I'm rewatching SPN again, starting from the pilot, and it's... interesting.

First thing I noticed: first season Jared Padalecki is TINY and YOUNG and VERY VERY YOUNG AND TINY. Jensen (the Dean one) has also matured a bit since then but not nearly as much as Jared (the Sam one).

Second thing I noticed: the misogyny really is as bad as I thought. In fact, it's worse--I was under the impression that it had gotten much much worse as the series went on, and now I don't think that's actually true, so much as that there's a cumulative effect, and by the umpty-billionth time you see some bitch slut get what she deserves, probably with no fucking pants on, you're already a hair's breadth away from flipping your shit and going on some sort of rampage. Like reading Far Side comics, but with the opposite effect.

And I had been thinking, maybe it's just me, maybe I'm too sensitive, or looking for things to get mad about, but it's not, so I feel better about that. Kinda.

Third thing I noticed: holy damn, this season starts out slow. Until we pick up the YED arc (we're not there yet), it's all MotW and blah blah saving people hunting things and I can't speak for the first-timer, but having digested four years of arc and being eager to revisit the beginning and re-contextualise it, I am BORED SILLY with all this Hunting stuff (which, ironically, used to be what the show was about).

So... I'm making a rec? I think I even remember how to do this.

I'll start with this: Even if you're not in this fandom, this is a very very good story.

The story is Warlock, by aftertherain. It is nominally slash, Merlin/Arthur, although not explicitly so (the only touching at all takes place in shared dreams OH HEY THERE ARE SHARED DREAMS IN THIS FIC) and the focus is very much not on the romance so much as the relationship, which is... complicated.

The tl;dr version of why you should read this: Arthur discovers that Merlin is a sorcerer, has him imprisoned, uses him for a weapon, and sets him free. It is the story of how Arthur learns to become king and so much more than that.

( I'm having a hard time articulating why I loved this story without blathering on, so behind the cut: blather. )

...it seems like making recs used to be a lot shorter and less involved. Maybe I have forgotten how to do it.

Not a secret.

Not edgy, not new, not subversive transgressive, not a secret.

Not shameful.

From a discussion I'm not linking to for various reasons:

Here's a question I've been mulling in my mind: Which is the weaker passing of the Bechdel test - Star Trek Insurrection, which passes due to a conversation between Troi and Crusher about how their boobs are firming up, or this new movie in which Uhura and Gaila discuss a distress signal from Klingon space, but do it in their underwear?

DISCUSS.

So here's the thing. And let me disclaim this by saying that I am a fan of Supernatural, in spite of its glaring, occasionally painful-to-watch flaws, and I am a HUGE fan of Castiel, and I think Misha Collins is talented, intelligent and charming, so I guess I'm a fan of him, too.

So here's the thing:





This interview is horrible. It's cute, they're in Australia talking about Texas and laughing together and talking about where they want the show to go, and it's framed by the interviewer in the studio talking about how female characters don't survive long on Supernatural because of the female fans. Because, you know, bitches be crazy! Crazy fans don't like it when girls touch THEIR men!

Which is bad enough... and then the actors agree with her. At about 1 minute in, Misha starts talking (and Jared chimes in to agree) about how the SPN fandom is sexist, and we hate women, and that's why female characters don't last.

I can't even fit my mouth around how much BULLSHIT that is. Yes, there is misogyny in the fandom. And yes, it's good that the fans should be called on that. But there's this saying, something about a mote and a beam and you'll put your eye out, and I think the rebuttal is best summed up thusly:

Misha, you're smart enough to know better. Watch this vid and tell me, which of these characters--the victims, the sluts, or the evil slutty victims--am I meant to embrace and identify with? What happened to Jo? Why do the writers/producers feel the need to kill--in the most sexualised way possible--any female character with any kind of power?

If you can watch that vid, which is nothing more than a collection of clips showing the treatment of female characters on Supernatural, and honestly tell me that the FANS are misogynistic? You're in deep denial.

Remember how I was saying about how FANDOM IS NOT A SECRET?

