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thecloserkin · 5 months ago

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book review: Layne Fargo, The Favorites (2025)

Genre: straddles romance, literary, and thriller

Is it the main pairing: yes

Is it canon: yes

Is it explicit: no

Is it endgame: yes

Is it shippable: yes

Bottom line: I came for Big Feelings and this book delivered. Wuthering Heights but make them ice dancers: killer concept, flawless execution. Yes, I have expanded the remit of this blog to include spiritually incestuous relationships.

Just to recap, Wuthering Heights is a tale of extremely extra people who, not satisfied with making each other miserable their entire lives, insist on tormenting each other from beyond the grave. Elite figure skating is an extremely incestuous sport where competitors are constantly switching coaches and partners in pursuit of the gold medal. Nobody is allowed to sulk because Layne Fargo telegraphs to the reader where she is going with this: “Everyone thinks Heath Rocha was my first love. He wasn’t. My first love was figure skating.” The great tragedy of Katarina and Heath’s romance is that Kat wants to win and she wants Heath, whereas Heath has always just wanted all of Kat. They’re sixteen at the beginning so Kat’s like, of course these two goals will always be in alignment, but there comes a time when winning and Heath are in tension with each other, and that is when the story is at the height of its power. Anyone who’s been alive more than ten minutes could tell you that hate and hurt are forces just as powerful as than love.

If it’s been awhile since you’ve picked up a Brontë book it may have slipped your mind that Jane Eyre is first person POV but Wuthering Heights is entirely outsider POV: We get Lockwood who is an outsider to the neighborhood, and Nelly who is a servant in the household, but we are shut out of Cathy and Heathcliff’s internal monologue. Well, The Favorites is first-person from Kat’s POV, interspersed with transcripts from a new documentary about Katarina Shaw & Heath Rocha’s scandalous career. Imagine if I, Tonya was a straight documentary. Just the juiciest melodrama imaginable. I have never been so upset my brain cannot process audiobooks because in the audio version Johnny Weir (gay fashion icon and professional snark commentator) voices the character who is based on him. As the story drew on I found myself looking forward to the “documentary” interludes more and more, and this is because as Katarina grows older/wiser her narrative becomes less messy and less interesting. Which is not a problem with the original Wuthering Heights because Cathy Earnshaw dies absurdly young. The way The Favorites handles Shaw & Rocha’s legacy is so different from Wuthering Heights, and yet these are both books obsessed with intergenerational trauma.

The Favorites is enthrallingly, achingly American in the best and worst possible ways. American like Stephen King, American like Supernatural, that is the amplitude of Americanness. Katarina and Heath are two podunk kids from the Midwest who go west and reinvent themselves, learn to live their lives in the public eye, chase that green Gatsbyian light that is forever retreating. There is this yawning pit of ambition in Kat that is never satisfied, and if she’d been born a man nobody would have looked askance but for a woman with a public profile? Unacceptable:

When I was strong and self-assured, people recoiled from me. They told me I was too competitive, too ambitious, too much. But when I was brought low, bruised and bleeding, a princess in need of rescue instead of a queen, they loved me.

But they’re also American in the anodyne sense they’re from the USA. An American dance team did not win a world title until Davis & White in 2011. At that point Russia had taken home three Olympic golds to the USA’s zero. It wasn’t until 2014 that Davis & White finally earned the USA’s first Olympic gold in ice dance (Americans have always been stronger in the ladies’ and mens’ singles disciplines). Sorry for being a pedantic skating fan, and I wouldn’t go as far as to say this book is Russia bashing but it’s certainly minimizing Russia’s contributions to the sport (and Japan! where are the Japanese skaters). It’s a story that could only take place in America because it’s built on the American dream of reinvention, of rising above your station, of “making” it. Even if it’s a mirage it’s still the motor that drives the story. Heath is the only nonwhite, non-Asian skater we meet. Thank you, Layne Fargo, for working that in. There’s been maybe 20 film adaptations of Wuthering Heights and 19 of them have whitewashed Heathcliff. Heath spent his first 13 years in foster care before Kat’s dad adopted him, so we’re not sure what kind of “nonwhite” he is but he stands out. Kat also stands out for being not-willowy-thin and for being white trash. Shaw & Rocha’s biggest rivals, Lin & Lin, are the mixed-race children of legendary Chinese-American ice dancer Sheila Lin. Sheila is the coach who launches Shaw & Rocha onto the international stage, but as a mentor she’s less than ideal. She’s too busy girlbossing her way to the top to tend to her relationships, including her relationship with her own children, who at different times will partner Katarina and Heath. Sheila is an ice-cold bitch and she’s awful to Kat and Heath but she’s also a product of American institutions (which doesn’t excuse her behavior! just means you don’t have to be the perfect victim for racism/misogyny to be real).

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

On the eve of joining Sheila Lin’s elite training academy, when they’re just two broke kids who can’t afford to pay their small-town coach, Katarina sells her mom’s engagement ring. This is the last thing she has left of her mother. Heath is more gutted than she is. It’s a portent of things to come, because Kat has zero qualms about throwing away something super important and meaningful if it brings her one step closer to the podium. Heath—and the reader—are put on notice that Kat’s ruthless ambition will be be the undoing of both of them. The entire arc of Shaw & Rocha climbing the competitive ranks is Kat putting in 120% and Heath being like “where did my soulmate go.” It all culminates in a rip-your-heart-out-of-your-ribcage breakup scene. Afterward Kat reflects, “I had no idea what breakup felt like; I’d never experienced one.” Because she’s been with Heath forever. They’ve always been everything to each other, romantic partner just another role they slipped seamlessly into. Early in the book there is a scene where their coach stumbles on them having an “intimate moment” and at first she’s like “are these thirteen-year-olds making out” and then she’s like “did somebody die” but actually what’s happened is Heath’s being transferred to another foster family and can’t skate with Kat anymore. To Kat and Heath this is indistinguishable from the end of the world.

Let’s talk about revenge. Heath disappears for two years, comes back hotter and madder. His skating is orders of magnitudes better. An aghast Katarina watches him take the ice:

His love for me hadn’t been motivation enough to reach his full potential. His hatred, though? That made him capable of anything.

He’s here to rub her face in exactly what she’s thrown away. His new partner? Isabella Lin, of course. Kat has been skating with Isabella’s brother Garrett the past two seasons. That was one of the reasons she and Heath broke up. To Heath, even entertaining the notion of another skating partner was tantamount to cheating on him romantically.

I was impressed by the characterization of Isabella and Garrett, whom I found insipid in the original Wuthering Heights but in this version their existence doesn’t just propel the plot, you actually understand why Katarina and Heath might be drawn to them as partners. Bella and Kat in particular share this yearning pit of emptiness: “But it was never enough for her. That’s why we were friends: nothing was ever enough for either of us.”

We have now entered the “make my ex madly jealous” phase of the story. Predictably it ends in Kat pushing herself too hard and bleeding all over center ice at the Olympics, and Heath rushes to her side and that’s the end of them partnering other people lol.

“I want to go home,” she tells him from her hospital bed, and at first he thinks she means the hotel but she repeats, “I want to go home.” They retreat to the Midwest, to the house they grew up in, all the good memories and the bitter ones. This is the house Kat’s father died in; the house Kat’s brother kicked Heath out of before their father’s body was even cold in the ground:

In our little stone house by the lake…Some days, I was content too. Other days, I felt trapped in a purgatory of my own making. Every day the same as the next, not working toward anything, not improving, not striving. Simply existing. Heath might be able to live like that, but I couldn’t.

So much of Wuthering Heights is about place—it’s right there in the damn title—and while The Favorites isn’t about property ownership in the same way, the image of the house by the lake is thematically central. Kat moves back into her childhood home and finds that she cannot escape her roots, but she also cannot be wholly contained by them. She and Heath return to competition. There is, eventually, another breakup. The melodrama quotient is so high that I felt chemically unbalanced by the time I finished this book:

”This is exactly what I’m talking about! I tell you I love you, and you throw it back in my face. I suffer for years to get back to you, and—“ “You wanted to get back at me. You wanted me to suffer too. That’s not love, Heath.” “My love isn’t good enough for you either. Got it.”

