#my head's been a mess since the week before results day and while i'm miles better i'm still not right

[aretrothing]

.

[himbeaux-on-ice]

i am. feeling a little sad about max. this week.

idk, just. to be one of those players who plays for the sheer overwhelming joyful love of the game, but is also intensely, extremely competitive, and to have been sidelined by flukey injuries three times last season and still kept pushing and coming back, because you've never let bad injury luck stop you before. and in the games you do play you are producing at the absolute best rate of your career, but you can't be in enough games and the team founders in part as a result of your absence, and even though you come back for the stretch and you keep scoring and scoring despite everything, it's not enough. the team misses the playoffs. you avow that you believe the squad you have can run it back next season healthy and do the big things that were expected, can come back and win. you ask for this chance at redemption. you do nothing but say you believe.

and your team, the team that made you re-discover your love of hockey after a miserable couple years and which you do nothing but sing the praises of the entire franchise and city, the team that you scored more goals for than anyone else while you were there, the team you wrote an entire essay about being so excited to become a part of, the team you call family, unceremoniously trades you away for less than nothing, as a salary dump because they were stupid, paying a team to take you by adding in a young defenceman too.

you pack up and move your family, your young kids who are deeply embedded in the local youth hockey community and your wife, out of the city you said you fell in love with, that you said fit so well, that you made your year-round home, and across the entire country. you don't come back for your friend's wedding (the kid who was traded with you does). you don't say goodbye to the fans. your agent says you saw it coming for a while, because of your contract, because of the cap mess, because this is what this team does (because they did it to his last client too). you say you're just looking forward now, not back, you're excited to take part in things with your new team and getting to know your new city. you say you're 100% healthy for the first time in a while. you say you're better off without everything about your old team that you said you loved so much just a few months ago, you say that all that stuff that was so good and kind of them made you weak actually. you say you're looking forward to skating with your new teammates. you go skating in your new jersey and borrowed gloves.

you immediately tear your acl and have to get surgery that will sideline you into the new year, six months, no skating. your old team suffers an injury that means they could have afforded to keep you anyway. they use the cap space to replace you with a guy who hasn't missed a game to injury since 2009. you are injured and sitting with your family in a new city thousands of miles away with months without hockey on the horizon. fans of your old team say they dodged a bullet, getting rid of your fragile self when they did. your old friend turns down money from the team that just threw you away to come and join you. the kid who you were traded to your second team in exchange for, who ended your last playoff run with a thud, takes up the captaincy that you once had, what feels like a lifetime ago - when you wore that letter for the first time you cried with pride, and then stood tall through three years of people saying you should be stripped of it for being too sensitive, too weak. 'i stood up there with a gun to my head every day and i took it. i'm proud of myself for doing so'.

the people who were your best friends in the world and your second family six months ago talk around your name in interviews, talk as if nothing major has been lost, as if you just vanished into thin air. everyone in the news talks about you in "maybes" and "ifs" and past-tense, when they remember to talk about you at all. the season is on the horizon and you still won't skate for months now. the athletic top 100 players list comes out and this year you've fallen right off of it. the nhl network top 50 comes out and you're not anywhere on it at all. you are 33 years old, 34 soon, battered and bruised and covered in scars and you've been through nearly unimaginable things and been written off and come back before. when they speak of you they say that maybe you're getting too old to keep pulling off the magic healing trick anymore, they say you're in the latter years of your career. the teammates who you came into the league with as young men are retiring, stepping back, waiting for contracts that might not come - they are getting old. fourteen seasons is such a long, long time.

you built your career up from absolutely nothing on the back of just sheer deep abiding love of the game, you accomplished so many genuinely impressive things (captain, olympian, 800 games, 600 points, 300 goals, lead your team in goals for half a decade, 40th most points by an american-born player ever and 22nd most goals), you came back from the unimaginable, you held up unimaginable weight upon your shoulders, you took torrents of abuse, you stayed kind through all of it, despite.

you still don't have a cup. you always get shown the door from these cities you fall in love with, always because of someone else's mistakes, always 'it's not you, it's me'. you've never been given a truly long-term contract, at least not one that pays you fair; you're nearly 34 now and that means that you never will. you have a happy family whom you dote on, you have a career you can already be so proud of. you still don't have a cup. you still don't have a cup.

the first time you ever stepped on the ice with skates on, you instantly fell down and cut your chin open. your mother, a mexican immigrant who had never skated in her life, took you home crying and thought you wouldn't ever want to do it again. the next day you asked to go back. she bought you a helmet with a face cage, and back to the ice you went anyway, despite.

the first time you ever played hockey, after signing up on a whim, you took a penalty on your very first shift and the ref had to help you to the penalty box because you didn't know how to skate. you fell down all over the place. it was embarrassing. you kept going back anyway. you kept going, kept learning, kept playing, until you got drafted as a first-round pick, despite.

