Did any of the staffwriters do the required reading or just do what I used to do for my 40 plus page readings of Baudrillard and just skim the first sentence of every paragraph? Neat hack for you: paragraphs are set up in a logical order of Topic, Example, Elaboration, Linking sentence. Do you have to read 60 pages of some crusty French dude waxing poetic about how his best friend Pierre wants to shag his wife and making that your problem? Read the first and last sentence of every paragraph. Boom, done. Just cut your work in half. 

The musical highlights a lot of the important moments of the show so far. The brothers have, as Charlie Bradbury says, their “broment,” and as Marie says, their “boy melodrama scene,” while she insinuates that there is a sexual element to their relationship. This show never passed up an opportunity to mention incest. It’s like: mentioning incest 5000 km, not being disgusting 1 km, what a hard decision. Actually, they do have to walk on their knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. But there are other moments—such as Mary burning on the ceiling, a classic, Castiel waiting for Dean at the side of the highway, and Azazel poisoning Sam. With the help of the high schoolers, Sam and Dean overcome Calliope, the muse and bad guy of the episode, and save the day. What began as their lives reinterpreted and told back to them turns into a story they have some agency over.

In this episode, as opposed to “The Monster At The End Of This Book,” The storytelling has transferred from an alcoholic in a bathrobe into the hands of an overbearing and overachieving teenage girl, and honestly why not. Transformative fiction is by and large run by women, and queer women, so Marie and her stage manager slash Jody Mills’s understudy Maeve are just following in the footsteps of legends. This kind of really succinctly summarises the difference between curative fandom and transformative fandom, the former of which is populated mostly by men, and the latter mostly by women. As defined by LordByronic in 2015, Curative fandom is more like enjoying the text, collecting the merchandise, organising the knowledge — basically Reddit in terms of fandom curation. Transformative fandom is transforming the source text in some way — making fanart, fanfic, mvs, or a musical — basically Tumblr in general, and Archive of our own specifically. Like what do non fandom people even do on Tumblr? It is a complete mystery to me. Whereas Chuck literally writes himself into the narrative he receives through visions, Marie and co have agency and control over the narrative by writing it themselves. 

Chuck does appear in the episode towards the end, his first appearance after five seasons. The theory that he killed those lesbian theatre girls makes me wanna curl up and die, so I don’t subscribe to it. Chuck watched the musical and he liked it and he gave unwarranted notes and then he left, the end.

The Supernatural creative team is explicitly acknowledging the fandom’s efforts by making this episode. They’re writing us in again, with more obsessive fans, but with lethbians this time, which makes it infinitely better. And instead of showing us as potential date rapists, we’re just cool chicks who like to make art. And that’s fucken awesome. 

I just have to note that the characters literally say the word Destiel after Dean sees the actors playing Dean and Cas making out. He storms off and tells Sam to shut the fuck up when Sam makes fun of him, because Dean’s sexuality is NOT threatened he just needs to assert his dominance as a straight hetero man who has NEVER looked at another man’s lips and licked his own. He just… forgets that gay people exist until someone reminds him. BUT THEN, after a rousing speech that is stolen from Rent or Wicked or something, he echoes Marie’s words back, saying “put as much sub into that text as you possibly can.” What does Dean know about subbing, I wonder. Okay I’m suddenly reminded that he did literally go to a kink bar and get hit on by a leather daddy. Oh Dean, the experiences you have as a broad-shouldered, pixie-faced man with cowboy legs. You were born for this role.

Metatron is my favourite villain. As one tumblr user pointed out, he is an evil English literature major, which is just a normal English literature major. The season nine episode “Meta Fiction” written by my main man robbie thompson and directed by thomas j wright, happens within a curious season. Castiel, once again, becomes the leader of a portion of the heavenly host to take down Metatron, and Dean is affected by the Mark Of Cain. Sam was recently possessed by Gadreel, who killed Kevin in Sam’s body and then decided to run off with Metatron. Metatron himself is recruiting angels to join him, in the hopes that he can become the new God. It’s the first introduction of Hannah, who encourages Cas to recruit angels himself to take on Metatron. Also, we get to see Gabriel again, who is always a delight. 

This episode is a lot of fun. Metatron poses questions like, who tells a story and who is the most important person in the telling? Is it the writer? The audience? He starts off staring over his typewriter to address the camera, like a pompous dickhead. No longer content with consuming stories, he’s started to write his own. And they are hubristic ones about becoming God, a better god than Chuck ever was, but to do it he needs to kill a bunch of people and blame it on Cas. So really, he’s actually exactly like Chuck who blamed everything on Lucifer. 

But I think the most apt analogy we can use for this in terms of who is the creator is to think of Metatron as a fanfiction writer. He consumes the media—the Winchester Gospels—and starts to write his own version of events—leading an army to become God and kill Cas. Nevermind that no one has been able to kill Cas in a way that matters or a way that sticks. Which is canon, and what Metatron is trying to do is—well not fanon because it actually does impact the Winchesters’ storyline. It would be like if one of the writers of Supernatural began writing Supernatural fanfiction before they got a job on the show. Which as my generation and the generations coming after me get more comfortable with fanfiction and fandom, is going to be the case for a lot of shows. I think it’s already the case for Riverdale. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the woman who wrote the bi Dean essay go to work on Riverdale? Or something? I dunno, I have the post saved in my tumblr likes but that is quagmire of epic proportions that I will easily get lost in if I try to find it. 

Okay let me flex my literary degree. As Englund and Leach say in “Ethnography and the metanarratives of modernity,” “The influential “literary turn,” in which the problems of ethnography were seen as largely textual and their solutions as lying in experimental writing seems to have lost its impetus.” This can be taken to mean, in the context of Supernatural, that while Metatron’s writings seek to forge a new path in history, forgoing fate for a new kind of divine intervention, the problem with Metatron is that he’s too caught up in the textual, too caught up in the writing, to be effectual. And this as we see throughout seasons 9, 10 and 11, has no lasting effect. Cas gets his grace back, Dean survives, and Metatron becomes a powerless human. In this case, the impetus is his grace, which he loses when Cas cuts it out of him, a mirror to Metatron cutting out Cas’s grace. 

However, I realise that the concept of ethnography in Supernatural is a flawed one, ethnography being the observation of another culture: a lot of the angels observe humanity and seem to fit in. However, Cas has to slowly acclimatise to the Winchesters as they tame him, but he never quite fit in—missing cues, not understanding jokes or Dean’s personal space, the scene where he says, “We have a guinea pig? Where?” Show him the guinea pig Sam!!! He wants to see it!!! At most he passes as a human with autism. Cas doesn’t really observe humanity—he observes nature, as seen in season 7 “reading is fundamental” and “survival of the fittest”. Even the human acts he talks about in season 6 “the man who would be king” are from hundreds or thousands of years ago. He certainly doesn’t observe popular culture, which puts him at odds with Dean, who is made up of 90 per cent pop culture references and 10 per cent flannel. Metatron doesn’t seek to blend in with humanity so much as control it, which actually is the most apt example of ethnography for white people in the last—you know, forever. But of course the writers didn’t seek to make this analogy. It is purely by chance, and maybe I’m the only person insane enough to realise it. But probably not. There are a lot of cookies much smarter than me in the Supernatural fandom and they’ve like me have grown up and gone to university and gotten real jobs in the real world and real haircuts. I’m probably the only person to apply Englund and Leach to it though.

And yes, as I read this paper I did need to have one tab open on Google, with the word “define” in the search bar. 

Metatron has a few lines in this that I really like. He says: 

“The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”

“You’re going to have to follow my script.”

“I’m an entity of my word.”

It’s really obvious, but they’re pushing the idea that Metatron has become an agent of authorship instead of just a consumer of media. He even throws a Supernatural book into his fire — a symbolic act of burning the script and flipping the writer off, much like Cas did to God and the angels in season 5. He’s not a Kripke figure so much as maybe a Gamble, Carver or Dabb figure, in that he usurps Chuck and becomes the author-god. This would be extremely postmodern of him if he didn’t just do exactly what Chuck was doing, except worse somehow. In fact, it’s postmodern of Cas to reject heaven’s narrative and fall for Dean. As one tumblr user points out, Cas really said “What’s fate compared to Dean Winchester?”

Okay this transcript is almost 8000 words already, and I still have two more episodes to review, and more things to say, so I’ll leave you with this. Metatron says to Cas, “Out of all of God’s wind up toys, you’re the only one with any spunk.” Why Cas has captured his attention comes down more than anything to a process of elimination. Most angels fucking suck. They follow the rules of whoever puts themselves in charge, and they either love Cas or hate him, or just plainly wanna fuck him, and there have been few angels who stood out. Balthazar was awesome, even though I hated him the first time I watched season 6. He UNSUNK the Titanic. Legend status. And Gabriel was of course the OG who loves to fuck shit up. But they’re gone at this stage in the narrative, and Cas survives. Cas always survives. He does have spunk. And everyone wants to fuck him.  

Season 11 episode 20 “Don’t Call Me Shurley,” the last episode written by the Christ like figure of Robbie Thompson — are we sensing a theme here? — and directed by my divine enemy Robert Singer, starts with Metatron dumpster diving for food. I’m not even going to bother commenting on this because like… it’s supernatural and it treats complex issues like homelessness and poverty with zero nuance. Like the Winchesters live in poverty but it’s fun and cool because they always scrape by but Metatron lives in poverty and it’s funny. Cas was homeless and it was hard but he needed to do it to atone for his sins, and Metatron is homeless and it’s funny because he brought it on himself by being a murderous dick. Fucking hell. Robbie, come on. The plot focuses on God, also known as Chuck Shurley, making himself known to Metatron and asking for Metatron’s opinion on his memoir. Meanwhile, the Winchesters battle another bout of infectious serial killer fog sent by Amara. At the end of the episode, Chuck heals everyone affected by the fog and reveals himself to Sam and Dean. 

Chuck says that he didn’t foresee Metatron trying to become god, but the idea of Season 15 is that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all their lives. When Metatron tries, he fails miserably, is locked up in prison, tortured by Dean, then rendered useless as a human and thrown into the world without a safety net. His authorship is reduced to nothing, and he is reduced to dumpster diving for food. He does actually attempt to live his life as someone who records tragedies as they happen and sells the footage to news stations, which is honestly hilarious and amazing and completely unsurprising because Metatron is, at the heart of it, an English Literature major. In true bastard style, he insults Chuck’s work and complains about the bar, but slips into his old role of editor when Chuck asks him to. 

The theory I’m consulting for this uses the term metanarrative in a different way than I am. They consider it an overarching narrative, a grand narrative like religion. Chuck’s biography is in a sense most loyal to Middleton and Walsh’s view of metanarrative: “the universal story of the world from arche to telos, a grand narrative encompassing world history from beginning to end.” Except instead of world history, it’s God’s history, and since God is construed in Supernatural as just some guy with some powers who is as fallible as the next some guy with some powers, his story has biases and agendas.  Okay so in the analysis I’m getting Middleton and Walsh’s quotes from, James K A Smith’s “A little story about metanarratives,” Smith dunks on them pretty bad, but for Supernatural purposes their words ring true. Think of them as the BuckLeming of Lyotard’s postmodern metanarrative analysis: a stopped clock right twice a day. Is anyone except me understanding the sequence of words I’m saying right now. Do I just have the most specific case of brain worms ever found in human history. I’m currently wearing my oversized Keith Haring shirt and dipping pretzels into peanut butter because it’s 3.18 in the morning and the homosexuals got to me. The total claims a comprehensive metanarrative of world history make do indeed, as Middleton and Walsh claim, lead to violence, stay with me here, because Chuck’s legacy is violence, and so is Metatron’s, and in trying to reject the metanarrative, Sam and Dean enact violence. Mostly Dean, because in season 15 he sacrifices his own son twice to defeat Chuck. But that means literally fighting violence with violence. Violence is, after all, all they know. Violence is the lens through which they interact with the world. If the writers wanted to do literally anything else, they could have continued Dean’s natural character progression into someone who eschews the violence that stems from intergeneration trauma — yes I will continue to use the phrase intergenerational trauma whenever I refer to Dean — and becomes a loving father and husband. Sam could eschew violence and start a monster rehabilitation centre with Eileen.

This episode of Holy Hell is me frantically grabbing at straws to make sense of a narrative that actively hates me and wants to kick me to death. But the violence Sam and Dean enact is not at a metanarrative level, because they are not author-gods of their own narrative. In season 15 “Atomic Monsters,” Becky points out that the ending of the Supernatural book series is bad because the brothers die, and then, in a shocking twist of fate, Dean does die, and the narrative is bad. The writers set themselves a goal post to kick through and instead just slammed their heat into the bars. They set up the dartboard and were like, let’s aim the darts at ourselves. Wouldn’t that be fun. Season 15’s writing is so grossly incompetent that I believe every single conspiracy theory that’s come out of the finale since November, because it’s so much more compelling than whatever the fuck happened on the road so far. Carry on? Why yes, I think I will carry on, carry on like a pork chop, screaming at the bars of my enclosure until I crack my voice open like an egg and spill out all my rage and frustration. The world will never know peace again. It’s now 3.29 and I’ve written over 9000 words of this transcript. And I’m not done.

Middleton and Walsh claim that metanarratives are merely social constructions masquerading as universal truths. Which is, exactly, Supernatural. The creators have constructed this elaborate web of narrative that they want to sell us as the be all and end all. They won’t let the actors discuss how they really feel about the finale. They won’t let Misha Collins talk about Destiel. They want us to believe it was good, actually, that Dean, a recovering alcoholic with a 30 year old infant son and a husband who loves him, deserved to die by getting NAILED, while Sam, who spent the last four seasons, the entirety of Andrew Dabb’s run as showrunner, excelling at creating a hunter network and romancing both the queen of hell and his deaf hunter girlfriend, should have lived a normie life with a normie faceless wife. Am I done? Not even close. I started this episode and I’m going to finish it.

When we find out that Chuck is God in the episode of season 11, it turns everything we knew about Chuck on its head. We find out in Season 15 that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all along, that everything that happened to them is his doing. The one thing he couldn’t control was Cas’s choice to rebel. If we take him at his word, Cas is the only true force of free will in the entire universe, and more specifically, the love that Cas had for Dean which caused him to rebel and fall from heaven. — This theory has holes of course. Why would Lucifer torture Lilith into becoming the first demon if he didn’t have free will? Did Chuck make him do that? And why? So that Chuck could be the hero and Lucifer the bad guy, like Lucifer claimed all along? That’s to say nothing of Adam and Eve, both characters the show introduced in different ways, one as an antagonist and the other as the narrative foil to Dean and Cas’s romance. Thinking about it makes my head hurt, so I’m just not gunna. 

So Chuck was doing the writing all along. And as Becky claims in “Atomic Monsters,” it’s bad writing. The writers explicitly said, the ending Chuck wrote is bad because there’s no Cas and everyone dies, and then they wrote an ending where there is no Cas and everyone dies. So talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. Talk about giant craters in the earth you could see from 800 kilometres away but you still fell into. Meanwhile fan writers have the opportunity to write a million different endings, all of which satisfy at least one person. The fandom is a hydra, prolific and unstoppable, and we’ll keep rewriting the ending a million more times.

And all this is not even talking about the fact that Chuck is a man, Metatron is a man, Sam and Dean and Cas are men, and the writers and directors of the show are, by an overwhelming majority, men. Most of them are white, straight, cis men. Feminist scholarship has done a lot to unpack the damage done by paternalistic approaches to theory, sociology, ethnography, all the -ys, but I propose we go a step further with these men. Kill them. Metanarratively, of course. Amara, the Darkness, God’s sister, had a chance to write her own story without Chuck, after killing everything in the universe, and I think she had the right idea. Knock it all down to build it from the ground up. Billie also had the opportunity to write a narrative, but her folly was, of course, putting any kind of faith in the Winchesters who are also grossly incompetent and often fail up. She is, as all author-gods on this show are, undone by Castiel. The only one with any spunk, the only one who exists outside of his own narrative confines, the only one the author-gods don’t have any control over. The one who died for love, and in dying, gave life. 