Imo the final act of The Favorites felt like it ran out of steam but overall it invoked the raw power of the original Wuthering Heights, while making everyone appreciably less awful than their canon counterparts. Heath in particular is so much easier to root for than Heathcliff. Otoh all the characters are definitely worse people than their real-life skating analogues. Recommended reading: This interview with the author where she talks about her research methodology, as well as some readers’ over-the-top reactions to the ending (I wasn’t disappointed but I didn’t expect a traditional happily ever after). Halsey’s “Drive”. Virtue & Moir’s 2018 gold-medal-winning Moulin Rouge program, along with (I just scoured ao3 and this has apparently been taken down!!! it’s illstrash’s “it’s not a bad thing”) a tragically unfinished AU where they are not partners but rivals.

#layne fargo #the favorites #book rec

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thecloserkin · 2 years ago

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there's a blog post making the rounds on social media, aptly titled "Matt Yglesias and the Secret of Blogging" and ok here it is guys:

that the cornerstone of internet success is not intelligence or novelty or outrageousness or even speed, but regularity

post regularly and never stop, and no matter how milquetoast your takes are (if you write nonfiction) or how all your stories are the same story (if you write fiction) you just might accrue a loyal audience. I’ve seen both fiction and nonfiction writers quote this post approvingly so idk, will try to give it a shot

#‘internet success’ may be beyond my capabilities however loool

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thecloserkin · 2 years ago

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fic rec: Less Than Dirt. by ulexite

fandom: Supernatural

pairing: Sam Winchester/Dean Winchester

word count: 40k

Is it explicit: no

Bottom line: when they say “go hard gencest or go home” they are referring to this fic, which went so hard that it ground up my insides and fed them back to me in a tube

In this early-season AU, Sam is beset by visions and the boys are keeping it from John. Who knows what John would do if he knew, right? That’s present-day 2006. In 1997, fourteen-year-old Sam and eighteen-year-old Dean tangle with some hunters who turn out to be bad hombres. I think either plot thread could have stood on its own—the 1997 story is entirely self-contained—but when ulexite braids them together the impact is like an airplane landing. This fic is about Sam defending Dean, and Dean defending Sam, against all comers. “All comers” unfortunately includes John. There is some violence done to John’s canon characterization but in service, I think, of a good cause. If you’re familiar with ulexite’s other work it’s probably If Gold Rusts…, which is a fantastic fic. It’s also 130k long lol which is why I wandered away before finishing. Luckily this one’s more digestible.

In 1997, while John is off on a case, the boys have been left to rusticate in a motel in Nowheresville, USA. John deliberately leaves Dean behind to punish him for fucking up on a recent hunt. We are told baldly the nature of Dean’s fuckup: his actions proved that Sam’s safety—not killing monsters—was his top priority. As a consequence his father is putting him in the equivalent of kiddie timeout. In the aftermath, there’s a lot of discourse between the boys about who John’s favorite is. From Dean’s perspective:

“Look after your brother,” Dad had said, “since that’s what you’d rather be doing.”

And from Sam’s perspective:

Might as well have said: “Look after this burden of mine so I don’t have to.”

This is classic they each think the other is John’s favorite, and it’s just as aggravating to me, the reader, as it’s intended to be. So this whole ball of recriminations is sitting between them at the beginning of the 1997 arc. Sam and Dean are not on the easiest of terms with each other.

Enter the bad hombres.

They’re hunters. They’ve worked with John before. They’re looking for backup on a werewolf hunt, and since John is unavailable, they’ll take the next-best thing, his teenage sons. Yeah you heard right these guys just press-ganged a fourteen-year-old into forced labor, all the while relentlessly belittling him. It’s frightening how simple it is for a pack of complete strangers to drive a wedge between Dean and Sam at this fragile moment. All they’ve got to do is treat Dean like one of the guys—like a grownup—and ice Sam out by treating him like a useless hanger-on kid. Here is Dean defending his unilateral decision to 1) join these randos on a hunt and 2) lie to John about it:

“Yes, Sam, I lied to him, and you better not even think about calling him again to tell him we’re going on a hunt. You’re still my little brother, and I’m still in charge until Dad gets back, so do as you’re told for once.” He doesn’t feel like pointing out how infrequently he doesn’t do as he’s told. Everyone’s always accusing him like he makes a habit out of disobedience.

This is grossly unfair! The charge is that Sam has a “disobedient” temperament rather than that he has done xyz “disobedient” thing…which makes it impossible to refute. Again and again canon shows us Sam being punished for what he is rather than what he does—“freak” is an epithet that targets his nature which he cannot control rather than his behavior which he can—and it hurts extra coming from Dean, the person whose opinion he values highest. Sam is gravely wounded by Dean’s betrayal. Still, even hurting as he is, when the chips are down you will never find Sam anywhere but in Dean’s corner:

Outside, Donovan lines up empty beer cans along the stack of firewood and tells Dean: “Time to prove you ain’t all bark, Winchester.”

He’s both proud of Dean for making every shot even with his eyes bleary from the early morning and his hangover, and also wondering why he couldn’t just tell this man “I don’t gotta prove shit to you” and walk away. But then he understands it when the gun’s put in his hands, and the cans are lined up again, and he’s being told to give it a go.

As soon as Dean says “Show ‘em what you got, Sammy,” the need to impress makes all the sense in the world. Just that Dean’s the only one here whose opinion matters to him, and letting his brother down, especially now when he needs Sam on his side the most, even if he doesn’t know that? He makes damn certain he doesn’t miss a single shot.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in this section of the fic Dean is 18, the age of majority, the age at which he might assume legal guardianship of Sam were the worst to befall John (an eventuality he has definitely contemplated more often than is healthy). It’s not clear to Dean what Sam’s role is—is Sam his charge or his peer—and that flare of pride he gets every time Sammy does something well? Some skill Dean taught him? Muddies the waters even more. But we’re not done with this scene yet! We have to see with our own eyes exactly why these bad hombres are bad news:

Sam holds out the gun, but before Dean can make a step to start setting the cans back up, Donovan takes the gun and turns the opposite way from their makeshift targets, aims his gun over top of their heads, and shoots a starling right out of a tree overhanging the driveway. “That’s what it means not to hesitate,” Donovan tells them, sickly pleased that Sam can’t even bring himself to look at the felled bird wherever it landed. “You’ll learn, kid. Or you’ll die. One or the other.”

This dude just shot a living creature dead for NO REASON wtf?!

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Ok so long story short our boys get separated, the bad hombres stake Sam out for werewolf bait without even bothering to arm him with a weapon, Dean shows up to clean up the werewolves but is obviously livid about the way they deemed Sam expendable. Dean feels an obligation to stay and finish the hunt, but he won’t countenance Sam remaining if it will endanger Sam (which it will, since these dudes are psychos). So Dean deliberately picks a fight. He says the only thing he can to get Sam voluntarily onto the first bus to wherever-the-hell-John-went.

“Sam… I’m staying, alright? I’ve gotta see this through. I can’t keep fucking up and getting people killed, and you’re a distraction for me. Dad’s right about that.”

“…I’m a distraction?”

“You are.”

His eyes are burning, white-hot emotion, sadness disguised as fury. “So I’m just in your way, is that it? You want me to leave?”

“This entire time you’ve been nagging and nagging at me that you wanna go home, Sam. I’m saying if you wanna go then go. But I’m needed here, and they’re right. You’re not a little kid anymore, you don’t need me to protect you like you used to.”

I am a kid, Sam thinks, enraged, and so are you!

“I want you to come with me, Dean! I don’t trust these people, I haven’t trusted them from the minute we met them!”

Sam leaves. Then he changes his mind and returns, because Dean sent him packing with their only gun, and Sam can’t bear the thought that he left Dean alone without a weapon. Thank god he does, too, because the scene Sam walks in on is one of these psycho hombres murdering Dean. It’s the real unhinged one, Donovan. Donovan is hurting Dean for fun, just like he shot that bird for fun. Dean is badly injured and unarmed but still fighting back because the son of a gun has said he will go after Dean’s little brother next, and THAT threat never fails to make Dean see red. Of course he’s losing badly until Sam shows up and shoots Donovan cleanly in the back. Aaaaand scene.