when you were twenty-two years old, the largest player in the entire league put your head into an aluminum turnbuckle that braced up a pane of unforgiving hard-plate glass, the old-fashioned stuff, going full speed. when you hit it, it sounded like a gunshot. when you hit the ice, some people thought you might be dead. when they stretchered you off with a broken neck and a concussion, almost nobody thought that you would play hockey again. you sat at home rehabbing and watched the guy who hit you hoist the stanley cup. you returned to the ice six months after the hit and broke out for the best damn season of your career to that point, leading your team in scoring and only going up and up and up from there, despite.

this is what you do. this is who you are. you will take it on the chin, get up, wipe the blood off, and keep going, despite all doubters. you always get up. you always keep going, despite, despite, despite. even as it gets harder and harder to prove that to everyone, harder and harder to make your patchwork body get back up. to prove that you're not done yet. not yet.

the season that should be your fifteenth is starting without you. the hockey world moves on and forgets you. your spot is filled by younger, healthier, faster, cheaper, by committee, by anyone else but you. four more months, four more months. you play the waiting game and hope that there will be no setbacks, that when you get back to play you won't have to start this cycle all over again. you still don't have a contract past this season. four more months, four more months, four more months. fifteen years.

you still don't have a cup.

[castiel-left-his-mark-on-me]

Hi, Ary, very inactive ex-mutual(i think???) here. Good to see you thriving! ♥ It's been a while since I've dipped my head into cockles stuff. Could I perchance maybe ask uuuuum tf is going on??? lol I see Mish apparently confirmed he used to stay over at Jensen's in Van, and heard newbs were apparently freaking out about it and getting a bit messy, which I get that, business as usual. But I'm also seeing shit about spin-offs? And Jared getting in a twitter fight with Jensen, causing/resulting in stans to going feral and sending hate?? I know you're not as big a fan of Jar, but that's part of why I figured I'd ask you, you usually have a really level head about this kinda stuff. If you don't wanna answer publically, or at all, that's totally chill!

Hey, Rhi! We're still mutuals! Of course we're still mutuals! When I saw the notification of your ask, I was like "Hey! I haven't seen you in a while!" and my husband was like "???" and I said "Tumblr" and he said "Oh."

It was a wild time haha.

In any case, welcome back to the dumpster fire! We are obviously still a mess. So to catch you up, I guess I will start by summarizing both before and after the finale (not sure where you left off so this might be redundant for you) ... basically, it became obvious as the end of the show neared that Jensen was not on board with the plan for the finale; although Jared never stopped singing its praises.

We got confirmation of this during a zoom interview where Jensen said that he actually went into the writers room as well as called Kripke to basically voice how he didn't agree with the direction the final season was going, but he was shot down on all fronts. In another interview, he was asked "What would you tell your younger self going into this career?" And Jensen responded with: "I would tell myself to just keep your head down and do the work" meaning, "Don't try to change things because you can't." I also think that this whole situation is what he wrote "Let Me Be" about for his first Radio Company album, but that is just my own speculation. All of his reluctance, even though he always followed it up with "But I eventually saw the value in the script" or "I came around in the end" (which never sounded sincere, and I don't think he was really trying to sound sincere) made us all very nervous about what was to come for 15x20; and of course, when the last two episodes aired, we saw just how badly they fucked it up.

After the awful finale, the entire fandom became aware of the CW's heavy handed role in the thing, basically squeezing all the life out of SPN to shape it into a ramp from which Walker could launch itself. They not only erased all the love and joy and representation that Cas's love confession gave us, they also tore apart the things that made sense about the bond between Sam and Dean, making it really just about Sam-- and therefore Jared, which of course, Jared seemed to be fine with ... even though no one else was. Misha barely said anything during the finale, and a few of the other actors talked about the show ending in various posts, but Jared tweeted up a storm ... and Jensen? Jensen just sat in sexy-silent resentment of the whole thing. He didn't tweet, he didn't post, he didn't say a word once he no longer had to, and I think that's because he was already going full-steam-ahead on his plans for redemption.

Which brings us to Chaos Machine-- Jensen and Danneel's new production company that is being run by a queer creative director and has a mantra of inclusivity and representation woven throughout it's fabric; and apparently, the first story that Jensen wanted to tell through this new platform is the origin story of Sam and Dean's parents; so last week (?) he announced the upcoming production of "The Winchesters" -- the untold love story of John and Mary. Obviously, John is not the most likable character from the show, so the idea was met with a lot of resentment when it was first announced, but Jensen has gone on to say that he is excited to take on the task of telling the "true" story behind these characters-- the one that makes sense with the pre-established canon and doesn't reject it. So, given that, the idea is being mulled over with a bit more optimism from the fandom.

Who isn't being optimistic though?

Jared Padalecki.

