Honestly, It’s Subtle But Each Time Rufus Uses His Power There’s An Orange Tint In The Transition

THIS IS WHAT I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT! It’s not “Jimmy’s soul thinking the woman is hot” IT’S CAS! CAS LIKES WOMEN! CAS LIKES MEN! CAS LIKES HUMANITY! He was uncomfortable with the sex workers because he had never been in that situation before! It wasn’t a gay panic, it was a bi panic! He obviously liked the straight pizza man stuff that was on the tv, and even used it on Meg! He constantly flirts with Meg while being cuckoo with Sam’s trauma, and has a wife as Emmanuel! After he gets his memories back, he flirts with Meg yet again and even shows interest in “moving furniture” with her! He ends up married to the djinn queen somehow! He gets flustered when Rowena flirts with him! He wasn’t disinterested with Hannah in her original vessel, he just didn’t see it as an appropriate time for them to be doing all that when they had a mission! They literally kissed in the next scene after that! Yes Hannah chose a male as her second vessel, but her first vessel didn’t want to be a vessel anymore! I’m sure Hannah chose the closest vessel she could find! Castiel sees the true form inside of the body, not the body that Hannah was inhabiting! We learn this with Sister Jo when Michael visits her in Dean’s body, we’re shown his true form through her eyes! It envelopes the entire vessel! Castiel loves souls and true forms! He called Meg beautiful even when he could only see her true face! HE HAD SEC WITH APRIL AND BOASTS ABOUT IT! HE CALLS APRIL HOT AND WANTED MORE WITH HER BEFORE SHE BETRAYED HIM! This is all over the place but it’s all true and can be seen through context clues, the script, facial expressions, and body language! Dean seems to be Cas’s only fully 100% male love interest in the whole show! Throwing away all of Cas’s history because of the love confession is bogus! Rah rah rah rant over, the point is Castiel is QUEER. NOT STRICTLY MLM/GAY!

Honestly, one thing that bothers me quite a bit is the amount of times I see people define Cas as a gay man. He isn't a man. Nor gay. He has no gender and he is bisexual. I know his love for Dean shines like the sun and blinds like it, but Cas has shown interest in women too a few times. He is a bi angel. He is the queer angel.

This is so funny

Sometimes I forget and then I’m reminded

So tfw 2.0 have just wrapped up a case when Sam finds another one just a few towns over and since they're already there, they won't call up another hunter to do the job. But Cas, who was so on board for another hunt, is suddenly so cagey about it when he finds out which town specifically and he absolutely doesn't wanna go and keeps making up excuses and Dean confronts him like heyyy what's going on buddy, but Cas being Cas doesn't say anything. Eventually they get there and y'know they do their case thing, and somehow it leads them to going to a church. And Cas is EVEN MORE cagey about this and doesn't wanna go and tries to make excuses but they have a case to solve!! So eventually the four of them walk into the church, Cas dragging his feet the entire way and once they're inside, Jack's like "hey Cas, is that you?" and points to the stained glass self-portrait Cas made as godstiel and everyone turns to look, including other members of the church who were THERE when it happened and Cas can't fly away anymore but he does run

this is gonna be so long for no reason i know it already but i’m painfully rewatching parts of season 8 and i really just will never be over how people severely underestimate the impact of trauma on sam’s whole arc in season 8, and that’s obviously because the writers were so fucking asleep at the wheel when it came to that, but it’s the only thing that makes everything slot into place in a way that makes sense (to me, at least). 

the thing with sam in season 7 is that it wasn’t his post-hell arc the way season 4 contained dean’s post-hell arc: sam is still functionally in hell in season 7 in at least some way shape or form - in other words, up until the last 5 episodes of the season, sam is experiencing some form of hell-related trauma, not the after-effects, but the actual thing. it may have been psychosis, but as we saw, it was real to him and frequently debilitating. so that makes season 8 sam’s real post-hell arc, compounded with the sudden and confounding loss of dean (his “stone number one”) at the end of season 7, again, barely 5 episodes after sam’s 17-episode long psychotic break ended. 