EVEN RPS?

Allow me to prove.

( Large image, sry. )

(What I was looking for? This macro:


I fail at remembering.

Hey, this is what happens when I'm home from work, Sam's busy, Junie's trapped in the Traveling Circus of the Damned, and I've read everything on the internet! YOU GET SPAM.

Suck it up.

In today's installment of "Songs I Can't Stop Listening To Lately--" seriously, last night I bought this off iTunes and then listened to it on repeat for an hour--AN HOUR--Kings of Leon, "Sex on Fire."

The blame for this one falls on franticsga, who used it in the playlist for her Merlin modern-day AU club story, Inside Outright. Strongly recommended. Strongly NWS.

Because my brain feels the need to repurpose everything into a more angelic context these days, I'm just going to point out that this song would make an excellent soundtrack to an angsty, angry (Sam/)Dean/Castiel post-Lucifer Rising reunion fic.

IJS.

*puts it back on repeat, goes back to writing*

The women in my father's practice for whom he did abortions educated me and taught me that abortion is about women's hopes, dreams, potential, the rest of their lives. Abortion is a matter of survival for women.

It is not a matter of convenience, religion, politics, semantics, or public "concern". Abortion is a matter of survival for women, and has been since the dawn of time.

I have said before and will say again, over and over the anti-abortion faction will say it: All life is sacred, just not female life. And not George Tiller's life, either.

REEEEEEEEEEEEALLY?

Oh my god, the NUCLEAR-LEVEL RAGE I am feeling right now must be because it's my fucking special lady time.

FUCK YOU, G. GORDON LIDDY. Fuck you right back into the Dark Ages from whence you fucking came.

I literally cannot believe that we are still hearing this shit. I just... cannot believe it.

Dear Merlin Fandom,

Oh my god. You know who is totally fat? Bradley James. No, I know! It's crazy how he walks around looking like a totally normal person, pretty standard 20-something white guy, and yet he is somehow secretly a giant fucking whale, only noticeable when he is wearing eleventy jillion pounds of armor and padding. He must be taking lessons from David Hewlett or something, amirite?

( Cut for MORBID OBESITY. )

It's come to my attention that sometimes, people don't REALISE they're fat unless we ridicule and shame them, so I have a super-awesome idea. Let's make sure to mention in every single fic we write about how Arthur is fat, or Bradley is fat, or they were fat as babies, or they're fatter than Colin Morgan/Merlin but he loves him anyway blah blah JESUS CHRIST PEOPLE.

It was bad enough in SGA, and David Hewlett actually has, like, fat cells in his body. Keep it up in Merlin and I'm relegating you ALL to Gossip Girl fandom.

DON'T THINK I WON'T DO IT.

I cannot believe I had to be prompted by Captain Jack Harkness to do this... but I have a rec for you! And it does not suck, unlike Captain Hart's epic saga.

Doola has committed pornery, and per aeternitas blames me. All I did was beg a little, she's ridiculously easy.

The story is Supernatural RPS (Junie, you can't call it Padackles because it's a threesome, HA.) set after "the t-shirt con." If you don't know what that is, don't worry, there's video at her post. If you do know, you'll understand why that inspired her to write fic about Jared and Misha after the con.

It's Doola, so you've got some manhandling, some voyeurism/exhibitionism, some implied threesomeish action impending, and, I'm not even kidding, implied wingfic. But not like that.

All the World's a Stage, Jared/Misha(/Jensen), NC-17.

She has promised me a sequel. I intend to hold her to this.

It was totally worth getting out of bed today, just for this:





(Song is NSFW.)

I have decided to take a hiatus from my job and travel around the world until I have met each and every one of these people and hugged them to within an inch of their lives.

I get that you're trying. I do! And I get that it's hard, in a society as misogynistic as ours, to come out and say such radical things as "women are allowed to make decisions about their own reproductive choices" and "women and men should receive equal pay for equal work." You've made some good steps forward--Clinton as Sec. of State, Lilly Ledbetter--but if you think that I am going to overlook shit like this, you are sorely mistaken, because you are doing it wrong and quite frankly, I demand more of you. And if this is what you think being a feminist sounds like, well for fuck's sake, stop helping, we'll do it without you.