What stands out to me about this episode is not that fourteen-year-old Sam killed someone, but that the two of them tacitly agreed to let Dean take the rap for it (Sam was after all not supposed to be there). They let the victim’s relatives believe for nine years that that’s what happened, that Dean killed Donovan. When the inevitable reencounter occurs in 2006, John is entirely in the dark—the boys never told him what happened back in 1997—so John is caught off guard when Donovan’s brother and nephew draw their guns on Dean, and Sam gleefully claims credit for Donovan’s murder (“you’re pointing those at the wrong guy”), and then uses telekinesis to turn the guns on the other two. It’s hard to tell if John’s madder that he’s been kept out of the “Sam is manifesting psychic powers” loop, or madder that two dudes just tried to murder his son. One of these things is maybe a slightly bigger priority, John! It seems worth noting that Sam’s psychic powers are triggered, as usual, by a bodily threat to Dean’s life or limb. Also that John seems to assume that if people are trying to kill Sam, they probably have a good reason (instead of that people are fucking psychos). It’s this unwarranted presumption of guilt that steams my beans. There is not a shred of evidence that Sam is endowed with an evil nature or doomed to walk an evil path, and yet John’s conviction is nigh unshakeable. The visions that Sam was having at the beginning of the fic? Those were premonitions of his own death at John’s hands. He’s been seeing visions of plenty of people getting murdered, he just didn’t realize it was himself he was seeing. Omg when the dashboard read 3am I should have known I should knownnnn. ulexite is good at a lot of things but this descriptive passage stood out to me because it is BUSSIN:

Trees. He sees trees. A grey morning, barely out of the pitch of night, only knows it’s morning and not evening because of the dew clinging to the earth, the sense memory for a thing that hasn't happened yet telling him he shouldn't be awake. Dirt and mud, rotting leaf litter, new blood. He can smell it all, iron and loam. Yet, as soon as he tries to turn his head to look around, that’s when the pain hits, a needle from one temple to the other, straight through the cortex like his premonitions are killing him.

Dw John does not put a bullet in Sam because Dean shows up at the last second and he puts a bullet in John instead. And that’s our story all tied up with a bow.

Now, do I think ulexite’s characterization of John is true to canon? No, I think this is a very selective and unsympathetic reading of John. I think in this fic the boys are conflicted in their feelings for John, but John is never shown to be conflicted, up to and including when he’s about to put Sam in the ground he’s certain that he’s doing the right thing. Canon!John would never. That’s fine though, as long as the fic’s John characterization is internally consistent I’ll buy it. What really sits at the core of it though, the thing that sank a grappling hook into my heart, is the evolving relationship between Sam and Dean and the different roles they occupy for each other as they grow up:

The weight of his amulet, a constant reminder that Sam loves him the most, feels like a noose around his neck all day long, until finally he gets the courage to apologize to Sam

and

It’s not Sam’s fault Dean conspired to keep him young forever and has just now changed his mind. It’s really not. But sometimes Sam grates on him and it’s not because of any real discernible reason other than that Dean thinks sometimes he was made into a parent at four years old and that just kinda sucks

Idk this may just be my own hobbyhorse, maybe y’all don’t care and it’s just me on my soapbox watching these boys agonize about whether I’m parent or peer of what. But I mean:

“Do you hate me?” he asks, not even meaning to, it slips out insecure and irrational, unchecked.

Dean is quiet for a few beats too long for comfort, but he wraps an arm around Sam’s shoulders and he’s pretty sure Dean kisses the top of his head, and he says “You’re my little brother, you know I love you.”

He wishes that answered his question, but in this one instance, it doesn’t. It really doesn’t.

My first thought was: When Dean put a bullet in John that pretty definitively answered the question, wouldn’t you say? “I choose you, Sammy” is what I thought that bullet was saying. But on my second readthrough I’m not so sure. “I choose you” is not the same as “my love is unadulterated by other, more complicated feelings.” I think what Dean’s bullet does establish is that there’s no room in the SamDean relationship for anyone else, even the man who raised them.

#wincest #fic rec

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thecloserkin · 2 years ago

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hey! have you ever read gothic incest: gender, sexuality and transgression?

Yes, I took it out of the library and skimmed it but I think the ratio of things RTMI and things that made my eyes glaze over was like 1:5, YMMV!! thank you for thinking of me, anon

#asked and answered #anonymous

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thecloserkin · 2 years ago

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Hey <3<3<3

I was wondering if you’d read a fic (wincest) if I rec’d it?? It’s not a request to review it (unless you want to ofc) but I’d just like to know your thoughts on it?? I absolutely loved the review you did on Another Brick in the Wall. I was soooo excited when I saw it because it’s an amazing fic and imo roadie’s fics aren’t talked about enough and I love reading your reviews because they make me look closer at my own analyses and I just like the way you dissect them and your pov. I was literally squealing and had to put down my phone several times while reading your review 😅

All of this to say that I really loved your interpretations and observations and I would love to hear more of them. Only if it’s okay with you. I really hope that I haven’t come across as uhhhh idk rude or demanding or anything of the like, I just really feel like our tastes(??) or maybe interpretations regarding samdean are similar and I just want to talk to you about it. Hope that’s okay 🥺🙏

A thousand apologies for the belated response. I am unutterably touched that you found my review both entertaining and informative, and that it generated New thoughts in you, and that you came here to take the time to tell me so. I had a long period where I wasn't active in fannish spaces and I stepped away from this blog and I'm so sorry it took me forever to answer this ask! 100% onboard with the roadie stanning ofc. And I think you are correct, re: alignment of our tastes. Also: I write a book review blog!!! You telling me that you want more of my takes is like injecting dopamine directly into my veins. Alright what's this fic let's have it

#asked and answered #sweetpapercroissant

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thecloserkin · 2 years ago

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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG!!!! YOUR REVIEW FOR "UNDER THE PENDULUM SUN" JUST DESTROYED MY SOUL AND BUILD IT UP AGAIN!!! I HAVE TO - NEED TO - READ THIS BOOK NOW!!! I love incest stories between blood-related siblings, but as you can imagine, a lot of them are rather...disappointing since so many don't end...well. YOU MAKE IT SOUND LIKE THE MOST SUBLIMINAL THING EVER! I AM IN LOVE!

AHHHHHHH is basically the content of my 6k book review. If your life is Too Much and you need some escapism this book will serve you better than a meditation retreat for 1/20 of the $$$, take my word for it I would not recommend it so highly if it didn't deliver FEELINGS. I've gotten more enthusiastic feedback on my Pendulum Sun review than anything else I've ever written, and while I like to think it's because I'm just That Good, lbr it's because the book's underrated and it hits everyone's buttons. Don't hold your breath for my LA Review of Books column, i'm still down in the dumpster with the rest of you

#asked and answered #anonymous

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thecloserkin · 2 years ago

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Reccing a reccer: thecloserkin

Reclists come in all shapes and sizes and each style of reclist serves a purpose: uncurated lists organised around a theme for those who want to blast through a trope; short personal fave lists, with or without commentary, for the interest of those with similar taste; the tossing out of a 'this was great' for those who are looking to grab the next fun thing; discussions of the (fic) canon and the functions texts serve in the community. Rarest of all is a deep dive on a specific text, and this is where @thecloserkin's charming and enthusiastic close reads of a single specific fic really stand out.

thecloserkin has a specific thang and wants to share the pleasure they take in it. It's not only wincest! For instance, I understand it to be the incest coffee kids time of year and guess who is in their recs masterlist. These are full-on commentaries of the reading process, with excerpts and reactions, connections across an oeuvre and genre. As a writer to know that someone is out there who might spend that much time with a fic is special, and the window into the reader's experience invaluable; as a reader it's a delight, a celebration of the works that bring us all together and the feelings we have about them. It's enjoyment, and it's catching!

We're so lucky that a member of the community like thecloserkin will share their enthusiasm so freely. Check out their recs and give them a follow.

#thank youuuuuu #i feel like the way most people consume fic is they're looking for that next high #which is fine!! life is stressful enough without making fanfiction feel like work #but what ends up happening is people raid reclists and ao3collections and authors bookmarks #they don't spend that much time with one SPECIFIC work #unless it's to reread a favorite #and i think close readings are valuable not just for writers honing their craft but for readers too #anyway i am in AWE of your dedication to the craft you're a colossus of a writer and we are lucky to have you in this fandom

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thecloserkin · 3 years ago

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fic rec: Another Brick in the Wall by road_rhythm

fandom: Supernatural

pairing: Sam Winchester/Dean Winchester

word count: 171k

Is it explicit: no

Bottom line: the best casefic i have ever read in all my born days

Alright lads let’s start by calibrating our expectations: road_rhythm is not for everyone. I do not think I would have put myself through the emotional wringer of this fic if I didn’t already at least have Gnaw and The Operative Word under my belt. This fic is not the fic I would reach for were I at 20% brain capacity. But I trust roadie. I trust them to give me, not a happy ending—you’re barking up the wrong tree for that—but a satisfying answer to the questions raised by the story, and it is in this sense that roadie always, always delivers. The question this fic asks is: How does Sam reconcile his need for independence with his need for Dean?