The French Mistake

Let’s change the channel. Let’s calm ourselves and cleanse our libras. Let’s commune with nature and chug some sage bongs. 

“The French Mistake” is a song from the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles. In the iconic second last scene of the film, as the cowboys fight amongst themselves, the camera pans back to reveal a studio lot and a door through which a chorus of gay dancersingers perform “the French Mistake”. The lyrics go, “Throw out your hands, stick out your tush, hands on your hips, give ‘em a push. You’ll be surprised you’re doing the French Mistake.” 

I’m not sure what went through the heads of the Supernatural creators when they came up with the season 6 episode, “The French Mistake,” written by the love of my life Ben Edlund and directed by some guy Charles Beeson. Just reading the Wikipedia summary is so batshit incomprehensible. In short: Balthazar sends Sam and Dean to an alternate universe where they are the actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, who play Sam and Dean on the tv show Supernatural. I don’t think this had ever been done in television history before. The first seven seasons of this show are certifiable. Like this was ten years ago. Think about the things that have happened in the last 10 slutty, slutty years. We have lived through atrocities and upheaval and the entire world stopping to mourn, but also we had twitter throughout that entire time, which makes it infinitely worse.

In this universe, Sam and Dean wear makeup, Cas is played by attractive crying man Misha Collins, and Genevieve Padalecki nee Cortese makes an appearance. Magic doesn’t exist, Serge has good ideas, and the two leads have to act in order to get through the day. Sorry man I do not know how to pronounce your name.

Sidenote: I don’t know if me being attracted aesthetically to Misha Collins is because he’s attractive, because this show has gaslighted me into thinking he’s attractive, or because Castiel’s iconic entrance in 2008 hit my developing mind like a torpedo full of spaghetti and blew my fucking brains all over the place. It’s one of life’s little mysteries and God’s little gifts.

Let’s talk about therapy. More specifically, “Agency and purpose in narrative therapy: questioning the postmodern rejection of metanarrative” by Cameron Lee. In this paper, Lee outlines four key ideas as proposed by Freedman and Combs:

Realities are socially constructed

Realities are constituted through language

Realities are organised and maintained through narrative

And there are no essential truths.

Let’s break this down in the case of this episode. Realities are socially constructed: the reality of Sam and Dean arose from the Bush era. Do I even need to elaborate? From what I understand with my limited Australian perception, and being a child at the time, 9/11 really was a prominent shifting point in the last twenty years. As Americans describe it, sometimes jokingly, it was the last time they were really truly innocent. That means to me that until they saw the repercussions of their government’s actions in funding turf wars throughout the middle east for a good chunk of the 20th Century, they allowed themselves to be hindered by their own ignorance. The threat of terrorism ran rampant throughout the States, spurred on by right wing nationalists and gun-toting NRA supporters, so it’s really no surprise that the show Supernatural started with the premise of killing everything in sight and driving around with only your closest kin and a trunk full of guns. Kripke constructed that reality from the social-political climate of the time, and it has wrought untold horrors on the minds of lesbians who lived through the noughties, in that we are now attracted to Misha Collins.

Number two: Realities are constituted through language. Before a show can become a show, it needs to be a script. It’s written down, typed up, and given to actors who say the lines out loud. In this respect, they are using the language of speech and words to convey meaning. But tv shows are not all about words, and they’re barely about scripts. From what I understand of being raised by television, they are about action, visuals, imagery, and behaviours. All of the work that goes into them—the scripts, the lighting, the audio, the sound mixing, the cameras, the extras, the ADs, the gaffing, the props, the stunts, everything—is about conveying a story through the medium of images. In that way, images are the language. The reality of the show Supernatural, inside the show Supernatural, is constituted through words: the script, the journalists talking to Sam, the makeup artist taking off Dean’s makeup, the conversations between the creators, the tweets Misha sends. But also through imagery: the fish tank in Jensen’s trailer, the model poses on the front cover of the magazine, the opulence of Jared’s house, Misha’s iconic sweater. Words and images are the language that constitutes both of these realities. Okay for real, I feel like I’ve only seen this episode max three times, including when I watched it for research for this episode, but I remember so much about it. 

Number three: realities are organised and maintained through narrative. In this universe of the French Mistake, their lives are structured around two narratives: the internal narrative of the show within the show, in which they are two actors on a tv set; and the episode narrative in which they need to keep the key safe and return to their own universe. This is made difficult by the revelation that magic doesn’t work in this universe, however, they find a way. Before they can get back, though, an avenging angel by the name of Virgil guns down author-god Eric Kripke and tries to kill the Winchesters. However, they are saved by Balthazar and the freeze frame and brought back into their own world, the world of Supernatural the show, not Supernatural the show within the show within the nesting doll. And then that reality is done with, never to be revisited or even mentioned, but with an impact that has lasted longer than the second Bush administration.

And number four: there are no essential truths. This one is a bit tricky because I can’t find what Lee means by essential truths, so I’m just going to interpret that. To me, essential truths means what lies beneath the narratives we tell ourselves. Supernatural was a show that ran for 15 years. Supernatural had actors. Supernatural was showrun by four different writers. In the show within a show, there is nothing, because that ceases to exist for longer than the forty two minute episode “The French Mistake”. And since Supernatural no longer exists except in our computers, it is nothing too. It is only the narratives we tell ourselves to sleep better at night, to wake up in the morning with a smile, to get through the day, to connect with other people, to understand ourselves better. It’s not even the narrative that the showrunners told, because they have no agency over it as soon as it shows up on our screens. The essential truth of the show is lost in the translation from creating to consuming. Who gives the story meaning? The people watching it and the people creating it. We all do. 

Lee says that humans are predisposed to construct narratives in order to make sense of the world. We see this in cultures from all over the world: from cave paintings to vases, from The Dreaming to Beowulf, humans have always constructed stories. The way you think about yourself is a story that you’ve constructed. The way you interact with your loved ones and the furries you rightfully cyberbully on Twitter is influenced by the narratives you tell yourself about them. And these narratives are intricate, expansive, personalised, and can colour our perceptions completely, so that we turn into a different person when we interact with one person as opposed to another. 

Whatever happened in season 6, most of which I want to forget, doesn’t interest me in the way I’m telling myself the writers intended. For me, the entirety of season 6 was based around the premise of Cas being in love with Dean, and the complete impotence of this love. He turns up when Dean calls, he agonises as he watches Dean rake leaves and live his apple pie life with Lisa, and Dean is the person he feels most horribly about betraying. He says, verbatim, to Sam, “Dean and I do share a more profound bond.” And Balthazar says, “You’re confusing me with the other angel, the one in the dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you.” He says this in season 6, and we couldn’t do a fucken thing about it. 

The song “The French Mistake” shines a light on the hidden scene of gay men performing a gay narrative, in the midst of a scene about the manliest profession you can have: professional horse wrangler, poncho wearer, and rodeo meister, the cowboy. If this isn’t a perfect encapsulation of the lovestory between Dean and Cas, which Ben Edlund has been championing from day fucking one of Misha Collins walking onto that set with his sex hair and chapped lips, then I don’t know what the fuck we’re even doing here. What in the hell else could it possibly mean. The layers to this. The intricacy. The agendas. The subtextual AND blatant queerness. The micro aggressions Crowley aimed at Car in “The Man Who Would Be King,” another Bedlund special. Bed Edlund is a fucking genius. Bed Edlund is cool girl. Ben Edlund is the missing link. Bed Edlund IS wikileaks. Ben Edlund is a cool breeze on a humid summer day. Ben Edlund is the stop loading button on a browser tab. Ben Edlund is the perfect cross between Spotify and Apple Music, in which you can search for good playlists, but without having to be on Spotify. He can take my keys and fuck my wife. You best believe I’m doing an entire episode of Holy Hell on Bedlund’s top five. He is the reason I want to get into staffwriting on a tv show. I saw season 4 episode “On the head of a pin” when my brain was still torpedoed spaghetti mush from the premiere, and it nestled its way deep into my exposed bones, so that when I finally recovered from that, I was a changed person. My god, this transcript is 11,000 words, and I haven’t even finished the Becky section. Which is a good transition.

Oh, Becky. She is an incarnation of how the writers, or at least Kripke, view the fans. Watching season 5 “Sympathy for the Devil” live in 2009 was a whole fucking trip that I as a baby gay was not prepared for. Figuring out my sexuality was a journey that started with the Supernatural fandom and is in some aspects still raging against the dying of the light today. Add to that, this conception of the audience was this, like, personification of the librarian cellist from Juno, but also completely without boundaries, common sense, or shame. It made me wonder about my position in the narrative as a consumer consuming. Is that how Kripke saw me, specifically? Was I like Becky? Did my forays into DeanCasNatural on El Jay dot com make me a fucking loser whose only claim to fame is writing some nasty fanfiction that I’ve since deleted all traces of? Don’t get me wrong, me and my unhinged Casgirl friends loved Becky. I can’t remember if I ever wrote any fanfiction with her in it because I was mostly writing smut, which is extremely Becky coded of me, but I read some and my friends and I would always chat about her when she came up. She was great entertainment value before season 7. But in the eyes of the powers that be, Becky, like the fans themselves, are expendable. First they turned her into a desperate bride wannabe who drugs Sam so that he’ll be with her, then Chuck waves his hand and she disappears. We’re seeing now with regards to Destiel, Cas, and Misha Collins this erasure of them from the narrative. Becky says in season 15 “Atomic Monsters” that the ending Chuck writes is bad because, for one, there’s no Cas, and that’s exactly what’s happening to the text post-finale. It literally makes me insane akin to the throes of mania to think about the layers of this. They literally said, “No Cas = bad” and now Misha isn’t even allowed to talk in his Cassona voice—at least at the time I wrote that—to the detriment of the fans who care about him. It’s the same shit over and over. They introduce something we like, they realise they have no control over how much we like it, and then they pretend they never introduced it in the first place. Season 7, my god. The only reason Gamble brought back Cas was because the ratings were tanking the show. I didn’t even bother watching most of it live, and would just hear from my friends whether Cas was in the episodes or not. And then Sera, dear Sera, had the gall to say it was a Homer’s Odyssey narrative. I’m rusty on Homer aka I’ve never read it but apparently Odysseus goes away, ends up with a wife on an island somewhere, and then comes back to Terabithia like it never happened. How convenient. But since Sera Gamble loves to bury her gays, we can all guess why Cas was written out of the show: Cas being gay is a threat to the toxic heteronormativity spouted by both the show and the characters themselves. In season 15, after Becky gets her life together, has kids, gets married, and starts a business, she is outgrowing the narrative and Chuck kills her. The fans got Destiel Wedding trending on Twitter, and now the creators are acting like he doesn’t exist. New liver, same eagles.

I have to add an adendum: as of this morning, Sunday 11th, don’t ask me what time that is in Americaland, Misha Collins did an online con/Q&A thing and answered a bunch of questions about Cas and Dean, which goes to show that he cannot be silenced. So the narrative wants to be told. It’s continuing well into it’s 16th or 17th season. It’s going to keep happening and they have no recourse to stop it. So fuck you, Supernatural.

I did write the start of a speech about representation but, who the holy hell cares. I also read some disappointing Masters theses that I hope didn’t take them longer to research and write than this episode of a podcast I’m making for funsies took me, considering it’s the same number of pages. Then again I have the last four months and another 8 years of fandom fuelling my obsession, and when I don’t sleep I write, hence the 4,000 words I knocked out in the last 12 hours. 

Some final words. Lyotard defines postmodernism, the age we live in, as an incredulity towards metanarratives. Modernism was obsessed with order and meaning, but postmodernism seeks to disrupt that. Modernists lived within the frame of the narrative of their society, but postmodernists seek to destroy the frame and live within our own self-written contexts. Okay I love postmodernist theory so this has been a real treat for me. Yoghurt, Sam? Postmodernist theory? Could I BE more gay? 

Middleton and Walsh in their analysis of postmodernism claim that biblical faith is grounded in metanarrative, and explore how this intersects with an era that rejects metanarrative. This is one of the fundamental ideas Supernatural is getting at throughout definitely the last season, but other seasons as well. The narratives of Good vs Evil, Michael vs Lucifer, Dean vs Sam, were encoded into the overarching story of the show from season 1, and since then Sam and Dean have sought to break free of them. Sam broke free of John’s narrative, which was the hunting life, and revenge, and this moralistic machismo that they wrapped themselves up in. If they’re killing the evil, then they’re not the evil. That’s the story they told, and the impetus of the show that Sam was sucked back into. But this thread unravelled in later seasons when Dean became friends with Benny and the idea that all supernatural creatures are inherently evil unravelled as well. While they never completely broke free of John’s hold over them, welcoming Jack into their lives meant confronting a bias that had been ingrained in them since Dean was 4 years old and Sam 6 months. In the face of the question, “are all monsters monstrous?” the narrative loosens its control. Even by questioning it, it throws into doubt the overarching narrative of John’s plan, which is usurped at the end of season 2 when they kill Azazel by Dean’s demon deal and a new narrative unfolds. John as author-god is usurped by the actual God in season 4, who has his own narrative that controls the lives of Sam, Dean and Cas. 

Okay like for real, I do actually think the metanarrativity in Supernatural is something that should be studied by someone other than me, unless you wanna pay me for it and then shit yeah. It is extremely cool to introduce a biographical narrative about the fictional narrative it’s in. It’s cool that the characters are constantly calling this narrative into focus by fighting against it, struggling to break free from their textual confines to live a life outside of the external forces that control them. And the thing is? The really real, honest thing? They have. Sam, Dean and Cas have broken free of the narrative that Kripke, Carver, Gamble and Dabb wrote for them. The very fact that the textual confession of love that Cas has for Dean ushered in a resurgence of fans, fandom and activity that has kept the show trending for five months after it ended, is just phenomenal. People have pointed out that fans stopped caring about Game of Thrones as soon as it ended. Despite the hold they had over tv watchers everywhere, their cultural currency has been spent. The opposite is true for Supernatural. Despite how the finale of the show angered and confused people, it gains more momentum every day. More fanworks, more videos, more fics, more art, more ire, more merch is being generated by the fans still. The Supernatural subreddit, which was averaging a few posts a week by season 15, has been incensed by the finale. And yours truly happily traipsed back into the fandom snake pit after 8 years with a smile on my face and a skip in my step ready to pump that dopamine straight into my veins babeeeeeeyyyyy. It’s been WILD. I recently reconnected with one of my mutuals from 2010 and it’s like nothing’s changed. We’re both still unhinged and we both still simp for Supernatural. Even before season 15, I was obsessed with the podcast Ride Or Die, which I started listening to in late 2019, and Supernatural was always in the back of my mind. You just don’t get over your first fandom. Actually, Danny Phantom was my first fandom, and I remember being 12 talking on Danny Phantom forums to people much too old to be the target audience of the show. So I guess that hasn’t left me either. And the fondest memories I have of Supernatural is how the characters have usurped their creators to become mythic, long past the point they were supposed to die a quiet death. The myth weaving that the Supernatural fandom is doing right now is the legacy that will endure. 

References

I got all of these for free from Google Scholar! 

Judith May Fathallah, “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural.” 

James K A Smith, “A Little Story About Metanarratives: Lyotard, Religion and Postmodernism Revisited.” 2001.

Cameron Lee, “Agency and Purpose in Narrative Therapy: Questioning the Postmodern Rejection of Metanarrative.” 2004.