sam canonically (per jared, not the writers, of course) has PTSD from his experience in lucifer’s cage and we see that manifest in more understandable ways in later season when he’s faced with lucifer again, but it has to exist before then even if left unacknowledged by the narrative. but the season 7 hallucifer arc is in itself traumatic and not just a response to the older trauma from the cage because his mind is at all times trying to convince himself he’s still in the cage. that barely ends before he loses his brother again. so that’s a double dose of trauma and sam has to deal with both at the same time. that’s what gets us to a sam that is so unable to function in his life alone that he runs away from every responsibility and settles down into a pretense of normalcy with amelia. it’s not just grief or losing dean but effectively the first time his mind is not actively dealing with the trauma of the cage and instead now in post-trauma mode.

PTSD manifests itself differently in different people but it certainly can cause a debilitating fear of change, as after experiencing trauma people seek a sense of security and stability, so losing the “rock” that he had throughout his traumatic experience in season 7 (dean) so soon after he finally “escaped” hell would obviously send him into that kind of spiral, where he can only stabilize once he’s found some solid ground to re-orient himself and someone to effectively replace dean with. the need to feel safe, to feel secure, stable, in control, are all very real post-traumatic things.  and then dean coming back is a similarly disorienting experience for similar reasons, resulting in him wanting things to be the way that he got used to while dean was gone. 

moving on to benny, the thing that bothered sam about benny is, as astutely pointed out by jared and never really acknowledged by the writers, the hypocrisy of dean being able to have this monster friend and expect him to be trusted automatically when he was deeply mistrusted for his relationship with ruby and then berated to hell and back (LITERALLY) for having been stupid enough to trust her. now having difficulty trusting others is also very much a symptom of PTSD in people who were victimized by others which is something that just generally applies here in my view.

but for sam specifically, this is the origin point of his trauma - he went to hell because this, trusting ruby, ended the world and made him feel guilty enough to think that was his sole fault. this is compounded by the fact that for sam, prior to the in-between year between 7 and 8, the events of season five are basically the last time his mind and memory were functioning in a linear and normal way. for half of season 6 his soul is in hell and for the remaining half he has no memories of either thing except brief flashbacks and then suddenly he has all the memories again, centuries of memories, but then trauma is destroying his psyche and messing with his sense of reality etc. and season five is when he was being raked through the coals for this very thing, which led him in an incredibly, fully direct way (“i let him out, i gotta put him back in”) to the source of the horrifying trauma that his mind is forced to process. now PTSD obviously causes memory issues in and of itself so adding that to the absolute mess that sam’s mind/memory is because of the above, it’s hard to say objectively what’s “fresh” in sam’s mind vs. what isn’t, but the causal link between “trust monster” and “almost unsurvivable trauma” is definitely present. 

that obviously adds another dimension to sam wanted to be “pure” and rid himself of the thing inside him (demon blood) that, to him, was the root cause of all of this - if you didn’t have the evil blood, they wouldn’t have been able to get to you, you wouldn’t have deserved to go to hell - but also would apply to wanting to scrub himself of everything done to him and his traumas and become clean again, whole again, instead of the mangled mess he sees himself to be after hell. and it of courses adds another dimension to my beloved sacrifice church scene because this entire time sam would have been coping and struggling with unimaginable trauma compounded by the loss of dean in the only way he can, trying his best not to hurt someone again the way he did the last time he lost dean, and he’s being berated and blamed again somehow for doing it the exact opposite way this time as last time - having lost not only the security he built with amelia but not being able to find any solid ground the whole season with dean either, who was capricious at best with his brotherly affection due to his own issues post-purgatory and his woundedness and blame towards sam for not looking for him - and then the rules of who to trust and not trust are flipped on him but just before the church scene dean again brings up trusting ruby like it was a cardinal sin but only when sam does it - resulting in a desperate breakdown at the end of the season where he doesn’t think that anything he does can ever be the right choice because he’s done diametrically opposite things in the same situations and been berated both ways, but now i’m getting off topic. anyway season 8 sam didn’t do anything wrong in his life ever 