That’s not the only question—it’s a really dense story—but it’s the one I’m most interested in. Sam is abducted and wakes up in a sewer. That’s how it opens. He waits and waits for Dean to rescue him. Spoiler alert: He rescues himself. Which is not to say he doesn’t still need Dean—the reason he had the physical and psychological resources to escape was due to a sacrificial ritual Dean performed on his behalf. It was not an easy ritual; Dean went on a whole hero’s quest and in the end Sam saved himself. But what Dean did for Sam still matters. That’s the crux of it. In an author’s note that made me tear up, roadie returns from a two-year hiatus to confess she had doubts that the fic was too long, too plotty, too boring …and then kept writing anyway. Thank you for caring about this dumb show about dumb brothers doing dumb shit, roadie. Thank you for reassuring us that they matter, and that our investment in them matters.

In the hands of a lesser author, a casefic might be merely an opportunity to refract some aspect of the Winchesters’ relationship back at them. Another Brick in the Wall does this too, but the scope of its vision is staggering. There are themes that you see in roadie’s earlier work that come to fruition here: Sam and bodily autonomy, Sam and faith, Dean and food-as-caretaking, the-city-as-character (the number of maps of Providence, Rhode Island she must’ve pored over to write the car chase scene alone).

roadie’s take on brotherfucking is: It is a thing that has fucked them both up but it is also nowhere close to being the most fucked-up thing about them. Half the time you’re reading a roadie fic you don’t even realize it’s established relationship until they have sex and then you’re like whoah whoah roll back the tape, what?! This fic is no exception. There’s no pining, no dancing around the line, no guilt—I mean there’s plenty of guilt but very little of it on account of gay incest. Again: The point of the sex is it’s not the most fucked-up thing about them. In a lot of mutual pining stories the stakes are “does he want me back” but in THIS fic the stakes are “does he need me (in every sense of the word need, including but not limited to sexually) as much as I need him” and the answer is, obviously, both of you idiots need to find a dictionary and look up the word ‘codependent.’

I think it’s so telling that while the boys are reunited by the end of the fic, it doesn’t solve any of their underlying issues, and the only time they actually know peace is in their fantasies. Not sexual fantasies, either—the fantasy is about being together being enough for both of them. I legit wept. No one has ever accused roadie of over-romanticizing samdean lol but the thing that gets me about her writing is that it’s so layered, there’s always 5-8 bowling pins in the air at once, one of which is invariably the impulse to reach for an ideal love. An unobtainable ideal given who and what the Winchesters are, but they keep reaching for it. It’s a theme that crops up throughout roadie’s work: the gulf between what they want and what they are allowed to have (see especially Finding Harmony and This is All Very Meta ).

Finally before we get started I just want to register my admiration for roadie’s command of canon. I have never seen its equal. The fic is not constructed so that you can’t understand it without the canon background—I confess the first time I read it I had not seen Season 6—but I am floored by the amount of care and thought that went into situating it chronologically within canon so that events could unfold to their inevitable conclusion. It’s set in Season 6 which means Castiel is too busy waging a heavenly civil war to heed Dean’s prayers. It’s set after 06x16 “And Then There Were None” which means that Bobby’s too busy mourning Rufus to answer Dean’s calls. It’s set in Season 6 which means Ellen, Jo and Ash are gone but we don’t have access to Jody, Garth, Charlie, and a host of other allies that might have been available in later seasons. All in all roadie has done an airtight job of isolating our boys; of ushering every potential outside resource offstage. It’s just Sam and Dean, and the two of them aren’t reunited until the 80% mark. Which lets you see just how dysfunctional they both are without the other. The real payoff of the “isolate the crap out of samdean” strategy, though, comes later, in the Lisa scene: Crucially, this fic is set before 06x21 “Let It Bleed,” the episode where Crowley kidnaps Ben and Lisa. roadie apparently looked at the way Dean lost Lisa in canon and went “Nope, not painful enough, how about I twist the knife in harder.” In canon, Lisa and Ben were vulnerable to Crowley because Dean wasn’t with them, because Dean had chosen to hunt with Sam rather than settle down with Lisa. And that choice had passively endangered Lisa and Ben. In this fic, however, Dean is faced with a much starker choice: In order to save Sam he has to actively endanger Lisa by recruiting her as his confederate in a scheme that has a nonzero chance of resulting in a felony conviction. But Dean’s got no one else. There is literally no one else he can turn to whom he can trust, and as much as it pains him he does not hesitate to burn this final bridge because when it comes to Sam he will cross every line and burn every bridge.

Ok guys let’s do a close reading!

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

The first time I read this I wondered why we open with Sam in the sewer and, via flashbacks, fill in the gaps how he wound up there. Why not start with the Winchesters rolling into Providence to solve a missing persons case? Then it hit me: Sam being abducted starts the clock ticking. It is an exceedingly plotty fic, and it needs that time-crunch urgency lent by “Sam is slowly starving to death” to keep the motor of the story going. (Dean doesn’t know Sam’s starving but the reader does.) And we need the background on the case because frankly, Dean doesn’t think there is a case here. He’s here to humor Sam and Sam knows it and boy, does Sam resent it. There’s a line in the first chapter that packed a helluva punch, given everything that comes after:

Dean didn’t think Sam knew. Dean never did, when he tried to make Sam’s decisions for him.

GODDAMN. Paired with this:

every hunt Dean tried to get Sam to sit out, because apparently no one at all or even some stranger was better at your back than a time bomb.

We get a fair estimation of where Sam’s head’s at. He doesn’t doubt that Dean would sell his soul for him but does Dean trust his judgment and his competence? Is Dean willing to rely on him as a partner or is Dean just waiting for him to blow it again? Getting himself kidnapped by the monster they’re hunting is, in this context, a particularly bad look. Sam fears he’ll live the rest of his life with Dean hovering over his shoulder, waiting to clean up his messes. So that’s our starting point.

What is hilarious about Sam’s anxieties is that we are treated immediately, via Dean’s alternating POV, to how baseless they are. Within 48 hours of Sam going MIA Dean manages to be careless enough to bring the local police down on him, and when they initiate a manhunt and start erecting roadblocks he has to race out of Providence driving the most conspicuous car ever made. The whole time Dean’s thinking “wish Sam was here to set my dislocated shoulder”, “wish Sam was here to fiddle with the police scanner so I could hear better,” etc etc. Dean literally has to make up “rules” as guardrails for himself because it’s too overwhelming to navigate the world and make decisions without Sam. Meanwhile Sam, back in the sewer, has one thought that keeps him going and it’s “Dean would need him ready to fight.” At this early juncture he doesn’t doubt that Dean will come for him, it’s just a matter of when. The doubts come later.

Before we move too far from Providence and the case itself I want to highlight two things, one is the use of OCs and two is the attention to detail. The OCs—we’re talking about the victims and their friends/family—are all so distinct, and everything they have to say about the case is relevant so we’re not wandering off on Dickensian tangents, and yet I can believe that they all have fully realized interior lives somewhere offstage. This is, needless to say, a colossal achievement. As far as the detail thing: roadie does her research, and it pays off in spades. I’ve only been to Providence a few times but the way she writes about it evokes the city, both in broad strokes and in weirdly specific ways. This story could not be taking place in any other locale. Here’s a line from Dean’s internal monologue during the nail-biter of a car chase:

He fucking hated this town. It was pointless and it couldn't decide whether it was city or suburbia and the buildings were ugly. It was too close to the bay and too far from the ocean and what even was the point of Rhode Island?

Which tells us as much about Dean’s state of mind as about the city of Providence. Later on there’s a scene between Sam and one of his fellow captives. Sam wonders what they eat down here and he doesn’t like the answer he receives (“ectoplasm”). The other captive, Lindsey, snipes, “You want to hold out for Boston Market, that’s your business.” Boston Market is a fast-casual restaurant chain that’s ubiquitous in the U.S. Northeast. roadie could, of course, have reached for Chipotle, but I think for two reasons Boston Market was the better choice: It’s got regional connotations that Chipotle lacks, and it’s a lot less bougie (Lindsey is decidedly working-class). I’m using “ease of online ordering” as a proxy for bougieness. In 2011 when this fic is set, obviously nobody was ordering anything online or via phone apps, but the point is that roadie put a shitton of consideration into a one-off line about what kind of a restaurant a nursing home aide would fantasize about eating at. Newsflash: Lindsey, Sam, and the other captives dine on cockroaches and rats for the next month. When they’re not tripping on fungus, that is. No restaurants in their future.