Harri Englund and James Leach, “Ethnography and the Meta Narratives of Modernity.” 2000.

https://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/mel-brooks-explains-french-mistake-blazing-saddles-blu-ray/

[thecrownnet]

October 3, 2020

Series four of The Crown takes on Princess Diana: exclusive pictures and interviews Charles has found a wife, Andy’s got a racy new girlfriend and Thatcher’s coming for tea... Megan Agnew gets an exclusive tour behind the scenes of the most wild and lavish series yet

Lasers. That’s what helped Emma Corrin understand Princess Diana in the latest series of The Crown. When the cameras were rolling, she imagined that lasers were pointing at her, as if she were in a spy film or a bank heist drama. It was her way of imagining hundreds of people staring right at her. Lasers helped her with the iconic Diana head tilt. She pretended she was shying away from them.

Corrin could also draw on her own trajectory as a 24-year-old actress. Before landing her part in The Crown, she was an unknown. Suddenly “there’s a huge amount of pressure”, she says.

When I visit the set at Winchester Cathedral, which is pretending to be St Paul’s, the paparazzi arrive to catch Corrin pretending to be Diana. She’s dressed in a replica of the outfit they papped at the actual royal wedding rehearsal almost 40 years ago. Every time she moves between buildings and trailers, Corrin has to be shielded with umbrellas. Life imitates art imitates life.

Almost every person Corrin has spoken to since getting the role has their own “Diana moment” — they might once have waved at her car in the street, been a pupil at a school she visited or knew someone who sat next to her at a dinner. Diana was one of the first celebrities to whom people laid claim. “Everyone has this ownership,” says Corrin. She was, and still is, the People’s Princess. But Corrin is trying not to think too much about it. Public expectation has been “overwhelming since the beginning”, she says. She wants to do Diana “proud”. “I know that’s strange and cheesy, but I feel like I know her.”

Emma Corrin as Princess Diana/ NETFLIX

The first television series of The Crown, which aired in 2016, was at the time the most expensive in history. Each series since has been estimated to have cost upwards of £50 million. The first two covered the first decade of Elizabeth II’s rule to wide acclaim, but series three — in which Her Majesty Claire Foy was succeeded by Olivia Colman — had mixed reviews. “The jewel in Netflix’s tiara has lost its shine,” said one. It was “okay”, said another.

Now, with series four’s reported £100 million budget eclipsing the Queen’s own sovereign grant last year of £82.2 million, The Crown is barrelling straight into the Eighties era of celebrity glamour and modern party politics grit. Peter Morgan, the show’s creator, is taking on two of the most controversial public figures of the past 50 years: Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher. “The word ‘iconic’ is overused, but in the case of these two women quite justified,” Morgan says. Both have passionate fans and detractors. “Writing them was a bit of a high-wire act, but it was exhilarating.”

We meet Diana as a teenager, scampering around her huge family home in Northamptonshire. She is young and apologetic. The Prince of Wales, at that time dating her eldest sister, is rather distracted. A number of years later, Diana is leaving her relatively modest flat in Earls Court and her job as a nursery school assistant to move into Clarence House — but finds herself in solitude. Bored and lonely, 19-year-old Diana rollerskates down corridors to Duran Duran and sits all by herself in her chamber. One night, after finding out about Prince Charles’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, she gorges on puddings and makes herself vomit them back up.

Behind the scenes: the latest series of The Crown/ NETFLIX

*Spoilers*

It is a dark moment that Corrin wanted to get right. She listened to real-life accounts of people who had suffered from bulimia and talked with experts from the eating disorder charity Beat. Diana herself said that it was the most “discreet” way of harming herself: “Everyone in the family knew about the bulimia,” she said in recordings from the 1990s later made into a Channel 4 documentary.

“Drawing on my experience,” says Corrin, “not that I’ve experienced that kind of self-harm, but mental health in general, it can lead you down a very dark path when you’re struggling to cope, when things feel out of control. Diana very much doesn’t have the love and comfort and attention she needs from the man she loves or the family, who aren’t really acting as a family to her. There is a build-up of emotion she can’t deal with and making herself sick is a way of taking back control.”

When Josh O’Connor, who plays the Prince of Wales, first read the script for this series he thought: “Oh God, how can Charles be like that to Diana? But he feels wronged. He feels like she has an addiction to the spotlight,” he says. “I have to feel sympathy for him in that world. This is a family who have an intense inability to be emotional and he has inherited that awkwardness. In this series there’s an awful lot of Charles trying to explain himself and not being allowed to. He’s trying to say that if he can be with Camilla, then at least two of the three people can be happy. As it is, there’s three miserable people.”

The Crown works differently to other shows in that the “writers’ room” is not made up of writers but researchers, who constantly feed back to Morgan, the king of The Crown. It means that for each word eventually spoken on film, there are pages and pages of briefing notes. Annie Sulzberger, head of research, started this series by hiring a young team. “I wanted people who did not grow up believing one or the other [Diana and Thatcher],” she says. “You have to be curious enough and ignorant enough, I suppose, to write the kind of work we need.”

This series will span the Thatcher years — 1979 to 1990 — and will include the assassination of Charles’s great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten, by the IRA, Charles and Diana’s wedding, and the Falklands War. Once the team has laid out a timeline, Morgan picks out the events he wants to feature. The research team starts to hone in on each, getting increasingly “micro” in their investigations. In the making of this series, one of the team spent two weeks researching the label on a bottle of wine from which a character briefly swigs.

Dress rehearsal: Josh O’Connor and Emma Corrin act out Charles and Diana’s wedding run-through/ NETFLIX

As the show has progressed, the fact-checking work has multiplied, thanks to the tabloid journalism of the 1980s. “It’s not just about words being printed,” Sulzberger says, “but who wrote it. Diana will become very close with a journalist called Richard Kay and feed him information, and Charles’s team will do the same. So you need to start unpicking the biographies of all the writers in order to know that what you’re doing has some objectivity.”

Did the team speak to any of Diana’s family or friends? “No.” Do the producers give any material to the Palace to see beforehand? “No. We have no connection to them that would result in editorial shifts. These are real people, these are real stories and we are filling in the moments that aren’t recorded — private conversations, moments of reflection, philosophical moments.”

When I ask Morgan if it’s true that he meets high-ranking courtiers four times a year, he is keen to clear up that he doesn’t. “I have never had any discussions with anyone actively working at the Palace,” he says. “The two worlds, the royal household and The Crown, exist in a world of mutual deniability, which I’m sure is every bit as important to them as it is to us.”

Corrin, though, did speak to Patrick Jephson, Diana’s private secretary, who appears as a fictionalised character in this series. “I got a sense of her joy from him,” Corrin says. “He said she was so naturally happy. When she joined the royal family, she had come from living with flatmates in Earls Court and she was a very normal girl. Patrick said she was still full of that girlish silliness, very down to earth.”

The couple themselves at the real thing in 1981 MIKE LLOYD/SHUTTERSTOCK/REX

The executive producer Suzanne Mackie says that “particularly now” The Crown team feels a sense of responsibility “to living people, people’s children, people’s parents. Obviously what we don’t do is engage on a fact level with the royal family. We have a tacit understanding that they need distance from us and we need distance from them.”

It is a cold day in January and I am watching Charles and Diana’s wedding rehearsal in Winchester. About 75 per cent of the show is filmed on location around the world, over the course of seven months. The rest is filmed at the show’s base, Elstree Studios, just north of London.

Today in Winchester Cathedral there is a crew of 78 and a cast of almost 200. The sight is as epic as the show’s budget would suggest. Between takes, Corrin sits on the stone steps by the altar, scrolling on her iPhone with one hand and biting her fingernails on the other. Even before the clapperboard snaps shut, the resemblance between her and the princess is uncanny.

Sidonie Roberts, head buyer and assistant costume designer, has a timeline of photos of Diana covering the wall of her studio at Elstree. Roberts is devoted to the cause. She travels to Paris to buy buttons from the same shop the Queen’s dressmaker uses (it sells more than 30,000 types of button) and to Soho to rummage in basements for fabric. Last year she was in a Bangladeshi fabric shop in Brick Lane, east London, when she saw a roll of material right on the very top shelf. “It was still in its plastic, but I just knew — that’s Diana’s colour,” Roberts says. She got a ladder, climbed to the top, pulled down the fabric and bought it for £3.50 a metre. When Roberts got back to the studio at Elstree, she unrolled it and saw a stamp at the bottom: “The Lady Diana Collection, made in Japan.” Roberts did some research. It was real silk, from a collection made in the princess’s honour.

In the corner of the studio an assistant is gluing tiny pearls to Diana’s flat wedding shoes. She has been decorating them, exactly like the originals, for a day and a half. “We’ve had a long conversation about the size of those pearls,” says Roberts. David and Elizabeth Emanuel, who designed Diana’s original wedding dress, donated patterns to the show, which were used to make the new version. With its 25ft train, it took ten people to get Corrin into the dress. In the show it is seen in full, and only from behind, for no more than 15 seconds.

Paying their respects: Olivia Colman as the Queen and the rest of the royal family at the funeral of Lord Mountbatten/ NETFLIX

Corrin is masterful at inhabiting Diana’s coyness — hunching her shoulders towards her ears as she walks, the smirk, her intonation. Diana’s voice was the “polar opposite” of the royals’, says William Conacher, The Crown’s dialect coach. “She moved her jaw twice as much, so her voice was more forward, open, easier to access, and I don’t think it’s especially revelatory to suggest accessibility was her shtick,” he says. “She used a minor key that made her seem vulnerable. Despite the Queen’s and Prince Charles’s accents being ‘stiffer’ to listen to, I think it comes entirely naturally, whereas I find Diana’s voice more studied. I think she spoke to have an effect.”

What sort of research did Colman do for series four’s Queen? “Yeah, I don’t do research,” she says when we speak on the phone in the summer. “The research team on The Crown is a bit like the British Library. It’s extraordinary, and when they kick in, your computer can’t really cope with the amount of stuff they send you.” Was there something in particular that the team sent her that made things click? “No.” There is a longish silence. It seems Colman’s royal duty is waning. “They’ve got every image and film of the Queen ever made. I’ve also got three kids, so I can’t spend all my time going through all of it.”

As she wraps up a second series of The Crown — Imelda Staunton will take over for five and six — Colman knows that she would “really not like” to have the Queen’s job. “There are very few people who are forced into a job and have no choice about it,” she says. “She’s done it with dignity, for decades, bless her. It’s amazing.”

The funeral of Lord Mountbatten took place in 1979 BENTLEY ARCHIVE/POPPERFOTO/GETTY

If there were rumours of Elizabeth II being unhappy about the last series of The Crown, I can’t imagine she’ll be too chuffed about this one. Series four’s Queen is colder and more distant, and the effects of her duty on her children more obvious: Charles is heavy with melancholy, Anne feels unheard, Edward is portrayed as a spoilt bully and Andrew is dangerously arrogant.

Speaking of Andrew, there is a subtle nod towards recent events. At one point the prince discusses a young American actress he is dating. The actress had recently played a 17-year-old who must entertain several “old predators who seduce the vulnerable, helpless young Emily”. The real prince dated the actress Koo Stark in 1981, who had starred in The Awakening of Emily, which had a near-identical plot.

In series four, the pivotal relationship between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher begins well. They are respectful of one another as no-nonsense working mothers, but tensions arise — not least, over tea etiquette at Balmoral.

In preparation for her role as the Iron Lady, Gillian Anderson met Charles Moore, Thatcher’s biographer, as well as secretaries who worked with her. “The only way for me to go about sitting inside of her was to find the reason behind her actions — growing up, what she learnt from her father, how much she truly believed that she was the answer and as long as we all took the sour medicine now we’d be able to turn around this country, completely shutting her eyes to the people that she was turning out on the street.”

Anderson eventually “settled into” the body of Thatcher. “She walked very fast, always up ahead,” Anderson says. “She would power forward in front of presidents. With [Ronald] Reagan she would supposedly be alongside him, but was walking ahead. Always walking ahead of [husband] Denis, telling him to catch up.”

Thatcher’s barnet also features. In one scene she spends an asphyxiating four seconds hairspraying it in preparation for a showdown with the Queen. The hairdo took endless camera tests before Morgan was happy with it. “It essentially meant destroying it so it had an overprocessed ‘frothy’ quality,” says the hair and make-up designer Cate Hall. “To treat a wig so badly was against all of our instincts — they’re so expensive — but I’m grateful now that we went through the process with Peter, with him saying no, more, it’s not right, try again.”

Clash of the titans: Margaret Thatcher, played by Gillian Anderson, is filmed meeting the Queen, played by Olivia Colman, in a memorable scene from series four/ NETFLIX

Series five will have a whole new cast. Colman says she is “not the sort of person who keeps the shoes of a character they played 20 years ago”. But Helena Bonham Carter is going to miss Princess Margaret. “She does pop out [in everyday life],” she says. “The other day I was at some public event and there was the normal scramble of people and I just told them, ‘No, shut up.’ The finger came out, which is very her, and I said, ‘Shut up and wait. Don’t get hysterical.’ So I’ve got the bossy side of her.”

Originally Morgan said there would be two more series after this one. Then he changed his mind, describing series five as “the perfect time and place to stop”. Now there are two more again (“To do justice to the richness and complexity of the story,” he reneged). The show is creeping closer to the modern day. It is now said to be ending in the 2000s, spanning, perhaps, Charles and Diana’s divorce, the deaths of Diana, Margaret and the Queen Mother, the marriage of Charles and Camilla, and the teenage and twentysomething princes. “I want to end it close enough to present day to feel that we have completed a long journey and distant enough to feel historical,” says Morgan. “I have a specific incident in mind, but until I’ve actually written it and seen if it works, I can’t commit to discussing it.”

On set with Mackie, I mention Harry and Meghan. “Too often,” the couple posted on their Instagram page that month, “we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring.” Is it possible, I ask Mackie, for the royal family to humanise themselves while still justifying their existence as something mightier, more important, regal? “That’s where you go wrong, as a public figure, letting light in on the magic, especially as a monarch,” she replies. “You have to be an ideal. After years and years of that subjugation of self in order to put duty first, you, the essence of you, is buried somewhere. The Queen is a tiny little person inside many, many Russian dolls.”

Series four of The Crown is available on Netflix from November 15

[tessandscottforever18]

Sept 12

Fresh off the UK release of Amazon Studios’ reimagined 'Cinderella', pop icon Camila Cabello talks to Nick Levine about her starring role in the film and her next chapter.

Camila Cabello is in a very good place right now. The utterly joyous video for “Don’t Go Yet”, the lead single from her forthcoming album Familia, shows her dancing around a dinner table surrounded by family, friends and RuPaul’s Drag Race star Valentina. An eyepopping colour palette definitely complements the song: a bright and buoyant Latin bop banger that hits like musical serotonin. In the comments beneath the YouTube video, the singer has added a sweet message: “Hope you guys love this and that it inspires many wine drunk kitchen dance parties for you and your familia.”

The video may be a visual feast, but it’s no fantasy. Cabello says it reflects a recent healing period during which she focused on “collective joy and community and really growing the seeds of my relationships”. The casual dinner parties she threw with partner Shawn Mendes became a nourishing ritual as she stepped off the pop star treadmill for the first time in nearly a decade. This breather was long overdue given that Cabello’s career has maintained an upward trajectory ever since she entered the US version of The X Factor in 2012. Though she auditioned as a solo artist, she ended up landing a record deal as a member of Fifth Harmony, a girl group formed One Direction-style on the show. Four years later, she went solo and cemented her A-list status with “Havana”, one of the bestselling digital songs of all time. She now has more than a dozen platinum singles to her name, including 2016’s collaboration with Machine Gun Kelly, “Bad Things”, and 2019’s “South of the Border” with Ed Sheeran and Cardi B.

Still, Cabello’s pace of life slowed down last year for one reason only: the pandemic. “It’s been an absolutely traumatic thing that’s happened to the world,” she says today, speaking on the phone shortly before she records Spanish overdubs for her movie debut in a feminist reimagining of Cinderella. “But in terms of my mental health, before that particular moment, I was really approaching… ” The 24-year-old pauses, then corrects herself. “I mean, I don’t think I was even approaching, I think I was burned out. And I feel like that necessary forced pause [caused by the pandemic] just allowed me to look at my life differently. It allowed me to recalibrate what makes me happy and what is important to me. I feel like it saved me in a lot of ways.”