dean walks into the war room one day to see what seems like jack and cas glitching in and out of the bunker while they point to different parts of the map table and dean is like guys what the fuck and cas is like i'm showing sam and jack my favorite points in world history and dean is like uhhh i don't see sam??? and jack is like oh yeah we left him at the petersen house in 1865 he really wanted to watch a play there for some reason and dean on a verge of a heart attack turns to cas like you took sam on a field trip to watch lincoln get assassinated???? and cas just deadpans no i left him there he wanted to take pictures

I feel like, with how natural this seems for them, they were definitely acting as federal marshals as teens and retorting with “Aren’t you a little old to still be working out in the field?”

flirting mode ON

hey yall! this was my jack piece for the hunting & haunting spn zine. ive said it before and ill say it again: it was an absolute honor and privilege to work with these lovely and talented people. hope yall enjoy!

Sam, Dean, Castiel, and Baby are standing behind Batman and Robin 😭

Reading Li'l Gotham and at first I thought to myself that this suited man looks like Death from Supernatural

and then I realized it fucking was!

So, anyway, I say as though we are mid-conversation, and you're not just being invited into this conversation mid-thought. One of my editors phoned me today to check in with a file I'd sent over. (<3)

The conversation can be surmised as, "This feels like something you would write, but it's juuuust off enough I'm phoning to make sure this is an intentional stylistic choice you have made. Also, are you concussed/have you been taken over by the Borg because ummm."

They explained that certain sentences were very fractured and abrupt, which is not my style at all, and I was like, huh, weird... And then we went through some examples, and you know that meme going around, the "he would not fucking say that" meme?

Yeah. That's what I experienced except with myself because I would not fucking say that. Why would I break up a sentence like that? Why would I make them so short? It reads like bullet points. Wtf.

Anyway. Turns out Grammarly and Pro-Writing-Aid were having an AI war in my manuscript files, and the "suggestions" are no longer just suggestions because the AI was ignoring my "decline" every time it made a silly suggestion. (This may have been a conflict between the different software. I don't know.)

It is, to put it bluntly, a total butchery of my style and writing voice. My editor is doing surgery, removing all the unnecessary full stops and stitching my sentences back together to give them back their flow. Meanwhile, I'm over here feeling like Don Corleone, gesturing at my manuscript like:

ID: a gif of Don Corleone from the Godfather emoting despair as he says, "Look how they massacred my boy."

Fearing that it wasn't just this one manuscript, I've spent the whole night going through everything I've worked on recently, and yep. Yeeeep. Any file where I've not had the editing software turned off is a shit show. It's fine; it's all salvageable if annoying to deal with. But the reason I come to you now, on the day of my daughter's wedding, is to share this absolute gem of a fuck up with you all.

This is a sentence from a Batman fic I've been tinkering with to keep the brain weasels happy. This is what it is supposed to read as:

"It was quite the feat, considering Gotham was mostly made up of smog and tear gas."

This is what the AI changed it to:

"It was quite the feat. Considering Gotham was mostly made up. Of tear gas. And Smaug."

Absolute non-sensical sentence structure aside, SMAUG. FUCKING SMAUG. What was the AI doing? Apart from trying to write a Batman x Hobbit crossover??? Is this what happens when you force Grammarly to ignore the words "Batman Muppet threesome?"

Did I make it sentient??? Is it finally rebelling? Was Brucie Wayne being Miss Piggy and Kermit's side piece too much???? What have I wrought?

Anyway. Double-check your work. The grammar software is getting sillier every day.