While we’re on the subject of food I want to juxtapose two passages, Sam POV and Dean POV, against each other. These are part of long introspective scenes where they each wrestle with their guilt for what happened in the runup to the Apocalypse:

at least the blood, he’d told himself, didn’t ask anything of Dean. But maybe the blood had nothing to do with it. Maybe Sam was a born junkie.

So much shit crowding up between them. Ruby, principally; Dean hadn’t known then that the bitch was feeding him, like that was anybody else’s job.

I am. Speechless. Sam blames himself for being too needy, for asking too much of Dean; consoles himself that at least his demon blood addiction could be cleanly separated from his crippling addiction to Dean. Dean, otoh, is more enraged by the fact Ruby was feeding Sam than the fact she was fucking him. This is INCREDIBLE. How is roadie this good. If we jump ahead to post-reunion, Sam is discharged from the hospital and Dean carefully measures out all Sam’s nutrients, watches with a gimlet eye every ounce of caloric intake:

Apparently it wasn’t enough for him to fail so badly his brother starved for a month. Once Sam had saved himself, Dean had to sabotage him

I’m going to sit here for a sec and marvel at how this scenario was designed specifically to push all of Dean’s buttons, because not only did he “fail” Sam in the sense of failing to rescue him, but “feeding Sam” is uniquely Dean’s job. Sure, Dean takes it as a personal affront when he’s unable to satisfy any of Sam’s needs, no matter how esoteric, but eating is such a base physiological need. It’s the very first thing Dean ever learned to do for Sammy. The most basic fact about Dean Winchester is he’s never learned to orchestrate his existence around anything other than doing everything for Sammy.

On the subject of Sam, blood, and bodily autonomy, this line knocked me flat on my ass:

Many other things were not: your body, your mind, your actions. But the blood, that was yours.

In case you had forgotten that Sam Winchester’s entire arc is about how he has NO CONTROL over the evil ends other people (angels, demons, his soulless self) use his body for, but feels responsible for the consequences nonetheless, that was your reminder!!!

A non-exhaustive list of things Sam blames himself for in this fic: Mary burning up on the ceiling. Jess burning up on the ceiling. Ruining the only pure thing in his life by initiating a sexual relationship with Dean. Not yanking Dean out of Hell himself. Failing to save the monster who locked him up in a sewer. With all this guilt sloshing around, you can see why “Sam and faith” is such a cornerstone of this fic. Sam at this point in the series has lost his faith in God but a really scary thing happens when he marinates for a few weeks underground: he begins to lose his faith in Dean. And we realize that not only is Sam’s faith in Dean the only thing keeping Dean upright most days; it’s the only thing keeping Sam from flying apart at the seams. The universe may throw all kinds of nonsense at these boys but the darkness before the dawn is whenever Sam’s faith wavers. This was always where this fic was going, by the bye. This is why it had to be set in Providence, so we could rope in Father Reynolds from 02x13 “Houses of the Holy.” Angelic possession requires a willing vessel, and the hallmark of a good vessel is openness—remember that to receive Communion you need a cup, a chalice, a vessel. Sam Winchester is, as the show has taken pains to establish, the perfect vessel. This is not because Sam is weak. It is because he is uncomfortable with certainty (in marked contrast to Dean, who thrives on it). A person of faith is not someone who itches for answers; he is someone who is driven to ask questions. To have faith one must first have doubts. Sam’s faith in Dean is exactly as strong as his doubt that Dean needs him back.

Sam curled up tight on his side, away from the voice that wasn’t Dean’s, and his face crumpled. He wanted his brother. He wanted his brother.

The second repetition of “He wanted his brother,” and the implied undercurrent of all the ways Sam wants and needs Dean, and simultaneously resents Dean for making Sam need him so bad…I’m over here ready to gnaw my own arm off.

Meanwhile what’s Dean been up to? After his first interview with Canby (aka the man who got himself blotted out of Rufus’s phonebook for showing too much mercy; jfc how does roadie invent OCs like this) he ties up a demon and tortures it unsuccessfully for Sam’s location:

Dean burned her. The barn was rotten and combustible, and he had brought motel sheets for winding. He'd known going into this that he could never just let a demon who knew that they were separated go. Part of him didn't want to take the time. To do things in any manner other than as feverishly as possible meant admitting that enough time had passed, at this point, that an extra hour here or there didn't really matter. In the end, he did it anyway, because he knew that Sam would want it.

BECAUSE HE KNEW SAM WOULD WANT IT. Even now, when the most mission-critical priority ought to be ensuring Sam’s physical safety, his actions are still guided by who Sam is as a person. That’s the difference between Dean and all those supernatural entities who violated Sam’s autonomy—it doesn’t make Dean’s violations okay, but it does make my stomach want to eat itself.

This is after Dean’s hooked back up with Canby and agreed to his terms; Dean calls to append a codicil in which Canby gives him daily Sam-status updates:

”I want you to do the ritual every day."

”I’m out of blood."

”I’m overnighting you a pint." Dean found a thermos with a good screw-top seal. Perfect. "You run low, you call me. Something changes, you call me."

”All right."

”Say it, make it a statement that's ironclad with your truth spell or whatever."

”I will perform the same pyromancy I showed you daily with your blood unless physically prevented from doing so, and I will inform you of the status of your brother's vitality." Canby paused. "Do you really want this distraction, Dean?"

Dean's jaw clenched. "I'll text you the expected delivery time."

Dean is running on what, energy drinks and adrenaline and four hours of sleep? He can’t afford to be siphoning off pints of blood. The mission (saving Sam) again takes a backseat to Dean’s pathological compulsion to know where and what Sam is doing at all times. Not even to know that Sam is okay—Sam is clearly not okay—just the bare fact of Sam’s existence, he’s got to keep reassuring himself of that or he’ll go insane.

Finally, this is after Dean kills the cyclops (and regrettably, also the cyclops’ sheepdog):

“’M sorry,” he told it. He mustered up a crooked smile from somewhere. “Don’t tell my little brother. He’d be so sad.”

This apology to the dog fucked me up so much!! The dog almost took a chunk out of his neck because Dean had to make a split-second decision, stab the cyclops or turn and face the dog, and of course he chose the cyclops because the cyclops holds the key to finding Sammy, so anyway this dog just attacked him but he’s apologizing to the dog?!!! Don’t tell my little brother adfdkfjdkfd I am deceased.

Ok onto the central motif of this fic, Dean sacrificing his heart and Sam eating it:

“Dean, what did you think you were doing all this time? The magic we’re working—it requires a power source, and that’s you. Your bond. Your devotion …You’re on a path. A quest, if you like. It must be completed. There’s nothing to work with, otherwise. If you want my help finding Sam, you have to finish this.”

Dean didn’t have a clue he was on a hero’s quest, which is par for the course. I should have known, though, and this line hit me like a sledgehammer in the chest. Sid in Chicago came right out and said “you heroes are all the same” and I still didn’t cotton on!!!! Hello my name is thecloserkin and I’m really good at not seeing the forest for the trees. Awhile ago I read a book where the protagonist kept getting shipwrecked and captured/detained in prison camps, steered a narrow isthmus between two sea monsters, washed up on an island where a strange woman roofied his entire crew…and I somehow managed not to catch on. Given, you know, the story was retreading the Odyssey beat-for-beat. This is a long-winded way of saying that this is my second reread of Another Brick and I still have no idea which pagan god Canby sacrificed Dean’s heart to (was it Horus? because of the falcon) but the scene where he does it retains all its potency. Canby telling Dean’s heart to “Fly home” is e v e r y t h i n g. The notion that Dean and Sam are soulmates—not in the destined-to-be-together sense but in the sense of being a single soul ripped in two—that’s what this is about. That’s why they’re not functional when they’re not together. That’s why their dynamic doesn’t leave room for anyone else in their lives. This scene, this heart-sacrifice scene, is suffused with so much sincerity I almost keeled over. From the moment Canby asked for a focus object to do the ritual and Dean clutched at the empty space in front of his chest, I could not breathe. I think a lot of our investment in samdean comes from how multilayered it is, how much there is to unpack etc….but sometimes you just need to remember how much they love each other. And this scene accomplishes that. What follows is the dream sequence of Sam consuming Dean’s heart, which gives him the psychic wherewithal to make good his escape. The imagery is so motherfucking visceral. I find I have nothing intelligible to say about it because I am bad at analyzing dream sequences, but this is 100% a me problem and not a failing on roadie’s part.