Cabello has spoken candidly in the past about her struggles with anxiety, which in turn led to obsessive-compulsive disorder. Today, she likens managing this anxiety to a “constant ebb and flow”, which is made easier by her new therapist, but says the pandemic let her rethink her attitude towards work. “I’m fortunate enough to choose what I say yes and no to,” she explains. “That’s what’s really important to me this time around. If it’s affecting my mental health in a negative way, I’ll say no and do it another way.”

“I feel like the public and the media could almost have become a third person in our relationship.”

A project she’s clearly fully invested in is Cinderella, a new film version of the familiar fairy tale, directed by Pitch Perfect’s Kay Cannon. Cabello stars as the title character opposite Broadway legend Idina Menzel as her non-wicked stepmother and Pose actor Billy Porter as her fairy godparent. According to Cabello, these reimagined characters are just two of the film’s progressive elements. “Those classic fairy tales were all written by men. That’s why the story [of Cinderella] is that of a woman who’s saved by a prince,” Cabello says. “But in our version, which is written and directed by a woman, she’s saved herself and is trying to build her own life. It’s a much more empowering version of the story.”

In fact, Cabello’s Cinderella story has “no evil people in it at all”, because it places the focus firmly on the heroine’s self-actualisation. “Cinderella’s dream is to live an independent life at a time when women aren’t allowed to have careers,” she explains. “So she’s seeing something that’s wrong in the world and not waiting for someone else to correct it for her – she’s doing it herself. I think that’s a really necessary, positive update.”

Cabello has also been using her formidable social media presence – 54.5 million followers on Instagram, 11.9 million on TikTok – to spread some very necessary positivity. After being papped on a run in mid-July wearing “a top that shows my belly”, Cabello told her TikTok followers she thought “Damn!” before remembering that “being at war with your body is so last season”. Today, she says she experiences much less body insecurity since sharing this post. “I felt like I was not alone in feeling that or alone in my frustration,” she says. “And so next time there are pictures of me where my belly is out, there’s gonna be a community of women who have heard me talk about the way that makes me feel and who support me. And that is honestly so liberating.”

She has even used TikTok to break down a human rights issue that is close to her heart. In July, Cabello shared a well-received video explaining that recent protests in Cuba aren’t “about lack of Covid resources and medicine”, but are really “the latest layer in a 62-year-old story of a communist regime and a dictatorship”. She says speaking out in this way was a matter of moral obligation for her. “You know, I’m Cuban and I still have family on the island,” she says – Cabello was born in Havana, then moved to Miami with her parents when she was six. “And so much of what I do is Cuban culture. I mean, ‘Havana’ is one of my most successful songs so far,” she adds. “So when I’m in the United States, showing the beautiful part of Cuban culture, I feel like I also have to be there for the hard part, for the people there who are struggling.”

“If it’s affecting my mental health in a negative way, I’ll say no and do it another way.”

“Havana”, a sultry and infectious celebration of the Cuban capital, was so huge that it could easily have overshadowed her debut album. But thankfully, 2018’s Camila was a cool and cohesive affair that also spawned the brilliant angsty banger “Never Be the Same”. Then in 2019 Cabello launched her second album, Romance, with “Señorita”, a massively successful duet with Mendes that has now racked up 1.9 billion Spotify streams. When Cabello and Mendes confirmed they were dating shortly after its release, they became gossip-site staples – something they remain today – and were accused of faking the relationship for publicity. The impact of this negative coverage on their mental health was barely even mentioned.

Still, more than two years later, Cabello says she and Mendes have managed to maintain their privacy. “I feel like the public and the media could almost have become a third person in our relationship,” she says. “But that’s not been a thing for us because Shawn and I don’t even look at social media like that. Even though we know it’s there, it’s almost like it doesn’t exist for us. And that’s why we don’t live in LA. We live in Miami or Toronto, where there’s less paparazzi and that kind of attention is less of a thing.”

Looking ahead, Cabello says she’s excited for fans to hear Familia, which she feels has greater “intimacy” than her previous albums because she worked so closely with core collaborators Scott Harris, Ricky Reed and Mike Sabath. Because she trusted them implicitly, Cabello says she was able to “freestyle” during recording sessions and really pour her heart out. “You know, there’s one song [I’ve recorded for the album] where I’m talking about my mental health and anxiety without [specifically] saying it’s about anxiety,” she says. “But it’s about what anxiety looks and feels like for me in my body and in my mind. And that wasn’t something I came into the room intending to write about. Ricky just showed me a piece of music he had and it all came out of me.”

Cabello says this “stream of consciousness” songwriting style “never would have happened” when she was recording Camila and Romance because, for her, there was still too much “tension” in the room. But this time around, she felt comfortable enough to be truly vulnerable. In this respect, Cabello draws a comparison between her own creative evolution and that of Billie Eilish, who recently released her acclaimed second album, Happier Than Ever. “I saw this quote from Billie where she said, ‘I wasn’t scared, it wasn’t forced, there was no pressure, it was just really nice.’ And I feel the same way about this album’s process for me,” she says. The message is clear: in both her personal and professional lives, Camila Cabello is in a very good place.

[shelovescontrol91]

Camila Cabello is in a very good place right now. The utterly joyous video for “Don’t Go Yet”, the lead single from her forthcoming album Familia, shows her dancing around a dinner table surrounded by family, friends and RuPaul’s Drag Race star Valentina. An eyepopping colour palette definitely complements the song: a bright and buoyant Latin bop banger that hits like musical serotonin. In the comments beneath the YouTube video, the singer has added a sweet message: “Hope you guys love this and that it inspires many wine drunk kitchen dance parties for you and your familia.”

The video may be a visual feast, but it’s no fantasy. Cabello says it reflects a recent healing period during which she focused on “collective joy and community and really growing the seeds of my relationships”. The casual dinner parties she threw with partner Shawn Mendes became a nourishing ritual as she stepped off the pop star treadmill for the first time in nearly a decade. This breather was long overdue given that Cabello’s career has maintained an upward trajectory ever since she entered the US version of The X Factor in 2012. Though she auditioned as a solo artist, she ended up landing a record deal as a member of Fifth Harmony, a girl group formed One Direction-style on the show. Four years later, she went solo and cemented her A-list status with “Havana”, one of the bestselling digital songs of all time. She now has more than a dozen platinum singles to her name, including 2016’s collaboration with Machine Gun Kelly, “Bad Things”, and 2019’s “South of the Border” with Ed Sheeran and Cardi B.

Still, Cabello’s pace of life slowed down last year for one reason only: the pandemic. “It’s been an absolutely traumatic thing that’s happened to the world,” she says today, speaking on the phone shortly before she records Spanish overdubs for her movie debut in a feminist reimagining of Cinderella. “But in terms of my mental health, before that particular moment, I was really approaching… ” The 24-year-old pauses, then corrects herself. “I mean, I don’t think I was even approaching, I think I was burned out. And I feel like that necessary forced pause [caused by the pandemic] just allowed me to look at my life differently. It allowed me to recalibrate what makes me happy and what is important to me. I feel like it saved me in a lot of ways.”

Cabello has spoken candidly in the past about her struggles with anxiety, which in turn led to obsessive-compulsive disorder. Today, she likens managing this anxiety to a “constant ebb and flow”, which is made easier by her new therapist, but says the pandemic let her rethink her attitude towards work. “I’m fortunate enough to choose what I say yes and no to,” she explains. “That’s what’s really important to me this time around. If it’s affecting my mental health in a negative way, I’ll say no and do it another way.”

A project she’s clearly fully invested in is Cinderella, a new film version of the familiar fairy tale, directed by Pitch Perfect’s Kay Cannon. Cabello stars as the title character opposite Broadway legend Idina Menzel as her non-wicked stepmother and Pose actor Billy Porter as her fairy godparent. According to Cabello, these reimagined characters are just two of the film’s progressive elements. “Those classic fairy tales were all written by men. That’s why the story [of Cinderella] is that of a woman who’s saved by a prince,” Cabello says. “But in our version, which is written and directed by a woman, she’s saved herself and is trying to build her own life. It’s a much more empowering version of the story.”

In fact, Cabello’s Cinderella story has “no evil people in it at all”, because it places the focus firmly on the heroine’s self-actualisation. “Cinderella’s dream is to live an independent life at a time when women aren’t allowed to have careers,” she explains. “So she’s seeing something that’s wrong in the world and not waiting for someone else to correct it for her – she’s doing it herself. I think that’s a really necessary, positive update.”

Cabello has also been using her formidable social media presence – 54.5 million followers on Instagram, 11.9 million on TikTok – to spread some very necessary positivity. After being papped on a run in mid-July wearing “a top that shows my belly”, Cabello told her TikTok followers she thought “Damn!” before remembering that “being at war with your body is so last season”. Today, she says she experiences much less body insecurity since sharing this post. “I felt like I was not alone in feeling that or alone in my frustration,” she says. “And so next time there are pictures of me where my belly is out, there’s gonna be a community of women who have heard me talk about the way that makes me feel and who support me. And that is honestly so liberating.”

She has even used TikTok to break down a human rights issue that is close to her heart. In July, Cabello shared a well-received video explaining that recent protests in Cuba aren’t “about lack of Covid resources and medicine”, but are really “the latest layer in a 62-year-old story of a communist regime and a dictatorship”. She says speaking out in this way was a matter of moral obligation for her. “You know, I’m Cuban and I still have family on the island,” she says – Cabello was born in Havana, then moved to Miami with her parents when she was six. “And so much of what I do is Cuban culture. I mean, ‘Havana’ is one of my most successful songs so far,” she adds. “So when I’m in the United States, showing the beautiful part of Cuban culture, I feel like I also have to be there for the hard part, for the people there who are struggling.”

“If it’s affecting my mental health in a negative way, I’ll say no and do it another way.”

“Havana”, a sultry and infectious celebration of the Cuban capital, was so huge that it could easily have overshadowed her debut album. But thankfully, 2018’s Camila was a cool and cohesive affair that also spawned the brilliant angsty banger “Never Be the Same”. Then in 2019 Cabello launched her second album, Romance, with “Señorita”, a massively successful duet with Mendes that has now racked up 1.9 billion Spotify streams. When Cabello and Mendes confirmed they were dating shortly after its release, they became gossip-site staples – something they remain today – and were accused of faking the relationship for publicity. The impact of this negative coverage on their mental health was barely even mentioned.

Still, more than two years later, Cabello says she and Mendes have managed to maintain their privacy. “I feel like the public and the media could almost have become a third person in our relationship,” she says. “But that’s not been a thing for us because Shawn and I don’t even look at social media like that. Even though we know it’s there, it’s almost like it doesn’t exist for us. And that’s why we don’t live in LA. We live in Miami or Toronto, where there’s less paparazzi and that kind of attention is less of a thing.”

Looking ahead, Cabello says she’s excited for fans to hear Familia, which she feels has greater “intimacy” than her previous albums because she worked so closely with core collaborators Scott Harris, Ricky Reed and Mike Sabath. Because she trusted them implicitly, Cabello says she was able to “freestyle” during recording sessions and really pour her heart out. “You know, there’s one song [I’ve recorded for the album] where I’m talking about my mental health and anxiety without [specifically] saying it’s about anxiety,” she says. “But it’s about what anxiety looks and feels like for me in my body and in my mind. And that wasn’t something I came into the room intending to write about. Ricky just showed me a piece of music he had and it all came out of me.”

Cabello says this “stream of consciousness” songwriting style “never would have happened” when she was recording Camila and Romance because, for her, there was still too much “tension” in the room. But this time around, she felt comfortable enough to be truly vulnerable. In this respect, Cabello draws a comparison between her own creative evolution and that of Billie Eilish, who recently released her acclaimed second album, Happier Than Ever. “I saw this quote from Billie where she said, ‘I wasn’t scared, it wasn’t forced, there was no pressure, it was just really nice.’ And I feel the same way about this album’s process for me,” she says. The message is clear: in both her personal and professional lives, Camila Cabello is in a very good place.

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

A Tale of Red States and Blue States

Once upon a time, there was a state.

It was a large state, with vast stretches of country between its world-class cities. It had communities rich in diversity and activism and ideas – and it had a lot of resentful white people who were just plain old rich.

The richest and most resentful white people created a terrible blight they called “modern conservatism.” They set their wicked curse on the state, and then unleashed it on the nation with two Republican presidents – one lamentable, the next even worse.

There were many along the way who sounded the alarm, but there were more who ignored the danger far too long. The spell had summoned a beast. The beast was hideous and stupid. It was no good at anything except being a hateful beast. But the dark spell had done so much damage that being a hateful beast was enough for the beast to win, at least for a time.

In one version of the story, the state is called “California.”

In another, it is called “Texas.”

It’s strange to think of now, with a decade of sneering about the “left coast” and “San Francisco liberals” and blah blah blah baked into political conventional wisdom, but it’s true. The reactionary modern conservatism which held the whip hand on the backlash to the great civil rights advances of the 1960s was born in California. California voted for Richard Nixon six times: once as their senator, twice as Eisenhower’s vice president, and then three times as the Republican presidential nominee. In between those elections, Nixon of course had to win primaries. In 1968, when he was the Republican front-runner, he faced an upstart challenger who wanted to make sure he’d be racist enough to keep conservative southerners in the tent. That person was not a southerner, but the then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan, who would go on to be the next Republican elected after Nixon.

So what the fuck happened? Well, a lot of things, and I don’t want to pretend to do justice to the generations of righteous activism that pushed back against this disastrous regime. Democrats did occasionally win state-wide – notably, California elected two Democratic women to the Senate in 1992 – even though Orange County was practically a metonym for American conservatism right up until the 2018 midterms. But the turning point that seems to have gotten your average voter to turn on the Republican party for good was in 1994. Governor Pete Wilson, a kind of hard-right proto-Trump, threw his weight behind a hateful anti-immigrant ballot initiative. It passed, even though it was so deranged that it never went into effect because a federal court ruled it unconstitutional within days of the vote, because the California electorate really was that conservative. The electorate changed, almost on a dime. Mexican-American voters organized. Their friends and neighbors and fellow citizens realized that sitting back wasn’t an option. And now the Republican Party of California is a fucking joke.

This isn’t, like, the eternal winds of history blowing microscopic chips off the statue of Ozymandias. If you remember the Clinton presidency, this happened in your lifetime. If you’re a little bit younger than that, it happened in your big cousins’ lifetimes.

Part of what makes it hard to see changes like this is that the dim bulbs in our political media see everything through a horse race lens, where who gets one particular W is the only piece of information worth retaining. You win and you’re clever; you lose and you’re a dumb sucker who tried. Who gets power is really important! But if you only care about that, then you miss the really important trends.

Take the Georgia 6th, the district once represented by Newt fucking Gingrich. Its representative joined Trump’s cabinet in early 2017, at least in part because it was such a supposedly safe Republican seat, so there was a special election for his replacement. Traumatized Democrats and Women’s Marchers threw themselves into the steeply uphill campaign of former John Lewis intern Jon Ossoff. When he came up a few points short, our blue-check media betters tried to turn Ossoff into a punch line stand-in for silly #Resistance liberal losers coping with Trump by losing some more, SUCK IT, MOM! but the other, correct, interpretation is that Ossoff only came up a few points short in a district that was supposed to protect the kookiest of right-wing cranks. His campaign had functioned as kind of an ad hoc boot camp for novice organizers, canvassers, and future school board candidates who had previously been too discouraged and disorganized to take this kind of swing, and it showed Democratic party donors that the district was winnable. So when gun safety advocate and Mother of the Movement Lucy McBath stepped up to the plate in the 2018 midterms, her campaign had the infrastructure it needed, and now she’s well-positioned to be reelected because she’s doing a great job. Meanwhile, Ossoff’s organizing chops and the enthusiastic work his supporters did for Rep. McBath are a big part of why he’s in a dead heat against incumbent Republican Senator David Purdue.