When Jensen made this announcement on Twitter, many of his friends and coworkers congratulated him, but not Jared. Jared responded with a passive aggressive: "I'm happy for you, man, but I wish I didn't hear about it through Twitter." This of course, sent all the die-hard Jared fans into a tizzy and they immediately began asking him if he was serious (hoping it was just a joke-- we all hoped it was because there would be fallout no matter what one's opinion on Jared is). Instead of leaving it there though or just deleting that tweet, Jared went on to tweet some more, saying that he was being serious that he didn't know about the plans for the prequel, and that he was "gutted" that Sam apparenlty wouldn't be included (mind you, this a prequel to SPN... meaning BEFORE Sam and Dean were even born, so how could Sam be included? But Dean is apparently narrating this story so maybe Jared thought Sam should be helping to narrate it? I don't know). But Jared being Jared couldn't just leave that there, he then went on to tweet at Robbie Thompson who was announced as a writer for "The Winchesters" so then Jared went off on him too, calling him "Brutus" and a "coward" acting like Robbie betrayed him (speculation is-- Robbie refused to write for Walker, so Jared is pissed that he essentially chose Jensen over him). He did fairly quickly, remove that tweet attacking Robbie, but of course the damage was done at that point. And it truly only took his first tweet calling out Jensen for some people to be like "Jared-- that sucks if you didn't know but why are you saying any of this publicly?"

As you might know, Jared has had issues in the past with posting hurtful things on social media, and has even used it as a tool for attack before-- calling out customer service agents and public workers that he felt have wronged him, which is bad enough ... but for him to then do the same thing to his best friend of well over a decade? Many people who had once liked him or at least gave him the benefit of the doubt (I used to ...) stopped after this latest twitter tantrum.

However, some people have suspected for some time that J2 had a falling out either shortly before the finale or just after. Their public/social media interactions have seemed awkward, stilted or even non-existent in moments that they normally wouldn't be. In the past year, when Walker premiered, Jensen didn't say much about his friend's new venture other than a "Congrats. buddy" here and there. Later, we learned that Jensen refused to work on the show ... Jared said he make him do it, drag Jensen to the set "kicking and screaming" which made many fans quirk up an eyebrow because, why would Jensen put up a fight unless the two weren't as close as they used to be? And then Jensen moved his family to Colorado (either permanently or for an extended period at least) which is notable considering how he moved to Texas seemingly to be closer to Jared, even buying a house that was near his. All this was just speculation though; but it wasn't until Jared's tweet complaining about not knowing about the prequel that the theories behind them falling out, became less theory and more fact.

The day after his twitter tantrum, Jared tweeted again-- not retracting his statements or apologizing, but instead saying that he and Jensen "talked" and were "all good". Jensen then tweeted too, parroting this statement to some degree, which only made the whole thing even more sour in the mouths of the fans. The fact that Jared didn't apologize for his outburst and throwing his friend under the bus, and also the fact that Jensen-- Mr. Sexy Silence, Mr. Never Tweets, Mr. Tech-Ignorant-and-Proud, actually had to POST SOMETHING saying that he and Jared made up, it just screamed OPTICS. It was obviously the work of agents and PR firms and lots of people going "Look, if you two keep beefing, that will mean the death of both of your projects. Even more people will stop watching Walker, and this SPN prequel will never get picked up due to the scandal." So, the two "made nice" publicly to quell the chaos, but in my opinion, it's all too little too late. Jared started a storm that he can't contain now with a little tweet, and it seems like he knows that too because before he talked about him and Jensen making up, he asked that people "not send threats". He could have just as easily said that he shouldn't have made this a public issue and that he's sorry, but instead, he continued to play the victim and stoke the flames by alerting us all to the damage he's done.

Now, like I said before-- I used to give him the benefit of the doubt. I don't think he's an awful human or that he deserves to be attacked or anything, but he is an adult man with very poor judgment and an obvious selfish-streak a mile wide. He should know better, and he should have more respect for his so-called "friends" and "brothers" than to make them targets to public ridicule. I have a hard time believing that Jensen still sees Jared the way he used to, and I wouldn't blame him a bit for wanting to pull away-- especially when he's moving on to so many new and exciting things. Jared certainly deserves happiness just as much as anyone else, but he went on twitter and basically asked for a scandal, and he got one.

The question is now-- was there a motive behind it? Was just looking for a reason to bring his and Jensen's falling out to light-- while making himself looking like the victim in the process? Or did he genuinely not know about the prequel and just decided to go about "not knowing" in the most toxic and hurtful way he could manage?

In any case, that is the drama ... that is the J2 insanity in a rather lengthy nutshell ... that is the tea ... and I hope it all makes sense.

But the good news out of all of this is, Cockles is thriving-- they are happy and in love and Jensen calls Misha "Babe" and Misha misses waking up to see Jensen in the morning, and they are just as cute and wonderful as can be.

So, I will end that there. I am so glad to see you back, and I hope I answered all your questions in a way that made sense ... I tried anyway!

💖💖💖