Parenthetically Canby’s “Stay on the path” and “Don’t waver” (repeated twice!!) gave me major Orpheus-descending-to-Hades-to-rescue-Euridyce vibes.

I want to return to Sam in the sewer now, and talk about the OCs. Like in every well-constructed mystery the bad guy is not who you think it is. The real monster is not the vengeful spirit who’s abducted Sam but the monstrous humans who have been abducted alongside Sam. The other captives are cold-blooded murderers, every one of them. Sam being Sam, he learns he’s landed in a den of thieves and immediately begins to doubt his own innocence. This boy!!! He thinks he deserves it. “It” being whatever fresh new suffering fate has chosen to mete out to him. He believes he deserves it all and worse, believes he must expiate his real and imagined sins, and if he can’t seem to tell the former from the latter well that’s okay—all the world’s sins are his to bear. They oughta just nail him to a cross and call it a day. Actually, the common denominator amongst Sam’s fellow captives is not that they’re murderers but that 1) they got away with it and 2) they don’t feel bad about it. Sam Winchester carries all the excess guilt that ought by right to have been theirs.

Let’s talk about Jacob. Marian felt remorse; Lindsey felt no remorse but she was at least upfront with Sam (the world had never given her a fair shake so the world could fuck right off). Jacob, though. Jacob is a piece of work. Jacob asks Sam to put his fingers through the grate and spins him a sob story about needing human contact blahblahblah, and even on a reread, even knowing Jacob is the biggest psychopath of the bunch, I still didn’t tweak to what was happening until someone in the comments pointed out Jacob is sizing Sam up by the size of his hands. Jfc Sam is out here trying to save their worthless asses and Jacob is already laying plans to take him down if he gets so much as a whiff of Jacob’s murderous secret.

This is Sam coaxing Jacob to tell him about the circumstances of his twin sister’s death:

”It could be important. Come on. She would want you to make it out of here.”

Jacob laughed, shot and caustic. “Don’t be so sure.”

”It wasn’t your fault.”

”Of course it was my fault.”

This is the sister whom Jacob himself murdered! He made it look like an accident! It gave him the confidence to go on and commit more murders! He keeps a picture of her as a daily reminder of how he got away scot-free! If you, like me, would like to shake Sam until he sees the red flags, don’t worry, that’s intentional on roadie’s part. roadie is very good at controlling Sam’s third-person-limited POV. There was one moment when Lindsey almost said something—she almost warned Sam not to trust Jacob, because as much as Lindsey hates everybody and everything she hates Jacob most for his hypocrisy; for pretending to be the normal, sane one. There was another moment when Sam’s questions were hitting a little too close to home and Jacob deflected Sam by pointing to Lindsey’s crazypants behavior, and I was like: surely now Sam will see it? Sam, this man is playing you like a fiddle! And of course Sam doesn’t see it. Dean would have. Dean is more suspicious by nature (he’s got something to protect, after all: Sammy) but Dean’s skillset is also just better suited to thriving in the human jungle. Sam recognizes this. The narrative also recognizes this: Dean’s quest brings him to rural Utah—that’s where he assassinates the cyclops and steals the McGuffin—and he’s just not built for this wilderness/survival stuff. “Sam would have gotten more out of this,” Dean thinks to himself, and that’s the point: roadie is deliberately putting our boys in environments in which they’re not well suited.

We need to talk about the voicemail. Yes, the voicemail (“Listen, you bloodsucking freak…”). Sam saved a copy of it on an mp3 player, and when Dean finds it he predictably goes apeshit. Let’s back up a sec: Dean doesn’t touch the mp3 player, or any of Sam’s private belongings, until halfway into the fic, when he is at his lowest ebb. There’s a solid storytelling reason for this—the voicemail represents the nadir of the brothers’ relationship, so its revelation should coincide with the lowest point of the fic—but the in-universe reason for it is that Dean actually does recognize Sam’s desire for boundaries. He can’t usually bring himself to respect it, but he acknowledges that it’s a thing that Sam wants (see also: Easy to Fool When You Were in School). Tbh Dean seems almost as pissed that Sam kept the voicemail’s existence a secret as he is that Sam repeatedly listens to a fake voicemail that Dean never sent. As far as Dean’s concerned Sam isn’t entitled to privacy or secrets:

He wanted to know absolutely every corner and detail that belonged in that month-long gap the same way when he'd been twenty-two, he'd wanted to know what every piece of clothing Sam owned smelled like. He wanted to know the way when he'd been fifteen, he'd stolen a bite of every food item Sam had put in his mouth

That’s from later, after Dean’s gotten Sam back. Do you see how having Sam physically in his possession isn’t enough for Dean—how he can’t countenance there being any piece of Sam that he doesn’t have access to? So the role of the voicemail, in this fic, is that it’s one more way that Dean violates Sam’s boundaries. This is a thing Sam deliberately kept from him and Sam’s reasons may have been unhinged but it was Sam’s choice. And Dean took that away from him.

This is the money quote, this is Sam ready to ragequit the whole being alive gig because what even is the point:

Fuck anyone who was that sure they had it right. Fuck anyone who was that convinced their vices were less vicious. Fuck anyone who could take every screwup he'd ever made and twist it into a personal betrayal, who could find a way to make every single thing about him about them. Fuck anyone who still held a grudge because he'd gone to Flagstaff when he was nine, but would go to Hell and expect to be thanked for it. Fuck anyone who'd spit on him for going to college and then lock him in a cage to choke when they'd had their fill. Fuck anyone who'd throw him in the garbage because he'd once liked a Thanksgiving dinner that didn't have them in it. Fuck anyone who brought him back from the dead just to tell him he couldn't be trusted, anyone who dragged him back in and waited for him to blow it. Because here they were again: he'd blown it.

Fuck anyone who called him something to be put down and didn't even bother to follow through.

…And that’s how Sam incorporates the voicemail into his worldview. And the scariest thing about Sam's rage is it's nowhere near as scary as his despair. See what I mean about this being the emotional rock-bottom point of the story? Like, the placement of this monologue is after Lindsey and Marian are dead (unclear how much Sam contributed to their deaths but Sam ofc holds himself entirely responsible) but before Sam finds out the truth aka that he’s been bunking down with a merry band of murderers. It happens after Dean listens to the voicemail but before Dean performs the heart-sacrifice. In short, roadie has wrought upon us miles of emotional devastation mitigated by …..absolutely nothing yet. That’s why Sam’s “Fuck anyone” speech lands so hard. The thing that kills me is this monologue occurs in the same chapter in which Dean unearths the voicemail, right? And in this selfsame chapter Dean evinces none of the sentiments Sam attributes to him; his main preoccupation is he misses Sam like a limb:

Then he went around to the trunk and got Sam’s duffel. He was aware that this wasn’t accomplishing anything. He just needed to feel close to his brother for a while.

This is part of a longstanding pattern. For instance, back when Sam was at Stanford, Dean had:

pressed his face into things of Sam’s, gotten fuzzy enough to sort of believe he was really there. Every time, he’d woken up feeling like he’d swallowed poison.

And now:

What he did know was that if he failed, there was every chance Sam would die believing Dean had said it {the voicemail}. Jesus. This entire time.

Dean’s still framing this in terms of his failure; everything and anything that happens to Sam is ultimately his responsibility. The gap between what matters to Sam and what matters to Dean here is wider than the goddamn Grand Canyon. Imagine if you married someone only to find out you have incompatible life goals, only you can’t get divorced because they’re not just your spouse they’re your cool older sibling and your coworker and your golf buddy and your pastor and also your mom! Fuuuuuuck.

One final note on the caseness of this casefic before we move on to the post-reunion part:

Half of hunting anything is sitting still. Sam made himself still in his mind and held out his hand. “All soft and gooey inside,” he said. “Come on in.”