That’s why I’m keeping an eye on the South this year. The presidential campaign there is interesting, but the real story is in those network effects. There’s a rising tide that threatens to make the blue wave of 2018 look like a light spring shower if things break the right way. Just look at the Democratic senate candidates. They’re a diverse group: men and women, Black and white, preacher and fighter pilot. Most are relative newcomers to national audiences, but only some of them are young. Jon Ossoff is just 33; when he was in grade school, Mike Espy of Mississippi was Secretary of Agriculture. What they do seem to have in common is that they are having the time of their fucking lives.

Here’s Espy:

Moving and grooving in McComb. pic.twitter.com/RANCRGGpX7

— Mike Espy (@MikeEspyMS)

October 31, 2020

Ossoff:

The people of Georgia are tired of having a spineless, disgraced politician serve as their Senator. pic.twitter.com/OdaYwFKzmz

— Jon Ossoff (@ossoff)

October 30, 2020

Senator Doug Jones of Alabama:

I know you’ve heard us say it before, but when you see this clip, it bears reappearing: This guy really is clueless. https://t.co/w9YOUHegCW

— Doug Jones (@DougJones)

October 22, 2020

Jamie Harrison of South Carolina:

It's debate night and y'all know I'm going to walk it like I talk it. Let's see if @LindseyGrahamSC can do the same. pic.twitter.com/TNABxsaTEO

— Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime)

October 30, 2020

And the bad bitch with her eye on the big prize, MJ Hegar of Texas:

It's about time Texans had a senator as tough as we are. https://t.co/8MQ8Tykmyt pic.twitter.com/bgPr5vtgdh

— MJ Hegar (@mjhegar)

October 16, 2020

Clutch those pearls, John! https://t.co/iWej8MrhtV

— MJ Hegar (@mjhegar)

October 22, 2020

The spineless bootlicker Hegar is challenging, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, is currently resting his dainty patoot in the seat once held by none other than Lyndon Baines Johnson. As president, LBJ would aggressively push for some of the greatest human rights legislation in American history in pursuit of what he called the Great Society. That meant Medicare and Medicaid. It meant a revolution in environmental protections. It meant PBS. And it meant telling the one-party authoritarian regime in the Jim Crow south that America was done with their bullshit, they were going to have real democracy, they were going to do it now, and if they didn’t like it they could eat his ass.

Johnson was a complicated guy and left a complicated legacy. His project required an unusual leader of courage, conviction, and unmitigated savvy, cut with streaks of megalomania and dubious mental health. No architect but Lyndon Johnson would have built the Great Society, and no place but Texas could have built Lyndon Johnson.

Then again, Texas also gave us the Bushes in the late twentieth century. It gave us a terrorist attack on a Biden campaign bus just this weekend.

That darkness is real. So is the long, grinding slog to turn on the light. Like the GA-06 silliness, Democratic efforts in Texas get laughed at as some quixotic waste of resources by arrogant flops. In fact, the past few years of high-profile statewide elections in Texas have been on a pretty clear trajectory. In 2014, Wendy Davis, a state senator from Fort Worth who captured widespread progressive attention with her heroic filibuster of a 2013 state abortion ban, ran for governor. She lost by the ~20-point margin you’d expect in a year where Republicans everywhere did really well, but it was a vitamin B-12 shot to a perpetually overwhelmed state Democratic party. The 2016 Clinton campaign, when it was (correctly!) on the offensive before FBI Director Comey decided he would really prefer a Trump presidency, invested heavily in its Texas ground game. It was always a long shot, but even after the Comey letter and the Texas-specific sabotage by the Russian Internet Research Agency, Texas Democrats cut Trump’s margin there down to single digits. That is to say, they recruited the volunteers and taught the skills and raised the cash and registered the voters to carry the ball way down the field. And in the 2018 midterms, El Paso representative Beto O’Rourke built on all that energy to fight Senator Ted Cruz to a near draw. O’Rourke didn’t quite make it, but he did help a lot of downballot Democrats over the finish line and forced Republicans to light a few oil drums of cash on fire to save a seat that they had always assumed would be safe.

That growth has been possible because of a ton of hard work and persuasion, but it’s also been possible because there was so much untapped potential. As progressives have argued for years, Texas was less of a “red state” than a non-voting state. I’m not a person that usually has a lot of patience for people not bothering to vote, because the people who get to be loud about that are whiny, privileged assholes who can afford to be flip about the right to vote. But there are a lot of people who find it hard because they absolutely do know the weight and importance of voting, because they or their mothers or their grandfathers were beaten and terrorized to keep them away from the polls. They might make the same mouth-noises as the selfish dilettantes about how it doesn’t matter and they’re all corrupt and blah blah blah. But a vote is a tiny little leap of faith. It’s at least a skip of hope. And it hurts to know the weight and importance of that and to keep feeling that disappointment over and over again.

A key thing that Republicans in the South managed to do for a while, but California Republicans didn’t, was to let their misrule seem almost tolerable day to day. As outrageous as the overall trends were, as catastrophic the results were for a lot of people’s lives, it didn’t necessarily feel entirely irrational for lots of people to avoid the inconvenience and disappointment of trying to stop them. But if you’re just going to be a constant, unwavering shit show of incompetence and evil, infuriating people every waking minute of every fucking day for years on end, they’re not going to be deterred by inconvenience and disappointment. They're not going to be deterred by fucking tear gas. They’re going to understand that it’s worth trying to get rid of you, even if it’s a long shot. They’re going to line up to kick you in the shin just for the hell of it. And that’s exactly what millions of them have already done.

These dumbass motherfuckers radicalized Taylor goddamn Swift!

LOOK WHAT YOU MADE HER DO!

So yeah. People who had given up are fucking voting. Texas has already had hundreds of thousands more people vote than voted in all of 2016. BEFORE ELECTION DAY!

Vice President Biden likes to recite a poem by the great Irish bard Seamus Heaney. It’s about how you have to have faith that a better world is possible, even when you don’t have any rational reason to expect it any time soon, because it’s the only way you’ll be able to seize the most precious of opportunities, when “justice can rise up/ And hope and history rhyme.”

Sometimes hope and history walk into a bar to tell dirty jokes for a bachelorette party in downtown Austin. And they rhyme.

For a hundred and fifty years, unreconstructed revanchist terrorist sympathizers have threatened that “the South will rise again.” They mean the treasonous mobsters who called themselves the Confederacy.

Why do those losers get to define the South? Like, literally, they’re losers. They lost.

There’s another South. The terrorists cut it off at the knees, so it never quite rose the first time. But it’s always been there. The South the heroes of Reconstruction tried to build. The South of the Kennedy Space Station and the Center for Disease Control. The South of the French Quarter of New Orleans and the gay neighborhoods of Atlanta. The South of Barbara Jordan, Ann and Cecile Richards, Stacey Abrams, and the young women of the Virginia state legislature. The South of Maya Angelou, Molly Ivins, and Mark Twain. The South of the exiles of Miami and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. The South of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Representative John Lewis. The South of James Earl Carter, William Jefferson Clinton, and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Once upon a time, there was a colossus. The richest and most resentful white people feared it, for it was both great and good. So they hunted it mercilessly. They tortured and killed its most vulnerable people. They bound it and silenced it and told the rest of the world it didn’t even exist. But they knew that wicked lie was the best they could do, for something so mighty could never be slain by the likes of them.

The giant grows stronger every day as it struggles against its chains, and those chains are turning to rust. One day soon  - maybe in this decade; maybe this week – it will break free. It will rise. And it will shake the earth. Just you watch.

[mcnuggyy]

hi i'm applying to art center, it's my dream school. Your link to black at accd helped me take off the rose tinted glasses & understand its reputation doesnt mean it's perfect. I still want to go though...Do you have any tips for how to be a successful student at accd? i know its been a while since u were there, but any scrap of info would be appreciated....

sure thing!!! This might be a bit harder to do during a pandemic but it can still be done through voice chat and discord and stuff! A big thing that really helped me that I wish I had done earlier when I first started was finding some friends I can work with, vent about the same professors too, etc. They’ll be going through the same hardships you will be and that bond is stronger than anything, god the intense work and projects you and your classmates will have to do, it can be hard to go through it alone. So even if you can find someone just to sit silently with while you work, quiet encouragement. It’s a great support system that helped me immensely. Like a study group but with art!

Art school is expensive, TOO expensive imo, so even when a profesor says “BUY THIS SPECIFIC BRAND OR ELSE” still try and find cheaper solutions! Lots of students sell old supplies, I’ve even given my supplies away for free to lower classmates! cause for a lot of classes you will really only end up using those supplies just for that one class and never again, so might as well recycle them and give them to someone else instead of keeping them in your garage forever! (Again this will depend on the pandemic situation but we would have fliers and stuff for people selling their supplies! People would even sell art tablets for 100$ or less!! Great resource!)

Don’t be afraid to ask upper term students questions! We are all going through it, and have had to deal with a lot of crazy professors and projects and shit, so don’t be afraid to reach out! They are full of good tips, advice, resources, etc. And just like Black at ACCD, they won’t be afraid to tell you who to watch out for which I think is super important when it comes to choosing classes. Most people are really kind, we just look tired from the lack of sleep 😔

Talk to people outside of your track/major too!! (NETWORKING!!!) this goes hand in hand with the first tip. The biggest thing that helped me, specifically for the future, is the friends I made, that’s how I got my first few jobs! Because unfortunately In the industry it IS very much about who you know. As for talking with other majors!! You never know when you might need a photographer or graphic designer or they might need an illustrator or character artist!! Like it’s great to be able to say “I know someone” and they can do the same for you! It’s great to build those healthy work relationships and also just meet and hang out with other creatives with unique perspectives! Good for your art AND good for actually getting a job in the future 👌

(this also includes networking with some professors, a lot of them have industry experience they can provide! some are willing to look at ur portfolio and even share your portfolio with recruiters!!!) 

Setting up a good work schedule is super important cause the amount of homework you will get is pretty much impossible to do at most times, then again I speed run college, I took no breaks and finished in 2 years because of poverty. I do NOT recommend this because o suffered from constant burn out, depression, stress, isolation, etc. So make sure your work schedule includes time to eat, sleep, chill out, ya know good mental health stuff!

Might be good to get a therapist. Art center WILL increase your mental health issues drastically. Everyone I know suffered from stress, anxiety, lack of sleep, etc. and are still feeling affects from Art Center to this day. So it might be good to prepare yourself for this, because it does get really bad for a lot of students unfortunately...

As always my inbox and DM’s are always open! If you end up getting a specific professor, or someone you know I might have had to deal with I’m more than happy to talk about my experiences with them! A lot of them have had the same assignments for yearssss. I was in the entertainment track specifically so I had professors like Will Weston, Jeff Smith, Rey Bustos, Gayle Donahue, Bob Kato, Adam Dix, Peter Han, Richard Keyes, Steve Turk, Paul Rogers, Aaron Smith, Mike Humphries, Ricardo Delgado, etc. (some of these u might be familiar with from the BlackatACCD account so yeah I had to deal with a lot of them :/ ) but I was fortunate enough to take some cool queer classes too, and those were some of the few minority professors in the school, they were the best honestly, I recommend taking a class with Rocio Carlos or Gary Kornblau for sure if you get a chance, they are a breathe of fresh air on campus. 

Hope this helps!! sorry for the long post jaja <3

[srandhawa21ahsgov]

Election 2020 Presidential Candidates Assessment

Hawkins/Walker (Green):

The Green Party candidates Howie Hawkins and Angela Nicole Walker do not state their exact position about Criminal Justice Reform but the website does provide the American people with what the Green Party is going to do in order to ensure change within our criminal justice system. The Green Party wants to “monitor and prosecute White Racist terrorists, provide federal investigations of local police misconduct, have community control of the police, end mass incarceration, decriminalize personal possession of hard drugs, provide drug treatment on demand, decriminalize sex work, fight corporate crime, end warantless mass surveillance, and pardon whistleblowers and political prisoners”. I disagree with a few of the Green party’s positions. For example, they want to legalize Marijuana but isn’t it already legal? Another position I don’t understand is decriminalzing sex work. Personally, I do not think this should be okay. To make sex work legal also means that abortions, HIV’s, STD’s, infections, and even Aids would still go on. Why would we pass a bill that would basically state that rape, abotion, and all the infections that I listed would be okay. Even if they did pass a bill with safety regulations while decriminalizing sex work there would be nothing to guarantee those safety guidelines. I think that they should still criminalize sex work BUT provide these people with better, high-quality jobs that aren’t so risky and dangerous. Other than that I agree with all other positions stated for this political party. I agree that we need to monitor our police system to ensure that they are providing safety and NOT danger to the community. I also agree that American citizens that are detained because of a non-violent drug addiction should be hospitalized and forced into rehabilitation. If we compare the candidate stance to the party platform stance, we can identify that there are way more things that the Green party platform wants to do in order to reform the criminal justice system. While their views are quite similar and supporting to the candidates, the Green Party platform goes more in depth about their positions. They want to abolish the death penalty, repeal three strikes laws, incororparte mental health social services to bail agreements, and even provde community team policing. These are just a few specific things that the Party platform wants to do ensure changes within the criminal justice reform. The platform compared to the candidates state more of what they specifically want to do whereas the candidates put their positions into short terms.

Donald J. Trump/Michael R. Pence (Republican):

Donald Trump and Mike Pence have provided the American people with their plan to reform the United States law and justice system. Trump has given the Department of justice $98 million to hire 802 full-time enforcement officers. He also signed an executive order to restore state and local law enforcement access to surplus equipment such as armored vehicles. This was not Trump’s idea but it was on his Law and Justice page but the Department of Justice created the National Public SAfety Partnership, which would reduce violent crimes in cities. Trump’s administration expanded Project safe Neighborhoods in order to work with communities and cities to develop customized crime reduction strategies. The department of Justice returned to their old standard policy because they want federal prosecutors to charge criminals with the most serious, readily provable offense. Now those prosecutors were directed by the Department of Justice to focus on taking illegal guns off our streets. Trump has made many decisions on how to confront street criminals like gangs and criminal cartels. For example, he signed a three executive order that focused on international criminal organizations that prevented violence against law enforcement officers. The Department of Justice has designed a priority for the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force in order to allow federal law enforcement to utilize an expanded toolkit in its efforts to dismantle the organization. Trump’s version of reshaping the American courts include him appointing conservative Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. He also has appointed more than 50 circuit or appeals court judges, along with appointing 80 district court judges. Now, here is my position on all of this. First of all, hiring new police officers may or may not make a difference and it might enforce better more equal police officers within our nation but don’t you think that $98 million dollars could go to a better cause. A better cause could be giving police officers across the nation a lesson or some type of training to make sure that no one is brutally hurt while being detained or to make sure that a police procedure is done fairly with equal rights set on the table. I think that it was a smart idea from Trump to expand the project Safe Neighborhoods because it is a way for communities to come together to reduce crime. While it was good that Trump signed a three executive order that protected officers more, I think there needs to be an order that protects American citizens from police officers. In all, I don’t think that with Trump with Trump being President we are going to reform much of our justice system. Based on his views and what he wants to do he is looking out more for the officers which is great but as a leader of the United States we need someone that will be looking out for everyone as a whole. He needs to set laws where we are guaranteed an equal justice system for all people of color, race and ethnicity.  The candidate stance is a lot different compared to the party platform because the party platform goes more in depth about what republicans actually want to do to reform our systems. Whereas from the candidates stance he just talks more about protecting Law enforcement rather than American citizens. I think their position supports the party platform but not in a way that is shown. In addition, I think that Trump supports police more because that is how he is going to get their vote. He does it for a voting tactic. Personally, our law enforcement needs new training and they need to learn how to keep our American citizens safe. I am half Indian and even I worry about the police looking at me in a different way because of my darker skin tone. I couldn’t even imagine being African American and dealing with everything that is going on.