The relevant quote:

THE PRESIDENT: I mean, nursing, teaching are all areas where we need more men. I’ve always said if we can get more men in the classroom, particularly in inner cities where a lot of young people don’t have fathers, that could be of enormous benefit.

Now, as you and I both know, in a lot of those fields they have been underpaid because they were predominantly women’s fields. And so part of what we have to do is to recognize that women are just as likely to be the primary bread earner, if not more likely, than men are today. As a consequence, eliminating the pay gap between men and women, and the pay gap between fields, becomes critically important. And we’ve already taken action, for example, with the Lilly Ledbetter bill to try to move in that direction.

I think that if you start seeing nursing pay better and teaching pay better, and some of these other professions, you’re going to see more men in those fields, although there’s a little bit of a chicken and an egg — if you start getting more men in those fields, then the stereotypes about this being a woman’s field and all the gender stereotypes that arise out of thinking that somehow they’re not the primary breadwinner, those stereotypes start being whittled away.

If you're having trouble seeing the problem here, allow me to clarify: Setting aside the issue of whether or not we "need" more men in teaching & nursing to "save" our fatherless inner-city kids, which is a whole 'nother can of poisonous snakes, I am all the fuck in favor of raising the pay grade for "women's work." But not because we need to make it more appealing to men, jesus christ, I just have these weird ideas that the work women do--traditionally or otherwise--is inherently valuable, and that women deserve to be paid commensurate with men, regardless of who is the primary breadwinner in the sublimely heteronormative view of the world you've got going on there.

Mr. President, I know you can do better than this. Please don't prove me wrong.

p.s. When you start getting more men in women's fields, what actually happens? Is that those men get called "fags" and "pussies" and earn significantly more than the women in those fields. But, you know. Whatever.

I know I haven't gotten around to convincing you all to get on over to DreamWidth yet, but! DW goes into open beta tonight (it has been in closed beta up until now) which means that a bunch more invite codes are going to be available. HOWEVER:

If you have an OpenID account and set and validated an email address on the account, or if you're a subscriber to one of our project mailing lists, you will receive an invitation to join the site if you don't already have an account.

In other words, I will get a limited number of invite codes, but if you set up over there with an OpenID account--a process which takes approximately 75 seconds--you will get an invite straight from them. Free, no strings attached, no effort on your part.

I strongly recommend that you do this!

From the Gmail adbar:

PETA's Euthanasia Policy - PETA.org - Learn Why Euthanasia Is Sometimes The Most Humane Option For Animals.

AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAH Fuck you, PETA.

UGH.

I know we're meant to be all tolerant of each other's beliefs and accept that not everyone agress with us on everything, and for the most part, I'm on board with that (some of my best friends are social conservatives!).

PETA is a collection of people doing bad things for bad reasons in the name of those who have no advocacy or agency of their own. People who are members/supporters of PETA are at best misguided and at worst evil, and the organisation itself is a blight on our society.

For them to attempt to justify what they do, and to compare it to what I do, to what shelters do, to what people who actually give a shit about animals do, is disgusting.

(Also, they lie. They lie a lot, about a lot of things, for bad reasons, and I have no tolerance for any of that.)

(Also also, they're fucking crazy misogynistic.)

(Seriously, fuck PETA.)

So, I just went off on a little rant about how, let's say, disenchanted with SPN fandom I am, which reminded me: I have fic to post!

This was meant to be part of an epic exploration of what happens when Ruby and Castiel push Dean and Sam to their respective breaking points, and Dean is trying to avert the Apocalypse by fighting demons and doing what Castiel tells him to while Sam is... trying to avert the Apocalypse by fighting demons and doing what Ruby tells him to (and being Antichristical).

Instead, you get a tiny snippet of SPN gen-fic.

Oh yeah--I wrote this six months ago, and it's even more canonical now than it was then. I can't decide if Kripke's predictable, or Monkeypuzzle is a mole.