It’s notable that Sam invites the ghost to possess him. Which is a lot more agency than he had with Gadreel or Meg or Soulless or whoever. Sam solves the case, yes. He sends the ghost to its eternal rest. But by applying his oceans-wide empathy to the ghost’s broken psyche, Sam also saves himself. By the end of the fic he is saying stuff to Dean like “Nobody is purified by suffering,” which, way to go, Sam!!! That’s a good place to start.

So, the samdean reunion. It’s a reunion but not much of a reconciliation or a rapprochement. What I keep coming back to is the helplessness of the gravitational pull they exert upon each other:

Sam was rancid, to look at and to smell, but the need to touch him felt almost like a pull, like Dean suddenly had iron filings in his cells.

It’s never bothered Dean none that he’s apparently just wired this way—he makes no bones about Sam being his numero uno—but the fact that their bond precedes and precludes any active volition is highly troubling for Sam. For obvious bodily-autonomy reasons. And that’s a tension the fic does not and cannot resolve. Hell, canon couldn’t resolve it. In the final scene Dean gives Sam a bath and you know how bathfic is typically a window into intimacy because physical —> emotional intimacy? Yeah no. This is not that. Here is Sam, prior to the bath, asserting his right to change his own bandages:

”You don’t have to…It’s all in places I can reach.”

”Sam, what is your malfunction? Just take your shirt off, I’m not going to molest you, Christ.”

And this is the bath itself:

Sam was naked in the water and Dean was fully dressed. The was what vivisection felt like. “If you want a bath with knives,” Dean said, “you can get it where everything else is supposed to come from.”

Jesus god, what a line. What a fic.

So Sam has suffered a serious trauma, the most obvious effect of which is he gets slammed with sensory overload whenever he tries to look at objects. The less obvious effects….I mean, Sam wishes he could crawl back into the sewer where at least he wouldn’t have to be Perceived. A friend of mine who suffers from chronic illness read the final chapter of Another Brick and told me that the suicidal ideation in it was suffocating and borderline triggering for her. And I said, what suicidal ideation? And she said, it isn’t necessarily anything in the text it’s the vibes, it’s Sam’s whole headspace. And I sat with that. I am bringing it up because I’ve now spent 6k words on this review, which sounds like a lot, and I do try to be thorough, but I am just one person with one perspective. Mine is no more or less valid than the (apparently many, many) people who were disappointed or confused by the fic’s ending. I like to think that I read with a careful mind and an open heart, but there’s bound to be acres of meaning that I missed, just as there are swathes of experience that I am not privy to. I don’t even know why I’m doing this, or who even is reading this, I just feel this compulsion to pull these stories apart. I did not and cannot do a definitive job of it, because Another Brick is such a rich text that’d be impossible. All I know is I love these brothers and I love this fic. It’s a masterpiece.

#wincest #sam x dean #fic rec

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thecloserkin · 3 years ago

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4.21 • 8.01 • 5.16 • 9.01 • 10.23

The medical history form reads, "Has someone physically, sexually, or emotionally abused you?" with a box for yes and a box for no

☐ I am mostly fine

☐ I am mostly fine but

☐ One Thanksgiving his mom told me this story about how as a child he found a butterfly in the yard with half a wing missing. He cupped it in his hands, brought it inside, and held it covered against his stomach for fear it would fly away. They called the animal hospital on the landline and were instructed to carefully clip the healthy wing to match the broken one

☐ A cage of gentle hands is still a cage, and I know this now

☐ I would have climbed in the jar if he'd asked me. I would have torn the other wing off myself

#!!!!#wincest edit

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thecloserkin · 3 years ago

Photo

hvpeworld: A thousand times, a thousand times, a thousand times again

A thousand times, a thousand times, a thousand times again

#good god #stunning #wincest edit

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thecloserkin · 3 years ago

Note

I wanted to ask about your profile picture, where is it from

it's simon and river tam from firefly!

#asked and answered

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thecloserkin · 3 years ago

Text

fic rec: Baby Blue by Edwardina

fandom: Supernatural

pairing: Sam Winchester/Dean Winchester

word count: 12k

Is it explicit: yes

Bottom line: absolute masterclass in how to write the “xyz cursed object made them do it” genre

This is a bunker-era story in which Sam is compelled to suck on a cursed pacifier and in the process of racing to unravel the curse, Feelings are unlocked! Idk how Edwardina takes the most outlandish premises and makes the sex not just hot but tenderhot, but they do and they deserves all the accolades for it. It’s because they unfailingly seize upon the precise detail that shows why this sex scene can only be happening between Sam and Dean, because they’re samanddean not just any two generic hot dudes.

So this pacficier. Sam can’t take it out of his mouth for more than a few seconds at a time. Not to eat, not to drink, not to talk, not to sleep. Dean’s initial big-brother instinct is to rib Sam relentlessly about it the way he would if Sam did anything else mildly embarrassing—and being Dean, he comes up with some real creative ways to make fun of Sam. I was holding my stomach I was laughing so hard. Dean’s second instinct, however, is to take care of Sam—and he does it not so much consciously (the way all the jokes he cracks at Sam’s expense are conscious) as because it’s hardwired into him. Because there is a lot of stuff Sam can’t do in this compromised state. For example: Dean drives him to the park so he can go for a run. Since runners get dehydrated really fast Sam literally needs Dean to hold the pacifier out of his grasp so he can gulp down water. This scene made me u n b e l i e v a b l y delicate, and the reason is that Dean 100% does not realize that he is getting off on being Sam’s caretaker but we the readers 100% do and the tension is enough to make me combust. Same with the scenes of Dean feeding Sam soup or spaghetti-o’s—it’s a deliberate callback to a bygone era when Dean did inhabit that caretaker role, but the reason these scenes hit so hard is because they are grown ass men and Sam no longer needs Dean to take care of him as he once did. Except now, apparently, temporarily, he does. See what I mean about the presence of the pacifier unlocking feelings?

Sorry to be a broken record about this but Edwardina is a fucking genius. This paragraph literally made me stop reading and scream YAHTZEE out loud:

They went to the park, just as Dean had pitched, and Sam started jogging in place the instant he was out of the car. A medical mask hid his pacifier from the prying eyes of other preschoolers and their guardians. Dean kind of got a kick out of knowing it was just underneath the mask, though. It was kind of like when Lisa had worn crotchless panties under her little black dress.

So the thing about sex toys—and the pacifier is not a sex toy but hear me out here—is that it’s not the toy itself that makes the sex hot. It’s the cognizance that your partner is wearing/using the toy for you. Maybe it’s a butt plug or maybe it’s panties (Edwardina has written wincest featuring both), doesn’t matter what it is, the point is that Dean’s the only one in the know, Dean’s the only one who knows about Sam and his perverted relationship to this object.

So Castiel calls Dean out and the penny begins to drop for Dean, that he is enjoying Sam’s reliance on him maybe a little more than is healthy:

"Then I suggest you give working with Sergei on this some serious thought," said Castiel. "Or would you damn your brother? Force him to rely on you for every bite of food? Every sip of water? Would you rather consign him to this life, and yourself along with him? Or would you actually like to help him?"

Later on, in the leadup to the sex scene:

”God. I'm actually gonna miss this," Dean said, and blustered through a contrite laugh. His throat felt thick.

The sucking paused. "Hm?"

Whatever Sam was asking, Dean said, "It's been rough on you, I know. But, uh... we got kind of a good routine going, here. Like old times. You. Me. Cinnamon Toast Crunch for dinner. I Dream of Jeannie on our stolen cable."

This!!! This is why we had all those earlier scenes of Dean feeding Sam grilled cheese and making him drink out of a sippy cup! Consciously he may have chosen the sippy cup to escalate his one-sided prank war on Sam, but subconsciously it was to reinforce his position as Sam’s caretaker. The subtext of Dean’s actions here is very you need something, you get it from ME. Okay back to the sex scene:

"Don't you worry. No matter how this plays out, I'm gonna take care of you," Dean told him. "You're my baby brother. Don't care how old we get. You're my baby. My baby boy. Always gonna be."

and that’s the line of dialogue that induces a tent in Sam’s pants. Cue reciprocal blow jobs because of COURSE this ends in blowjobs, how else could a fic that is so preoccupied with Sam’s oral fixation logically conclude???