Gloria La Riva/Sunil Freeman (Peace and Freedom):

Gloria La Riva and Sunlil Freeman seem to be educated about what they want to do with their decisions when it comes to reforming the justice system. They know that police brutality is hurting the lives of African Americans and they also take into consideration that we need to give back to those communities who lost loved ones. These candidates say that “reparations must be paid to the African Americans and Native communities”. With their knowledge they know that 2.2 million people are behind bars in the biggest prison and they want to change that to end mass incarceration. Luckily, they want reform by punishing law enforcement when police brutality and violence are performed from cops. “Free Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners”. These candidates' goals are to end racism, end mass incarceration, and create equality. The party platform is very similar to the candidate stance because they both want to do different things to create change and they are both very set on what they do. Their ideas are very similar for example they both want to end mass incarceration, end torture from police bruality especially in prisoners, but the party platform wants to do more specifics like abolishing the death penalty, prove rehabilitation for drug offenders, and repeal the three strikes law. I agree with these candidates! I think that their positions and plans define a future for a more reformed justice system. They want to keep our Americans citizens safe and give opportunity and a chance for those who are in trouble with the law. Providing rehab, and treating every individual like they are all equal when in difficult situations makes everyone feel equal!

Roque De La Fuente “Rocky” Guerra/Kanye Omari West (American Independent):

Email sent to Candidates -

Dear Roque De La Fuente Guerra and Kanye Omari West,

The issue I am concerned about is reform within the justice system. I am concerned about this issue because it appears to be a major problem that is happening in our world right now. We have mass incarceration rates and people are being treated poorly within our justice system. I am currently a senior at Acalanes High School and I am researching this issue for my senior Government Class. Please clarify your stance on this issue. Thank you so much for your time and good luck!

Sincerely,

Sonali Randhawa

sonalichanel@gmail.com

O Jorgenson/Jeremy “Spike” Cohen (Libertarian):

These candidates really point out exactly what they want to do in order to reform the justice system. Many statements from their website start with “As your president” which means that it is specifically coming from the president so we understand what their positions and exact plans are. Their plan is to “decriminalize all drugs and encourage states to do the same '' and they state that they will work with congress to make history of the failed and unjust War on Drugs. They want to deal with substance abuse issues in a way that salvages lives, instead of throwing them away and detaining them for a long period of time. In order to see if an actual criminal act is taking place nameless, faceless SWAT teams that have been imported to our streets. Their mission is to go after drug offenders who have harmed no one and have taken scores of innocent peoples lives in violent confrontations. The president says that “I will defund federal involvement in policing. I will defund the DEA and keep federal agencies out of local police matters unless called upon by state authorities. No Knock raids will be performed because many times it ends up in killing innocent bystanders like Breona Taylor. They state that their goal is to get the government out of the way of AMericans lives to end the harm which the government itself has created. The candidate stance is a huge comparison to the party platform. The candidate stance does not support the Liberatraian party Platform. The difference is the party platform supports the constitution and they only talk about their view on crime and certain consequences that need to be done to the offender. But the candidate stance does. From the candidates stance, they have a lot of positions in place and they want to create change for the people that are capable of changing with drug offenders. NON-VIOLENT OFFENDERS are the people that we need to be changing in order to create a more united country. I agree with the candidate's stance. Mass incarceration needs to end so we can have our American citizens be reunited with family. We need to end mass incineration and provide help and rehab to prove that we actually do care about our U.S citizens.  

Joseph R. Biden/Kamala D Harris (Democratic)

Email Sent to Candidiates -

Dear Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris,

The issue I am concerned about is reforming the juvenile justice system. I am concerned about this issue because it appears to be a massive worldwide problem that is making our country even more divided by the day. We have mass incarceration rates and people are being treated poorly within our justice system. I am currently a senior at Acalanes High School and I am researching this issue for my senior Government Class. Please clarify your stance on this issue. Thank you so much for your time and good luck!

Sincerely,

Sonali Randhawa

sonalichanel@gmail.com

[tinkeringwithcannabis]

Tinkering with Cannabis: The First 90 Minutes Episode 57

Strain: Blueberry Chocolope Sundae (Wax)

Company: Sira Naturals

Locations: Somerville, Ma

Cannabis Connoisseur: Mike V.

Website: www.siranaturals.org

 

Hello again to all my cannabis loving and canna-curious friends, and welcome back to another episode of The First 90 Minutes! Today we will be toking and talking about an awesome wax concentrate I picked up from my friend Mike V. at Sira Naturals in Somerville, Ma, and Blueberry Chocolope Sundae! So, as some of you more experienced users may have guessed, this is a combination of three wonderful cannabis strains, Blueberry, Chocolope, and Sundae Driver. Where this strain is a mixture, there is not a lot of information on the product as a whole pertaining to potential effects and terpene profiles, so I am going to try to determine the potential effects by breaking down the strains in this product’s lineage. Blueberry, which has a 17.0% THC content, has myrcene, caryophyllene, and pinene as its top three terpenes. It is known to make the consumer feel happy, relaxed, euphoric, sleepy, and uplifted, making this a great fit for those with issues around stress, pain, anxiety, insomnia, and depression. Chocolope, which has a THC content of 16.0%, shows myrcene, caryophyllene, and limonene as its top three terpenes. This strain has been noted to give the consumer an experience of feeling happy, uplifted, euphoric, energetic, and creative. It has been categorized as best fit for those who struggle with stress, depression, anxiety, pain, and fatigue. Our final strain, Sundae Driver, has THC levels measuring up to 23.0% with its top three terpenes are limonene, beta caryophyllene, and myrcene. This strain is said to leave the consumer feeling happy, relaxed, uplifted, euphoric, and creative. It is recommended for those looking for relief from pain, stress, depression, anxiety, and arthritis, and has been found to cause dry mouth, dry eye, paranoia, dizziness, and anxiety as potential side effects.

Looking at the breakdown of these three strains, we can pretty much gather than Blueberry Chocolope Sundae’s top three terpenes are myrcene, caryophyllene, and limonene. Myrcene can be found in mangos, ylang ylang, and hops, to name a few sources, and is found to have a balsamic, peppery, and spicy aroma. The flavor profile is that of a balsamic fruit, geranium, herb, and must. It acts as a pain reliever, anti-oxidant, and a sedative. Limonene, which is found in the rinds of most citrus fruits, and is known for its aroma of sour lemon, orange, and citrus, with a strong citrus flavor profile. Limonene has been proven to have immense benefits as a bronchodilator, digestive aid, immune booster, anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory, analgesic, anti-anxiety, anti-tumor, and as an anti-depressant. However, these are not the only benefits of this terpene. It has also been found to promote weight loss and tissue regeneration. Finally, caryophyllene, which is found in basil, rosemary, cloves, and lavender, is known for its spicy and woody aroma and flavor profiles. It has been found to be an excellent anti-inflammatory aid and a neuropathic pain reliever.

It is due to these terpenes that I have chosen Blueberry Chocolope Sundae as my medication choice today to treat the onset of a migraine with left temple and forehead pain, nausea, and light sensitivity, in addition to stress and anxiety. The myrcene and limonene are great terpenes to target the stress and anxiety, while all three terpenes provide anti-inflammatory benefits, which are extremely vital in the treatment of migraines. A migraine occurs when the cranial blood vessels expand, and the tissue surrounding the brain is inflamed. Brain inflammation is also a great term to remember when choosing a strain to help with seizures, so focus on strains which are comprised of terpenes with high anti-inflammatory benefits. Ok, now that we have run through our background portion of this segment, I say let’s jump ahead. So let’s light up, sit back and toke and talk about the first 90 minutes!

Opening the wax container, there is a very spicy aroma with almost a citrusy, herbal kick to it. Flavor-wise, I am first hit with notes of citrus and spice, and with notes of berry and almost a very subtle sweetness as the taste fades away. Beginning this session at 4:50 p.m. with on hit of my G3 Pen on high heat, a head rush sensation hits me within minutes. This feeling has already led to a minor sense of relief from the pain I am experiencing in the left side of my forehead and temple. Although I am not noticing a significant improvement as of yet, however this is very promising as it gives me hope that the migraine-relieving properties will only intensify as the effects increase. There is a deep relaxation setting into my body, but it does not seem to be as much of a muscle-relaxation as it is a nerve calming relaxation. That may sound weird, but it is honestly the only way I can describe this sensation. At 5:00 p.m., I am feeling really unfocused, and my mind has a sort of floaty sensation. I can sense a strong cerebral hit coming on, and although it is definitely having an effect on my ability to think, it is also having a rapid effect in decreasing my anxiety and stress. I am finding that my mood is already showing signs of improvement as it begins to lift from a low and depressed state, and my anxiety is dropping from am 8 to around a 5.8. My mental stress level has fallen as well. Originally, it was at about a 9.3 and it has since dropped to a 6. The cerebral effects are coming on pretty strong at this point, and the fogginess and feeling pretty thick. The bodily relaxation is continuing to intensify and the migraine pressure has subsided significantly, along with the pain in my left temple and left side of my forehead. The bodily relaxation is seeping in from my skin all the way down to my bones, leaving me with a tingling sensation along my back, arms, and legs, which is exacerbated as my clothes brush against my skin. Although I have not experienced any changes in the nausea, I cannot claim that this is not being addressed by this strain. The one negative I am experiencing is dizziness, which very well could be contributing to the ongoing nausea.

At 5:20 p.m., my face has a “melted” feeling, and I definitely do feel a little stoned, but the foggy head is clearing and I am able to get up and function without the dizziness. The anxiety, stress, nausea, and migraine symptoms have all subsided, and I am left feeling calm, relaxed, reflective, and happy. The intensity of the physical relaxation has shifted, now making my body feel numb in addition to relax. I can see how this would be a great option for nerve for muscle pain. The sensation is similar to what one would experience when applying a lidocaine patch to a painful area. My mood has continued to uplift into a euphoric state, yet I am also feeling very content. Unfortunately, my level of focus is terrible with this product, but when listening to the right music, this strain is spot-on. At 5:50 p.m. I am feeling the intensity of the physical and mental relaxation continuing to increase. My mood is calm, reflective, yet euphoric. Although I do feel happy, it is more of a relaxed happy, rather than a really bubbly happy. The physical numbness continues to penetrate from the skin, inward to the bones, and the dizziness has completely subsided. The nausea and stress have dissipated along with the anxiety, and my migraine has also completely resolved at this point. I am finding a slight improvement in my level of focus; however I would not attempt any important tasks. My thought process, while more clear than earlier on, is very slowed and I am easily distracted. Despite the slightly more organized thinking patterns, I am still finding that my mind is very scattered, which has prevented me from ruminating on any one situation or idea. I believe this has also played a part in keeping my anxiety low.

Rounding the corner to our 90-minute mark at 6:21 p.m., the bodily relaxation is still running strong, leaving my body riddled with a strong tingling from the skin to bone. My level of clarity has greatly improved, yet my focus is still not yet to a point where I would be confident in my ability to handled complex tasks. My response time is still definitely slowed, and I continue to feel somewhat stoned, and my body and mind both feel very calm and at peace. I have not noticed any significant changes in my mood, and the effects seem to be holding pretty consistently. There has been no return of my migraine symptoms, anxiety, stress, or depression. As I continued to monitor the remainder of the effects, the last of the psychoactive components of Blueberry Chocolope Sundae faded out at 6:57 p.m...

Jumping into our final thoughts, this strain is amazing. It targeted and destroyed my migraine symptoms, anxiety, stress, and depression without an issue. The bodily relaxation was incredible, and I especially loved the bodily numbness I experienced. I absolutely believe based on my experience that this product would not only fare well for those who suffer from migraine and mental health disorders, but it is also an amazing fit for those who are suffering from muscle and nerve pain as well. The one negative I did encounter is the dizziness, which was a little strong at the beginning, but it did taper down toward the end. One of the things that I found this strain is fantastic for is to sit and draw, write, work on some form of creative art where you can let your mind wander and just see where it goes. Putting on some music to vibe with your high makes it even better. Personally, at the beginning of the high I was more focused on remaining in one location due to the dizziness. However, as the effects shifted, I found myself better able to move about and enjoy myself without feeling couch locked. After testing this product and finding it to be a great match for my needs, I would definitely rate this at 4.8 stars. I would highly recommend this to both experienced and inexperienced users alike, but I will caution you to go slow because this is a bit of a heavy hitter. Great job Sira, Keep up the great work!

If you are a patient, or adult above the age of 21 in Massachusetts, check out the following link for where you can purchase this product:

https://www.siranaturals.org/where-to-buy-cannabis-massachusetts

Well my friends, we have reached the end of this review. Thank you for joining me and stay tuned for more product reviews!

 

Disclaimer:

*****Please remember, this blog is an account of my personal experience with this product. Not everyone has the same experience with every product and that is okay. I always recommend starting out with one or two hits to see if that is enough , and you can always increase your dose from there.*****

[theevilesteviled]

Time for my long-ass tribute post to the late great Rik Mayall, who would have been (should have been) 62 today. 

When I was little, I had an imaginary friend. Well, actually, being an only child meant that I had a massive collection of imaginary friends from all over the shop. Books, games, films, my own imagination. But the one that had the most profound effect on me (oftentimes without me even realising it) was without a doubt, Drop Dead Fred. I swear, from the age of about 9 or 10, I must have watched that movie a billion times. Well, I did until I hit high school anyway. But even though I didn’t watch it once during my five hellish years of senior education, Fred still had a huge impact on my life. I remembered him as an important, fundamental part of my childhood, and began referring to everyone I loved as Snotface. (Amusing to some, I don’t think my significant others were overly impressed, however.) I don’t know why I never watched it during that time, even though I talked and thought about it often. If I had to guess, I think it had something to do with the ending. It just seemed a little too sad. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t remember what I was up to when Rik passed away. A self-centered teenager with boy problems and a pretty serious Motley Crue obsession isn’t exactly the key demographic for heartfelt mourners, after all.

Now, some of you know this, some of you don’t - I’ve never been overly closed off about it - but from about the age of 15 onwards, my mental health was a disaster. I won’t get into that here, but suffice to say I didn’t get a diagnosis until I was 17, and didn’t get the right help and treatment I needed until I was about 18, almost 19. Once again Drop Dead Fred came to mind, though not in the most cheerful of circumstances. The only psychology clinic that could take my case was for children, so I was left feeling like Lizzie sitting in the waiting room, surrounded by children while the chaotic mess of OCD, Anxiety, and Dissociation I’d been walking around with for nearly 4 years wreaked havoc inside my mind. And taking my medication - something I’d steadfastly avoided for as long as possible, convinced it was akin to some sort of weakness - did feel a bit like taking those little green pills. Especially when the side effects left me in a pretty sorry state.

But I’ll admit I didn’t seriously think about Fred or Rik until last year, when I was shaking off the tail end of my dissociation and trying to adjust to a life without my mental illness taking up 90% of my time. Without that focus, I was a bit lost. I’d got into my university course somehow - I have no memory of this, I was fairly convinced the rest of the world was a two-dimensional figment of my imagination - and was doing pretty well, but it felt a bit odd since it was a writing course, and I wasn’t sure I still knew how. Anything I did write was depressing, clunky, and didn’t sound quite right. 

And look, I’m not going to sit here and say that Rik and Ade saved my life or anything like that. They didn’t. I did, and my medication did, and my therapy did. And I was happier by then. A bit clueless and directionless and not really sure of who I was without OCD driving my every move, but optimistic and cheerful. I even started making friends.

