#ymmv of course with how well known or accepted those are in your community/ies

[secondwhisper]

Love and solidarity to people with less-spoken-of "invisible" disabilities.

Disabilities of breathing, eating, and drinking. Disabilities of language, speech, signing, reading, and writing. Disabilities of digestion and toileting. Disabilities of sleep. Disabilities of thermoregulation. Disabilities of sexual function. Disabilities of navigation, balance, and motor control. Disabilities of taste and smell.

"Invisible" disabilities with obvious causes, and "invisible" disabilities with unknown causes. "Invisible" disabilities with treatments, those with helpful adaptive technologies, those with experimental approaches, those with social or infrastructural accommodations, those with nothing that really helps. "Invisible" disabilities that go unspoken even in spaces meant for those of us who have "invisible" disabilities. "Invisible" disabilities that have yet to be named.

"Invisible" disabilities that wouldn't be so invisible if others would just look at us and how we live.

[electric-sympathy]

So, to wrap up and clarify my thoughts on John and fandom, in case anyone missed the second half of that post of mine:

There are two things I am not cool with in relation to John: One, people that love him in a way that ignores that he used Parentification and neglect and that this is abuse (I have yelled at and unfollowed SO MANY PEOPLE for this), and Two, people that campaign for the idea that John was the traditional, stereotypical child-beating abuser as absolute fact (ie headcanons and thinky-thought-theories are absolutely 100% fine) and often shit on those who oppose, because I feel it A. devalues the previous two abuses, which further contributes to the idea that someone can’t be an abuser unless they hit, and is particularly bad because most people don’t even know that Parentification exists and to squander that and thus continue ignoring real-life victims when the show displays it so well is a practically sinful waste, and B., it disregards canon, which I oppose in all its forms (save times when crappy showrunners create new, contradictory canon, YMMV) because this fandom is a fucking mess already because of that sort of thing. 

My fannishness is very much punctuated by academic interest. Behind art, English has always been my best subject. I’ve always been very interested in literary and film analysis and, as far as my grades and professors say, taken to it quite well. I’ve been known to easily pass exams and contribute meaningfully to class discussions even if my ADHD had gotten in the way of me reading the assigned chapter! :P This is to say, I care more about accuracy than I do about my personal emotions regarding any particular character. (If you feel I have a bias for Dean, consider that this may be because my value system is different than yours.) I treat them as characters, not people. Thus I do not judge people for liking particular characters unless you disregard the bad they’ve done in order to do so. In terms of my own personal system of analysis, I find moral judgments-- specifically and limited to those that entail hating or loving a character enough to disregard canon-- to be useless. I don’t allow my distaste to get in the way of proper, close analysis. 

Like, most people in this fandom think they can figure out what John was like offscreen without even considering his background and motivations and how they affect his actions which I find patently ridiculous.

It may seem like I disregard all of this with Sam, but my response to him is because I find the audacity of the showrunners to present the narrative in such a horrendously manipulative and potentially socially harmful fashion to be disrespectful to the craft itself. If they want to treat us like children and stretch Sam beyond his actual scope, it is only fair I do the same in the opposite direction. (Regardless, I have on occasion expressed that Sam’s disposition is not quite his fault (beyond a certain point it is), and that some of it comes from a place of pain) 

Further: Everyone has a breaking point, and it’s not on a consistent scale. I.e., I love Alastair’s character as a torturer, even of Dean, while I find Sam “just” strangling Dean-- combined, of course, with narrative acceptance-- too reprehensible to maintain academic composure and distance. What bothers one person may not bother another, and vice versa. It doesn’t mean that they find the less bothersome thing to be moral; it’s just how human emotions happen to work.

And, you know, all of this fanfiction about John where I’m made to wonder if these people have even seen Season 1 because of how erroneous they are even in terms of John’s basic physical mannerisms irritate the fuck out of me. I cannot stand bad writing. Just because you feel a character is evil doesn’t mean you throw artistic integrity out the window, God damn it. (You guys know that loads of abuse goes unnoticed because the abusers are pitch-perfect community members that don’t “look” like abusers and are in fact capable of controlling themselves at times, right?)

But right, back to John: The simple fact of the matter is that John has been on this show incredibly little, and when he has been spoken about in his absence, his actions are seldom illustrated in actual words. Expressions are not nearly concrete enough to warrant absolute interpretations. Even specific depictions of him have been all over the map depending on who was running the show at any particular time. (For example, one episode congratulates John on not allowing Dean to drink and another accuses him of drunkenness, and for another, the episode Bad Boys was written by a known plothole-loving shithead & all-around idiot [look up his response to people hating the episode; he barely seems to understand what he just wrote] and, by many interpretations, contradicts John’s specific modus operandi of abuse.) No matter what your stance on him is, you can probably find something in canon that, often depending on the interpretation of your debate partner, contradicts you. Further, Jeffrey Dean Morgan has said that he despises most of the later characterizations, because they don’t correspond with the John he played. Personally, I consider actors to be one of the most important authorities on the characters they play... Especially considering such a short run, others may not.

So, unlike with the main characters, that right mess leaves us with potentially correct interpretations of him that run the gamut. 

The point of all this is: While opinions that don’t align with my interpretation irk me and I might occasionally argue them, unless you meet the Badness Criteria above, you can feel safe on my blog, like John or despise him.