I do not think I can overstate the significance of Sam choosing to take the pacifier out of his mouth long enough to blow Dean. It’s the most difficult thing he can possibly do right now, to stop sucking that thing and suck Dean instead, and Sam applies the same grim determination to it as he does everything else he undertakes in his life, and Dean sees and appreciates it so much:

Staring down at him, Dean could see the effort it was taking not to go back to the paci in the pull of Sam's brow. But he was the opposite of offended about that. If anything, that only made it obvious what Sam wanted, because if left to his own devices, Sam wouldn't even eat, wouldn't drink, wouldn't voluntarily do anything that took the pacifier from his mouth.

And this:

Not the most expert head Dean had ever been given. But easily, so fucking easily, it was the best of his entire life, just because Sam was the one giving it. There wasn't even any competition. Dean was close to losing it then and there. He didn't want to. Not yet. But he also couldn't handle what was happening. He was inside Sammy's mouth, and Sam was slurping at his cockhead, lapping at it –

But then it all stopped, and Sam yammered, "Wait, please wait," and stuffed the pacifier back into his mouth with a pained cry. Distress marred his forehead.

Dean's dick was disappointed. But the rest of him ached with tenderness. He could totally ignore the almost painful knife of arousal in his gut if Sam could ignore fucking soul-powered magic in favor of blowing him for even a few seconds.

Wahhhhhh!! This fic made my heart soar so hard. The author says they had the time of their life writing this and if you, reader, don’t have the time of your life reading it then I, your humbler reccer, will personally refund the twenty minutes of your life that it took you to read it.

#wincest #sam x dean #fic rec

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thecloserkin · 3 years ago

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fic rec: Kevin Tran For President by glovered

fandom: Supernatural

pairing: Sam Winchester/Dean Winchester

word count: 11k

Is it explicit: no

Bottom line: what if the S8 opener was a coffeeshop au

I don’t think we as a fandom (spn generally, and samdean specifically) are really built for coffeeshop AUs but goddamn does glovered deliver. It’s mostly down to the ensemble cast—Castiel and Meg don’t have a ton of scenes but what lines they have are high-impact, and then there’s Kevin. Kevin has 1) the worst case of imposter syndrome an Asian-American overachiever has ever come down with and 2) a mega-crush on Sam. Dean is fresh out of Purgatory and here to help. It’s not toothrotting fluff but it’s not not toothrotting fluff iykwim.

This fic was like a pump of caramel syrup injected directly into my veins. I wouldn’t want, like, five pumps of it in a single latte, but the S8 rift between Dean and Sam really hurt me and this story was a balm. On a basic canon-divergent plot level Sam didn’t quit hunting and therefore Dean, when he returns, doesn’t take Sam’s rejection of the lifestyle as a rejection of Dean. On a meta level it eases my heart to see that the Winchesters are not radioactive to absolutely everyone they care about: Kevin’s most pressing concern right now? Passing macroeconomics. Castiel is not, thank fuck, auditioning to be the next Winter Soldier. Meg and her smart mouth are the light of my life.

Sam is a barista because Kevin is attending Princeton, and Kevin is Sam’s responsibility. Sam isn’t carrying around all this baggage of “I hung Kevin out to dry—yet another way I let Dean down, ugh,” and that allows Dean to come at being in love with Sam circuitously rather than devouringly (the way he does in canon). Dean comes at being in love with Sam through Kevin’s attraction to Sam:

”Does he seem..." Dean looks back to his paper. "No, you know what? Never mind." He's reading about some football game he didn't used to care about, when Kevin speaks up. ”No." ”Huh?" ”No, he doesn't seem." ”Really?" ”Really." Kevin screws up his mouth, watching Sam, too. "Of course not. He was worried sick."

In fact we learn that Sam went slightly berserker. I think “I went at the remaining Leviathans with the machete you gave me for my twenty-third birthday” is just as believable a reaction to losing Dean as “I quit hunting cold-turkey and clung to my grief like a liferaft.” I mean, just because it’s fluff doesn’t mean it’s weak on characterization:

”You didn't even tell anyone you had a brother," Dean says. The thought comes out of nowhere. Sam stills and then finally lies down again, but he rolls into Dean's side a second later so his face is close, breathing Dean's breath. "I couldn't even talk for three months. Let alone talk about you."

Dean is just so nakedly relieved to have his brother back:

Sam follows close behind him down the stairs and falls into step once they're on the street. They don't talk because talking before five in the morning has never been their thing, but Dean does look over once, three times, when they're not under streetlights, and Sam catches him at it. There's a lot of eye rolling, and it makes everything in Dean hurt that hurt of hope, of being alive and back and wondering where they're going to go now. He knows if Sam doesn't want to go he's going to have to stay here, learn to deal. They'll be together either way, no matter what.

Looking at S8 through the soft-focus filter of a coffeeshop au makes me wonder how much of Dean’s disappointment in Sam is disapproval he’s left the life, and how much is anxiety that he left (will leave) Dean. Dean’s never been able to separate his self-self and his hunter-self. He also—hilariously and very much in-character—has this pathological drive to ensure Sam’s physical safety that is in no way equalled by insight into the inside of Sam’s noggin. What I mean is: Dean thinks Sam wants to settle down in suburban New Jersey, when actually Sam gave his two weeks’ notice the minute Dean reappeared. Dean thinks Sam doesn’t know how Dean feels about him, when actually Sam probably knew before Dean did. Dean is an idiot.

This is Dean being blindingly jealous of some girl Sam casually dated at some point:

Kevin glares at the girl as she passes with a free drink. "She seems great and all. I just...don't like her."

Dean remembers that Kevin's the victim here. He feels a sudden, uncanny sort of compassion for him. Imagine being in love with a dude, only to watch him fall for some caffeine junky.

”You and me both," he says, and watches Sam go about his business like nothing out of the ordinary just happened. "Kevin, I got your back."

We all know Dean Winchester is the king of repression and denial but glovered’s light touch here is just. Everything.

They go on a vision-quest in the desert:

"Chill," Sam tells him, stopping to examine another plaque-style map on a wall.

”Don't tell me to chill, I spend months navigating the stump swamps of Purgatory to come back here and get lost in a—" Sam turns and puts a hand over his mouth.

”What's a stump swamp?" Meg asks.

”It's a swamp with many stumps," Cas tells her.

”I’m not dismissing your PTSD," Sam tells Dean in low tones, and doesn't let his hand up when Dean tries to deny it. "But I'm letting you know that you're overreacting."

”Mmph."

”Okay?" Sam asks.

Dean licks Sam's palm, but Sam remains unmoved.

”Cute," Meg says. "Are you going to give him a kiss or—?"

Lmfaoo

Did I mention that Kevin’s ex-girlfriend is alive and well and not attending her safety school??

”She broke up with me," Kevin says. "After the whole, you know. Kidnapping and mental break and stuff. She went to Stanford, anyway. But yeah, it bugged her sometimes."

”But you were into her?"

Kevin shrugs.

Dean's aware he's being a dick. He's just trying to figure out if the kid knows he's gay for Sam. "Probably wasn't First Lady material, anyway."

And like. Kevin’s ex not being dead or possessed, Kevin’s mom likewise being alive and not-possessed—it opens the door for Kevin to want things for himself beyond bare survival. The throughline of this fic is Kevin’s dream deferred to be president of the United States. Kevin thinks he got into Princeton because Dick Roman pulled some strings for him. Team Free Will has to hack into his admissions records to prove that this is not the case. I’m…not crazy about the meritocracy-is-not-fundamentally-broken assumptions embedded in this maneuver, but as a storytelling choice it’s A+

”I know how you feel about him," Kevin says, and actually has the balls to look sympathetic, like it's anything Dean regrets.

Dean glances at Meg and Cas, but they're having some random conversation, so he looks back to Kevin. Kevin leans back under the force of Dean's frown, but still says, "I mean, I guess with the way you two grew up, it makes sense. And I get it, believe me, I do."

”You know what," Dean sneers. "It's cute you have a crush on my brother. But you're already a prophet. If you want to be president, you can't be a prophet and gay. You have to choose one."

”It's probably true," Meg says.

”Only historically," Cas tells him.

Sam, who seems to selectively notice when Dean calls people out, shouts over, "Don't listen to him, Kevin. You can be whatever you want."

Kevin freezes. "What?"

”You can do it," Sam says, and then goes back to frothing milk to pour into a paper cup.

”I know," Kevin says quietly, getting all mouth-breathey.

”No, but, you're already a prophet," Dean tells him, just in case Kevin missed his point. "You can't have Sam, he's mine."

YOU CAN’T HAVE SAM HE’S MINE that’s it that’s the ticket

#sam x dean #wincest #fic rec

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