Still, even I have to agree that they did have a profound effect. One that began when, by chance, Drop Dead Fred showed up on my dash. I laughed, realised I hadn’t seen it in such a long time (privately noted that Fred looked a lot cuter than I remembered) and then googled the film. And then googled the actor. And then googled the Young Ones, because it rung a bell from some long-ago part of my childhood. I was there for Rik of course, but I burst into tears as soon as Vyvyan came onscreen and I realised one of my other old imaginary friends wasn’t some bizarre flu-induced fever dream. I binge-watched the entire first season, went out the next day and bought the box set, and watched it all in a day. But that wasn’t the truly amazing part. The amazing part was that I started to write. And it wasn’t...well. It wasn’t great, but it was fun. I realised I was sick of writing the depressing horror I’d been churning out since the age of 13. I wanted to write comedy. I still do, although whether or not I’m actually funny is still up for debate. But its also worth remembering that I’d just started uni, so the Young Ones spoke to me on a level that it might not have otherwise. I saw myself in Rick, I idolised Vyvyan, and realised I was attending lectures and seminars with thousands of Neils and a surprising number of Mikes. I got a bit more confident, dressed the way I wanted to, was unapologetically loud and outgoing, made more friends and tried to make an idiot out of myself at every possible opportunity. I had a fucking ball.

Aaaaand then, of course I joined the Scumbags. Well, first I wrote Closets. That dumpster fire of angst you all seem to like so much. But then I got invited into the fandom, and I wrote fics and made friends and eventually formed a sort of family. Six months later and I’m still knocking about the fandom, writing fic and hanging out with other Scumbags, running zines and working on horrible og comedy novels that’ll never go anywhere, and having a bloody good time. 

So as I sit here, watching Clair de Lune, eating custard with a fork, thinking about Rik and everything he did in those short 56 years and trying really hard not to cry about it because @neil-neil-orange-peel will give me a good telling off if I get sad on what’s supposed to be a happy day, I can’t help but think about what life might’ve been like if I never watched Drop Dead Fred at the impressionable age of 9. It wouldn’t be worse, necessarily - again, he didn’t save my life - but I think it would have been far less interesting. 

So happy birthday you mad bastard. Thanks for all the laughs, and I hope you’re having a good one, wherever you are. I’m sure you know we all love and miss you loads down here, but I think it bears repeating anyway. <3

[iampikachuhearmeroar]

okay, y’all, i’ve gotta back on my tl;dr bullshit soapbox about something:

so, the other day, i was just mindlessly scrolling through my corporate & capitalist hellscape facebook™️ (i.e. LinkedIn) and came across this totally trite mostly bullshit meme that was shared by some corporate executive search man (whose name i decided to crop out bc eh):

so i obviously agree with the last three points on this list, bc god yes my life would’ve been a bit better if I didn’t get all my dialogue about mental health only from teen mags and horrible portrayals in teen tv shows (and also this hellsite). and hell yeah everyone, and I mean EVERYONE needs to learn that failure is okay many situations (like failing a class in uni or school) bc everyone fails at something sometimes. and dealing with failure is HARD. and time management is something that I’m pretty sure everyone lies to fuckin hell about on their resume, bc lots of people really suck at it, myself included. so yeah. that needs to be taught. and i also agree with the “how to manage your health” point. bc thats becoming ever more prevalent and important with career burn out etc.

but entrepreneurship? people management? conflict resolution? creativity? how to manage money? public speaking? like y’all. three of those ARE taught/learned in school, who the fuck wrote this meme? 

for anyone who actually paid attention in maths class, (which is probably very few people outside of the top performing classes), there WAS A WHOLE FUCKING UNIT that focuses on financial maths (in australia anyway). I ignored this unit as well as maths in general at school, bc I generally hated maths and was convinced that I was somehow never going to get a job. but i remember the gist of the overall topic and its subtopics. one subtopic teaches you how to calculate your wages in various contexts (overtime, double-time and a half, holiday payments, im pretty sure maternity leave pay was jammed in somewhere? idk if other countries would have double time & a 1/2 like australia though). another subtopic teaches you how to calculate interest on bank loans and credit rates on credit cards. a third subtopic teaches you how to calculate savings (obvs in terms of discounts in shops)....im sure there was a bit about budgeting in there somewhere? im pretty sure there were some questions were about tax payments somewhere as a subtopic enrichment exercise? but you get my gist. are these not money management skills? in some sense? like if i could find one of my old maths textbooks or old maths books i’d give an example of a question, to make my point stronger. but the problem, like i said before, is that a load of people (myself included) just zone out in maths in high school and stop trying with it. they forget what they’ve learnt, and just remember how much they hated algebra and how they’ll never use it again. maths was one hell of a fucking strong bitch, guys. but maybe i’m wrong.

creativity? excuse me? have people forgotten about art classes? drama classes? english classes? music classes? need i go on? okay don’t get me wrong, most of these classes did focus a lot on memorising quotes or facts about people (artists/writers/poets/composers/dramatists etc) or specific  periods/movements in art or theatre or literature for example.... but the amazing sculptures/paintings etc people created in art for their final projects in year 12, or even in year 10 were works of their imagination. the scripts people write in drama or maybe english (if you had a fun teacher who did a screenwriting unit, for example) are creative asf. especially in year 12 when they do their major projects, where they may produce a monologue or a short movie, and then there’s a group piece. drama students might even make their own costumes for these performances. LIKE AIN’T THAT A LOT OF CREATIVITY RIGHT THERE Y’ALL????? and english. lowly old english. THEY HAVE A WHOLE FUCKING TOPIC ON CREATIVE WRITING FOR FUCKS SAKE. the original music people might create for their final projects too in year 12? does that not count as creativity? like yes, i know a lot of these things do still have to meet bs assessment criteria (especially in catholic schools, where the main things are you don’t offend the catholic education office and jesus/god lmao) to be considered worthy of a mark for your year 12 exams. but FUCK. HOW THE FUCK AREN’T ANY OF THESE SUBJECTS COUNTED TOWARDS BEING CREATIVE???????? like fuck your corporate creative ideation or w/e bullshit, Callum. drama and english even lend themselves to improvisation in some instances, like public speaking, which is examined further, below.

next, we move on to public speaking. this shit is basically taught from the first goddamn day of “show & tell” in kindy/kindergarten, and this fucker has the gall to say that it’s not fucking taught in schools? someone call in miley cyrus/hannah montana to throw the fuck down in this motherfucking hoedown BC THIS STUPID-ASS MEME-FUCKER HAS NERVE. i hated public speaking. absolutely hated it. even though it was ironically one of the places i ended up excelling in in english classes. even when i fucked up in my english speeches with like “oh, fuck.... said nelson mandela,  i’ve seem to’ve lost my palm card. wait, shit! there it is... excuse me while i pull it out of my ass. whoops, sorry miss” *bats eyes and finger guns at my year 9 english teacher who has her head in her hands and is done with my shit, while the class laughs at my gaffe* i’d still end up with like 73% or like 26/30. it was baffling. but for people who weren’t the class clown/smart alec like i was from years 7-10 (and like i actually wasn’t once i moved schools).... public speaking is like the leading cause of anxiety, right? like by the time i got to doing speeches/presentations at uni i was having panic attacks... the thought of presenting to my classes made me fucking sick with fear and anxiety. nearly every subject i did at uni (even when i tried to avoid subs with public speaking assessments) and throughout school had some type of presentation/speech whatever you want to call it project/activity in it. even fucking SPORT/PDHPE at school and even philosophy at uni. and these fuckers are saying its not taught in schools. FUCK  OFF. like yeah, i get that they actually mean it in the professional sense.... where people can give the sappy bs motivational speeches or an insightful ted-talk worthy 20-minute presentation... or a great sales pitch. but like??? save that for mike “my dad phoned in to EY and i have a job waiting for me after uni” mcfuck in a business major or law degree? or for clubs like toastmasters? fuck. ok enough of the skills we learn in school. let’s move onto the businesslike-sounding ones of “people management”, “conflict management” and fucking “entrepreneurship”. like. what the fuck? okay in some sense people management and conflict management could potentially be used in managing friendships and relationships in your personal life. but like. i can feel the business underpinnings and i dont like it lmao. like why do you want fully functioning adults straight out of school, franklin? and there’s extra credit conflict management subjects at uni??? or at least my home uni had it... and i never did them bc they were intensive courses during summer break lol. but the one that pissed me off the most was entrepreneurship. LIKE ARE KIDS NOT FUCKING ALLOWED TO BE KIDS NOW????? well  apparently: “NO! YOU MUST ALWAYS THINK OF MONEY MAKING WAYS TO BE RICH! YOU MUST BE ENTREPRENEURIAL!!!!!! YOU MUST GENERATE BUSINESS IDEAS FROM THE TIME YOU CAN FUCKIN’ WALK!!!!! AND SPEAK!!! CHILDHOOD AND BEING A TEENAGER DON’T EXIST WORKER BEE!!!! CAPITALISM FOR ALL!!!! WORKER BEES!!! CAPITALISM IS YOUR FRIEND!!! OWN A BUSINESS BY THE TIME YOU’RE 8 YEARS OLD!” like it’s insidious asf. and it doesn’t acknowledge that most entrepreneurs are already privileged people anyway, who usually have some type of money to start off their venture (or that’s what it feels like anyway). and yeah throw all the “THIS BOY IS AN ENTREPRENEUR AT 18!!! 18!!!???? BY STARTING HIS OWN BUSINESS AT 12!!!! WHAT A CHAMP! 😁🙃” clickbait news stories at me, but i don’t fucking care. the concept and perceived over-importance and almost preaching mindset of entrepreneurship is slowly becoming insidious and toxic asf. call me paranoid. but that’s what it feels like.

but with those last three topics, i want to make a point that school curriculum’s (in australia at least, and probably worldwide) are so jam-packed already with sport (which is pointless and shitty), geography (ok how to read maps is important, but i never bothered to learned to do it properly), history, science, english etc etc etc..... that like.... where the actual fuck are the gonna jam the above bs (people management”, “conflict management” and entrepreneurship) into the curriculum???? and also teachers are already over-worked enough as it is, they don’t need another load of shitty subjects pushed onto them. and they sure asf don’t earn enough (especially in the states) to have this bs pushed into their subject schedules either. keep them at uni, where they should be. or just in the workplace/in the general public where they belong. and if people suggest that you could probably push these subjects into the year 11/12 business studies programs or elective commerce courses in years 9/10, save your goddamn breath. like i remember looking at business studies hsc papers in years 11/12 to see what they did.... and it was pretty chock-a-block anyway. and my experience of my year 9 commerce was horrible, to say the least. let kids be kids, for fucks sake. they shouldn’t have to be fully functioning adults in the workplace, by the end of high school, for fucks sake. AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS NOT AN ESSENTIAL SKILL????!!!! FUCK OFF WITH THAT SHIT, WILHELM. anyway. that’s my rant over about how i hate how corporate people are trying to be #relatablewiththeyouth🙃 with their shitty versions of “10 things i wish we learned in school” memes.... and failing.... without realising that this is why millennials are suspicious and cynical about meme usage by corporate people/corporations.

[bountyofbeads]

‘Something Just Keeps Happening’: Dayton Shooting Hit a City Already in Pain https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/dayton-shooting-nan-whaley.html

‘Something Just Keeps Happening’: Dayton Shooting Hit a City Already in Pain

By Campbell Robertson and Mitch Smith | Published Aug. 9, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 9, 2019 |

DAYTON, Ohio — First, the Ku Klux Klan came to town. Two days later, tornadoes destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses and obliterated entire neighborhoods in and around the western Ohio city of Dayton.

Then this past weekend, a gunman stormed onto a crowded sidewalk in the entertainment district — an area of town typically swarming with revelers who stay until the bars close in the early morning — and fired at least 41 shots into the crowd, killing nine people before he was shot dead by the authorities.

“Something just keeps happening,” said Amanda Hensler, an owner of a store, Heart Mercantile, that is across the street from where the massacre took place.

The day after the mass shooting — the second within a 13-hour period in America — residents flocked to Ms. Hensler’s store to buy T-shirts that read “Dayton Strong,” which has become something of a motto for this grieving, shocked city. The customers knew that the store would have them in stock because they had been printed three months earlier, after the catastrophic tornado outbreak.

Indeed, Dayton has been through a brutal six-month stretch, even before the Klan held a rally at the city’s downtown Courthouse Square. Since the beginning of February, the city has also endured a large infrastructure failure and federal indictments at City Hall.

Seeing the city through all this has been Mayor Nan Whaley, 43, a blunt and outspoken second-term Democrat who is believed to have political ambitions beyond Dayton, a city with about 140,000 residents who have endured more trauma this year than many larger cities experience in a decade.

Since Sunday morning, when she first appeared before a throng of reporters, Ms. Whaley has found herself in the biggest moment of her political life — and at the worst moment of her city’s modern history. She has been a whirlwind presence across the city, too, talking to victims’ families, briefing reporters and working with the state’s Republican governor to form bipartisan alliances on gun policy.

And then there is the Twitter feud with the president of the United States.

“She’s going to be governor one day,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, a fellow Democrat who represents Ohio. Mr. Brown was not speaking of Ms. Whaley’s presence solely over the past few days, but over the whole, bad year.

“There have been these three big things, two of them tragic,” he said, “and then you put all that in the context of the past 30 years, with globalization. It’s sort of been one thing after another.”

In February — after a water line break left tens of thousands without water, but before the federal indictments of current and former local officials — Montgomery County granted the Klan a permit to come to town on the last weekend in May. Afterward, the city sued, arguing that a paramilitary-style rally would present serious public safety concerns. Officials ultimately agreed to a consent decree that limited the weapons the marchers could carry.

The rally cost the city at least $600,000 in security costs, but in the end, only nine Klansmen showed up. They were hemmed in by more than 700 law enforcement officers and were easily drowned out by the shouts and chants of the hundreds who had come out to oppose the march. When the rally ended uneventfully, it seemed that the potential for serious violence had passed.

Two days later, the tornadoes hit.

“It was almost as if it was a metaphor of a divine nature,” said the Rev. Renard Allen Jr., the pastor of St. Luke Missionary Baptist Church, one of the larger churches in Dayton.

That tornado outbreak on May 27 devastated suburban communities and littered city streets with fallen trees. For weeks, residents lifted branches off strangers’ homes and served meals at temporary shelters.

“I think the tornadoes really brought the community together in a really bizarro kind of way,” said Shelley Dickstein, Dayton’s city manager. “We were very much still in the process of healing from the tornadoes when the mass shooting hit.”

When Ms. Whaley was elected to the City Commission at age 29, Dayton, like much of the industrial Midwest, was struggling to recover from a prolonged decline. Over the decades, factories and Fortune 500 companies had left Dayton. So had nearly half its residents.

But during her nearly six years as mayor, Ms. Whaley has presided over a downtown revival. Buildings that had long been vacant are being redeveloped. Some neighborhoods that had been emptied are seeing an infusion of new residents.

And during this time, Ms. Whaley has steadily built a larger profile for herself, taking on a leadership role in a national mayors’ organization, speaking openly about the toll of the opioid crisis on the state and briefly seeking the Democratic nomination for governor.

“People see that she’s striving for a higher political level,” said Gary Leitzell, her predecessor as mayor, who said Ms. Whaley’s ambitions have been seen by some as overshadowing the concerns in some neighborhoods.

“I don’t dislike her,” he added. But, “I do not trust her.”

Still, among mayors across the country, Ms. Whaley has become something of a celebrity.

“She is just so smart, she’s so accessible, she’s so real. Like, what you see is what you get,” said Christine Hunschofsky, the mayor of Parkland, Fla., which endured the unwelcome spotlight last year when 17 people, including 14 students, were killed at a high school in her city. “She is definitely someone other mayors look up to and learn from.”

But on Sunday, it was Ms. Hunschofsky who had guidance for Ms. Whaley. While Dayton police officers were still outside Ned Peppers bar, collecting evidence and methodically combing the vast crime scene, Ms. Hunschofsky texted words of encouragement. Buddy Dyer, the mayor of Orlando, Fla., the site of the Pulse nightclub shooting in June 2016 that left 49 people dead and more than 50 wounded, called Ms. Whaley. So did Bill Peduto, the mayor of Pittsburgh, where 11 people were killed in a synagogue last October.