( Dean, Castiel, Gen, no spoilers, no swears. )

Dear Supernatural fandom,

CHILL THE FUCK OUT.

See, here's the thing. Kripke did not just "out us" to the whole world. The world? Already knows about fandom. And you know how I know that? Because FANDOM JUST GOT A WHOLE DAMN SCENE IN A PRIME-TIME TV SHOW. Okay? So, the cat, it is out of the bag. And it has been for, like, fucking decades.

Remember, you did not invent fandom. Even the ST:TOS fans did not invent fandom, and IIRC, there were whole fucking EPISODES of that show written by fans. Way back in the day, people were writing Iago/Othello slash, and you know what, they probably cried in their beer about how totally oppressed and transgressive and blahdeblah they were, too. And--okay, they might have had a point. BUT: It is the year 2009, people, Barack Obama is president, fucking Iowa has admitted that gays are people, and scientist are making big strides in the field of teleportation. I'm not saying life is perfect, but we've come a long way since witch hunts and the black death.

Kripke did not condemn us, or expose us, or betray us. All he did was wave and say "HI SLASH FANS."

Reeeeeeelax.

Jesus.

Repetitively,
Dove

p.s. THEY KNOW ABOUT RPS TOO. YES, ALL OF THEM.

p.p.s. Re: next week: OMG JOHN WINCHESTER YOU BASTARD I KNEW IT OMG.

p.p.p.s. did you notice how super-hot my SPN boyfriend is when he's falling for Dean, in the biblical sense? I DID. I also noticed that each week he gets a little further from god and closer to Dean. Oh Hottie McWingfic, I WORRY FOR YOU. Your dad is going to be way pissed if you're not careful. Plz do not end up a feather pillow, I would be sad.

Polytechnique: OMG What About The Mens?

I saw this linked from Shakesville as "Polytechnique: Of Course We Need A Male Perspective," and I thought, "Surely not..." but no, of course, I should know better.

On December 6, 1989, a man walked into an engineering school in Montreal and killed 14 women for having the nerve to seek an education, condemning them for being feminists, for daring to reach for privileges previously (and, in his mind--and the minds of so many others--rightfully) afforded only to men.

The US tends to blithely ignore anything that happens in Canada, thinking of it as a sort of benignly crazy relative we hear from on occasion, but in Canada this "incident" was obviously a Big Deal, and is marked with a national day of remembrance.

The film is finally tackling the subject that has long been ignored, O shame of our culture, the most important aspect of what happened in Montreal that day, what is still happening all over the world every single day: when all those women were killed, how do you think that made the male survivors (who were asked to leave so the shooter could kill the women without harming them) feel?

The underlying message, of course--and it's not lying too deeply--is that we have talked and talked about those women, oh my god, isn't it time to talk about the MEN SOME MORE? And frankly making a film about how the Montreal massacre affected men is like celebrating white history month.

One of the actresses involved said she wanted to do this project to tell "the side of the story that hasn't been heard."

Here's the thing, guys: your story's been heard. It's been heard so long and so loud that when the story turns to women for more than a moment, the noise is shocking and the automatic response is, "OMG, but you're not talking about men! What about MEN?" And that is fucking tiring. Wanting to talk about women is not exclusive to men because every dialogue out there is about men. Until that changes, no: no, feminists are not being exclusionary or turning away "allies" by wanting to focus on women.

I think I am angrier than usual because 1. I read the comments on the post I linked, which I do NOT recommend you do and 2. seriously, are you fucking kidding me? A man kills 14 women specifically for being feminist and now we have to make a movie about how the men felt badly for surviving? when 3. so many, many people have never even heard of the shootings?

Augh, augh, augh.

subtitle: holy shit, a fannish post!

So, you guys remember that show I'm Totally Not Watching, right? (By the way, more of you need to join me in Not Watching this show, I'm looking at you, Doola.) Anyway.

( Merlin, meta, many mumbling mice are making midnight music in the moonlight--mighty nice. )