#they were so tragic anyway still love my dysfunctional siblings <3

[surii]

MAKE ME CHOOSE — anonymous asked: jiang cheng and wei wuxian pre time-skip or jiang cheng and wei wuxian post time-skip

[whenshiphitsthefan]

So, trying to hash out some personal stuff. If you have any insights after reading this feel free to comment because I still don't even... yeah.

CW for some references to sexual abuse

It's been six months since I finished Tophet, a story that I took about two years to write (not including the preceding story), and it turns out the entire 90k word fic was an incredibly deep allegory for why, even though my dad was alive for the first 23 years of my life and even lived in the same house for the first 12, he was almost totally absent.

The main gist of the fic is that Sam and femme!Dean are so codependent it overshadows everything else and they cannot be any other way even if they wanted to. The resolution is that their two children are having happy normal lives away from them. The ending is supposed to be tragic, but also happy if that makes sense. Sam and Dean are happy, the two kids are happy, but they aren't happy together. They can't be.

In the fic, Dean represents mental illness/depression. My dad, like Sam in the story, knew perfectly well how to be a good father but he couldn't function as one because his sickness was just too overwhelming. He hurt his children that he did love to varying degrees because of his mental issues. Sam ends up hurting his kids because of Dean.

It's gonna take a while to sort through all of it but it's incredible to me that I subconsciously crafted all this because I was, I don't know, trying to explain to myself why I didn't have a dad? Trying to tell myself that I was better off without him?

I've been messed up about this ever since I realized it.

I was never good at picking up on literary symbolism before and obviously when I wrote it I did not make any conscious decisions to make it like my life, but looking back, it's all there and you could do a whole lecture in an English course about it.

It's all fucking there. I used a dysfunctional, codependent relationship with Dean to represent clinical depression and whatever else happened to my dad to make him the way he was. I hate to say this but Crowley in the fic represents my mom, someone who provided for me materially and on some levels emotionally (IRL she truly loves all of us kids) but due to her own problems could never provide the type of parenting my dad technically knew how to do but couldn't consistently execute. There's a scene at the end where Sam uses a knife on his four day old daughter to get a couple drops of blood. It's in the woods in the dark and if that's not a metaphor for my one weird memory that may or may not be my dad molesting me then what the fuck would it be? There's another scene where Sam feels like he's sexually exposing himself to Tophet and he's not but they're in the situation because of Dean, and my dad was convicted of doing that to some random girls either before I was born or shortly after. I still don't know much about it but it's like... that's what that is.

I kind of wonder also if I was trying to explore how my dad might have felt about the situation. Like I know he felt guilty about not being there. He was also a shitty person who made shitty choices and was abusive towards my mom (Sam killing Crowley in the story might be related to that). So like, it's not like he's entirely deserving of sympathy, but I don't think I paint Sam that way in the story either. He knows perfectly well what is right and wrong and he does the wrong thing anyway because he needs Dean. I used to kind of wonder why I was writing such a dark version of Sam, because Sam doesn't go that dark until season 10 whereas I had it set in season 6/7, but it wasn't Sam I was writing.

It might be partly what my therapist initially suggested, that I keep writing Sam as a father because I'm living out a fantasy of what could have been, so maybe the story is a fantasy where my dad was a great person other than the mental illness that made him do bad things/be absent even when he technically was there.

But I was compelled to tell this story, like it was already there, so maybe I was telling the story... from his point of view?

When I first started the first story, What We Carry Inside, it was an idea that came of a random smutty fic, and I hadn't spoken to my dad in months. I started posting that one in January 2016 which is a few months after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died in May 2016. I finished WWCI and started posting Tophet in February 2017.

So, I'm not sure how much of WWCI is about my dad (some of it definitely is fantasizing-about-having-a-normal-dad), but by the time I was actually writing Tophet, my dad had died months earlier and his story was over.

So, what I'm saying is that I spent, depending on how you look at it, 2 to 3 years telling the sad story of why I don't have a dad, and I am not sure if it was more of a "I have to take this out and look at it" or a way of defending his massive failure of a life. Again, I don't think Sam is a hero in that story. He is the protagonist, yes, and I wrote it because I love... whoever...

Idk it's like I wrote it because I love my dad (but instead of loving him I love a fictional character) and want to believe he felt bad about his failures (which I know he did to some extent) but I also portray Sam as being happy at the end. I didn't use the words but I make it clear that he isn't... guilty? about it anymore. Or that he doesn't have to be.

So. Maybe the whole fucking fic is actually a very long version of a conversation I had with my dad in August of 2015 where I told him that I forgave him for things he did and things he didn't do. Maybe I wrote all that to say "you know, dad, you were really fucked up and did fucked up things, but it's okay. I know you loved me and my siblings and something else prevented you from functioning."

(I realize I just wrote basically what Sam said to John Winchester in the 300th episode. I loved that scene because I'd actually had that talk with my dad and I was happy for Sam finally having it.)

But man I put a whole lot of time into saying something to a dead person that I'd already told him when he was alive, which makes me wonder if I was saying it to myself or maybe trying to say it to others.

Like I can sum it up as "the story is about why I didn't have a dad" but who was I trying to explain it/defend him to? Am I telling my truth, or his truth? Am I trying to convince myself of something?

I should probably see my therapist again sooner than December but on the other hand I have a lot of other fanfics to analyze.

This is just really overwhelming for some reason, realizing I put all that out there without knowing it. I seriously spent years of my life working on a story that was just a story (one I loved but still just a story) and thinking I was making creative decisions when really I wasn't because the story it's based on had already ended. The details and scenes had already been decided long before I wrote them.

I just. I was so into the dark Wincest element of that story, but that translates to a fixation on my dad's mental illness. Which I guess is fair since that's why I didn't really have a dad even though I technically did. I love dark Wincest in general. My favorite type of Sam/Dean story is when they do bad things to save each other or be with each other. So how deep does it go? How many of my Wincest fics are just about battles between us and mental illness that prevents us from doing what we want or should?,