At a vigil on Sunday, Ms. Whaley talked about joining an unfortunate fraternity of mayors whose cities had been the site of mass shootings. The crowd roared with approval for the mayor. A moment later, they drowned out the Republican governor, Mike DeWine, imploring him to push for tighter gun laws with chants of “Do something!”

Ms. Whaley said in an interview that she was not sure how Mr. DeWine would react. “After that I said to him, ‘I’m sorry, people are just wound up,’” she recalled. “He said to me, ‘Nan, that’s part of the job.’”

Since that vigil, the two have spoken every day, she said. They have effusively complimented each other at news conferences and tried to put on a bipartisan front for gun control proposals.

“She’s done a great job,” said Mr. DeWine, who grew up about 20 miles from Dayton. “Communities always look for leadership from the mayor when you have a crisis, and she’s stepped up.”

On Tuesday, Mr. DeWine proposed expanding background checks and enacting a version of a “red flag” law that would allow guns to be seized from people deemed dangerous. But feisty exchanges between Ms. Whaley and President Trump have not made a bipartisan alliance very easy.

Before Mr. Trump visited the city on Wednesday, Ms. Whaley said she planned to tell him “how unhelpful he’s been” on gun policy. She also would needle him about mistaking Dayton for Toledo in a national address on Monday about the shooting.

After leaving Dayton on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that Ms. Whaley’s characterization of his visit was “a fraud.”

For her part, Ms. Whaley said on Thursday that she was relieved he had left town.

“We’ve got to get to the work of grieving and bringing our community together,” she said. “All of the national drama about what President Trump is thinking and what he’s not thinking, it’s not helpful to our community.”

And there has been no shortage of help needed in Dayton.

On Thursday, for Ms. Whaley, this meant a news conference at a children’s hospital, lunch with the governor and her regular appointment with a counselor, which she highlighted on Twitter to emphasize the importance of mental health.

Still, officials in Dayton were looking ahead. Plans were already underway, the city manager said, for a New Year’s Eve party to bid good riddance to 2019.

Timothy Williams contributed reporting from New York.

[migleefulmoments]

I am a fan of Wentworth, and he was saying he wasn't gay in almost every interview at the time (before anyone read anything in that statement I'm not insinuating anything about D, just so we're clear). He didn't evade the question, he was stating "I'm not gay". Now when we were watching him (and of his own accord), the closeting had tremendous effect on his mental health.

There is an importance difference between “I’m not gay” and “I’m straight”. Gay men and women questioning their sexuality have often said “I'm not gay” but nobody says “I’m straight” and then walks that back. Darren has said it hundreds of time over 9 years.  Sexual identity is determined by the individual and nobody else. Darren has been very clear that he identifies as straight. He has said it point blank many times, he has lived his life in a manner consistent with a straight man- he married a woman he dated for 8 years, he’s never dated a man that we know of- and the ccers have looked- and he has never insinuated he is attracted to men, even in a joke. There is nothing to suggest he is gay accept a group of fans who cannot let it go. This got long so ....

Wentworth has never talked about closeting being something that was forced on him by the show runner or in a contract form. His experience was like everyone else- the reality that LGBTQ actors get less work, are typecast as gay characters-which up until a handful of shows like Glee, Will and Grace, The L-Word and  Queer as Folks, most gay characters where side kick, buddies, comic relief. There were other shows with gay characters but not many.  It is changing, but when Wentworth was struggling, it was still scandalous to come out- they still had to do the big People cover stories claiming “I’m Gay”. Work was hard to find- so everyone giving gay actors advice to stay in the closet were giving good career advice. The problem is that they didn’t understand the mental health implications of this kind of pressure, they didn’t appreciate the struggle to be true to oneself and they seem to have lacked basic of compassion. Most of the actors who have talked about the pressure, also talk about their own struggle with accepting their sexuality and how that mixed in with the pressure to stay in the closet coming from their managers and casting directors. Coming out is not a one-size-fits-all process, it is a complicated, very personal experience that is affected by one’s upbringing, religion, whether there is family and/or friend support, and one’s own mental health status. All of those factors impact coming out but now add in “under the world spotlight” and “impacts your ability to earn a wage” and that gets much more complicated.  

Several actors and singers have talked about being outed and the horror of being forced to talk about their sexuality way before they were ready. Some weren’t even ready to face their sexuality themselves and were forced to when people kept bringing it up. Whether they were outed by the media, by coworkers, by fans or a combination, these are all deeply disturbing stories of depression and anxiety brought on by being outed. 

The problem with the cc trope is that the reality isn’t as simple as Abbu’s theory that one person pushed an actor inside the closet and locked it with a signed, never-ending, legally binding contract. In fact, cc theory is a simple, 1-dimensional look at what really goes on with LGBTQ performers and the closet. It is simply a prop in the CrissColfer fantasy that is used to further their “proof” but it is not based on the reality of what is happening in Hollywood, it discounts the individual’s struggle to be accepted and to accept themselves, to come out and be safe and earn a wage. The ccers out Darren daily with no remorse. They ignore the stories being told by actors who struggle after being outed and they fixate on their fantasy that “Darren wants them to out him��. Nobody ever wants to be outed.   

Closeting in Hollywood isn’t based simply a misconception held by casting directors and managers who are out-of-touch with the times. As a society, we-and by we I mean ccers- still label people as gay based on effeminate behavior and gay kids are being threatened and bullied at school at an alarming rate. Gay kids are still committing suicide. The problem is much deeper than Hollywood. We are making changes but they are slow and the Trump administration and Mike Pence are trying to turn things back to 1950. They just barred transgender troops and have fought to end the rights that Obama administration gave to protect trans kids in school. 

The cc fandom needs actually read the interview and quotes they post because the people aren’t saying what the cc fandom are hearing. They cherry-pick quotes to highlight and ignore the stuff that disproves their 1-dimensional theories.  Today Valentinaheart posted and Abby reblogged (Bold is theirs) : 

Garrett Clayton made headlines when he came out as gay back in August.

It followed years of unfair speculation from both the public and the media – many of whom pressured him to come out when he wasn’t ready – and closed out a chapter of the actor’s life that saw him hide his true self in the public eye.

Now, in his first interview since coming out as gay, the former Disney star tells Gay Times he “finally feels comfortable” with his sexuality – but there was a time that the homophobia he experienced in Hollywood pushed him further into the closet.

“One of the first things somebody who was instrumental in starting my career did, they sat me down and they said, ‘Are you gay?’ And I could feel the pressure of the question, so I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m gay, or bi, or whatever’, because suddenly I could feel that there was something wrong with that in this person’s eyes,” he says.

“They looked at me and said, ‘No one wants to fuck the gay guy, they want to go shopping with him, so we’re going to have to figure this out.’ It turned into this situation where I’d get calls and they’d say, ‘You still need to butch it up’. I literally had to change everything about myself at that point, otherwise I was never gonna make it.

“And that was so conflicting, because here’s somebody offering you your dream, but they’re telling you that you’re not good enough the way you are. You’re talented, but who you are isn’t good enough.”

Unfortunately, this insidious homophobia was something that continued long into Garrett’s career.

“They had me changing the way I walked, the way I spoke, the way I dressed, the way I answered questions,” he continues. “It got as petty as them saying, ‘People need to see that you’re into sports because they’ll think that’s more masculine, so why don’t you go buy a sports hat, take some pictures in it, and make sure people see you in it’.

“There’d be calls after I went into casting offices like, ‘Hey, this is how gay casting thought you came across today, so here’s what you need to do to fix it’. I even had cast members screaming drunkenly in the middle of a room, ‘Who here thinks Garrett is gay?’ and then yelling at me for not having come out yet.”

It felt “like being back in high school” for the aspiring actor, and the self-suffocation prescribed by those around him inevitably took its toll, leading to a period of reclusive behaviour and depression and, ultimately, therapy.

“I convinced myself that I was the problem, and I got into a really dark place for a couple of years. Then I went to therapy for about a year and a half to really sort through all the things I went through growing up and the situations I found myself in while in Hollywood. I got to work through all those conflicting things.”

The second paragraph was not in bold and yet says a lot to a fandom who outs Darren on the daily: It followed years of unfair speculation from both the public and the media – many of whom pressured him to come out when he wasn’t ready – and closed out a chapter of the actor’s life that saw him hide his true self in the public eye

The article says that

  “...but there was a time that the homophobia he experienced in Hollywood pushed him further into the closet”

Interestingly, they did bold this section which could have directed at them

I even had cast members screaming drunkenly in the middle of a room, ‘Who here thinks Garrett is gay?’ and then yelling at me for not having come out yet.”.

How can they not see they are the cast members yelling “are you out yet’?

It felt “like being back in high school” for the aspiring actor, and the self-suffocation prescribed by those around him inevitably took its toll, leading to a period of reclusive behavior and depression and, ultimately, therapy.

So, the taunting and outing took its tole and lead to depression? Hmmm.... they never listen to what their posterboys are saying. 

[stories-about-cheating-women]

It started when I was 17, I previously had no sexual experiences. I had kissed girls but really lacked female interaction but was desperate for it. So when I met a girl who was attractive, who actually liked me. It was really mind blowing and I dont know why. But she was one of the very few attractive women who found me attractive. She ended up latching on to me. The kind of girl who wears thongs, yoga pants and has a nice ass. Just

amazing and was so lucky to have found her. By chance. We started officially dating a month into seeing eachother. She told me this story once when she was a bit drunk about how she was giving a blowjob and how he "Came within like 20 seconds because he didnt get off for days and I ended up choking on it and I coughed it all out and made a huge mess"

This really felt like I got hit in the gut, while I knew she had dated before just hearing that was hard. Mostly because she didnt give me head for the first couple months so I assumed when she did it, it was her first time. While she was good at it, I assumed "Natural ability" but I was wrong. Because I never had much expirences with women and it felt like she was all I had and it just hurt that another guy had this experience with her. It also took me a while to cum from a blowjob, probably cause I was a chronic fapper and never came much. (But at the time never realized this)

But all I knew was this guy was insanely sensitive and must have felt everything inside her mouth and to just explode like that, he had a more intense experience with her then I did cause she was always unimpressed with how little I came. I tried to save up for a few days but then she just wouldnt give me head, she only did it once in a while.

Anyway she talked about this "Friend" a few times we will call him mike. "You should meet my friend he LOVES the same music you do, you guys would get along so well" and I didnt think anything of it. She has guy friends, whatever. Now I feel this is important to note. She lived in another area of the city then I did. She went to school by her house. Of course her friends live close by too. So we were out after going to her house and we went out and shes like "Lets go see if my friend mike is home" And on the way there she said "Aww.." I asked

"What?" she said "Nothing" I kept asking and she said "No you will be mad" I told her I wouldnt be and I just want to know. Then she just said flat out "This is the guy who gave me a mouthful of cum" hearing that, I was devastated. Felt like I got a big hit right in the gut. Because I

assumed she did that with an guy she was dating. But no, it was "Just a friend!" and one she never dated and was still friends with!? It destroyed me mentally, I felt like crying. Also I seen this guys Facebook and he was obviously very good looking but even more maddening, he had like 20 different selfies with girls. So it felt like why did he have to mess with my future girl??? Just disturbing. I felt like I might fight this guy, and get my ass kicked. Just cause I was so upset and pissed that they did this. Thankfully he was never home when we went.

A few months later snooping in her facebook messages when she left it open. I went to the messages between her and mike. While yes, it did seem it was before we were dating. It angered me how easy it was for him, they barely talked on facebook and he just said "Hey you should come over" and she would reply "Of course :)" and she would go over and suck his dick. While I had to wait months. It just utterly, destroyed my selfesteem and was truamatizing to know. Especially cause they go to the same school, so they talk in the hallways and it angered me knowing they still talk after he gave her a mouthful of cum. Theres no way he doesnt get reminded of that every time he sees her.

Anyway, as the months went by I was haunted by it. It was a strain on my mental health, but I began to find it erotic. Whenever she would give me head I would just think about them, knowing he got to expirence this with her WITHOUT having to commit to a relationship, just total freebee blowjobs from this beautiful girl, who was only one out of many of his friends. I found it hot and couldnt stop thinking about it, hoping she did it more

then once I eventually asked her how many times they did stuff and she said "I dont know, about 5, but we never had sex" This made it more hot so he didnt have sex with her or please her and she would just give him blowjobs like no big deal.

I couldnt stop thinking about it and became obsessed with their previous encounters. Now a year into our relationship, we moved in together. Our sex life got a lot more vanilla, well it already was before. But those once in a while blowjobs she used to give me? She stopped doing that and would only have sex once like once a week. Sleeping with her this was frustrating. I often had to jerk off before bed or I would end up

waking her up by thrusting her ass and she would get mad and it would lead to an argument. She just didnt seem to have a high sex drive at least not for me. But she always wore yoga pants, a thong and cleavage showing shirts and this was just frustrating.

I was a bit snoopy as I always sort of been. I checked her texts once in a while when she was in the shower or whatever. She usually didnt just leave it laying around. but would do a poor job of putting it in a spot she wouldnt think Id look. Or when she was sleeping. I did this and found nothing exciting. But one day when she was in the shower I grabbed her phone and I checked her texts and she was texting mike. The conversation went like "Its been so long, I miss you friend :). His reply, "I miss you too, we need to talk more and chill haha" Her reply "Absolutely, we so need to chill"

Reading this I got an adreniline rush. It was so hot that she was talking to him like this, the smileys and I miss you. Talking about "Chilling" again. I found it so fucking hot while my first reaction was to confront her, I just couldnt. I just wanted this to happen. A few weeks later looked in her phone again when sleeping. Nothing was new, she stopped replying to his messages so seems like she didnt plan on going through with it, was disappointed but she was at least considering it at first. So I knew there was a chance... She just needs a little push.

I managed to get access to her facebook cause I found a little book with her password in it (Dumb idea to write it down) so now I had all my tabs on her that if something happens. I WILL find out, and ill love it. As the months went by, nothing was happening a few other guys messaged her but she didnt reply much. Seemed like she wasnt a cheater. I became frustrated, I wanted her to cheat on me especially with her old time Friend with benefits Mike. I wanted them to hangout again, behind my back. Where she ends up sucking his cock again like old times. I wanted this to happen so bad. I decided I must do something to give her a little push... Without her knowing of course.

I decided, to stop initiating sex with her. I feel me wanting sex so often, made her feel attractive a worthy. So I stopped initiating sex with her I just jerked off in the bathroom before going to bed every night, and cuddled her to sleep without thrusting or being sexual towards her. I needed her to know I still loved her. So I remained charming and nice, rubbed her back to sleep which she always loved. But I stopped initiating sex completely... That once a week when she did want sex, I made excuses and didnt have sex with her. She would be turned off instantly when I mentioned

"I have a headache" Because her thinking I didnt want sex was a real mind boggler and it certainly got her thinking and wondering why. Possibly even questioning her attractivity (She was absolutely beautiful and I mean it) My plan was that her resistance to other men would diminish and eventually she would be getting fucked by another man. While remaining in a relationship with me.

Checking her facebook messages almost everyday for months. And to my surprise... Nothing. She wasnt really messaging guys back. It was disappointing and frustrating. Decided to just keep doing what I am doing. About 4 months into this I lost some hope and stopped checking her messages so often. Until one day. She put a really good looking selfie on facebook. Showing off her ass in the mirror. One guy commented "You look amazing" and he messaged

her. But unlike usual this conversation did not die. She kept replying and chatting with him. Until she said "Text me anytime". I checked her phone later when she was sleeping. This was always a sketchy operation. She would sleep beside her phone and I would have to very slowly take it from her. And no shes not a heavy sleeper. I read their texts for the day and he asked her "Can I take you out to dinner sometime?" She said "Sure" but actually gave him a date right there "This Friday at 6 PM, you pick the place :)" So they agreed.

By this point I was insanely turned on and very excited knowing my GF has a secret date in a few days. I couldnt wait, picturing her getting fucked after a date was just too much and way too hot for something like logic to stop this.