“Cringy” Multifandom Blog MANY SPOILERS

how‘s the water?

you‘re in it

All right, I was forced to start up a tumblr just to post this thing. So, I watched the first five seasons of Supernatural while doing field research on the birds of northern Alaska, and when Castiel spread his wings for the first time my first thought was “Oh look, that angel’s in molt”.

For the whole rest of season 4 I kept thinking of him as “the molting angel.” I kept wondering what on earth had happened to him in Hell that left his wings so messed up, such that he had to do an out-of-season molt with both alulas broken. And I kept wondering whether his new feathers had come in all right! 

But mostly I became convinced that Castiel must have suffered some real injuries while rescuing Dean from Hell. Castiel never mentioned anything about this… but I like to think that there’s a pretty dramatic story there that he has never told.

What if, when we first saw Cas’s wings burned and wounded, what if that’s not burned by Hell fire or wounded by demons, but burned by how scalding hot Dean’s soul is. It physically would hurt Cas to touch Dean when he was in such pure soul form, let alone grabbing him and flying him out of Hell, he could get completely burned or even vaporized; all the other angels know that, so they stalled looking for him, didn’t try hard enough to reach Dean, but Cas didn’t mind. He saw how bright Dean’s soul is – bright and beautiful like the sun, hot like the sun, dangerous to him like the sun to Icarus – and how much he deserved to be saved, so Cas grabbed him without hesitation, ignoring the pain and wound his soul brought him, ignoring his wings burning and tearing from Dean’s soul’s heat – even then he was still fascinated by this human, by the Righteous man – until he finally got Dean out of Hell.

All this time, we assumed Cas’s handprint on Dean’s shoulder was because Cas had the higher body temperature and that it was Cas who burned Dean, but “burn” really could also happen the other way around, as long as the temperature difference is high enough. You can get severely burned by liquid nitrogen, because the human body is about 200 degrees Celsius higher. So it is equally likely that Dean’s soul was the higher temperature one among the two, and Cas was like the liquid nitrogen. And so Cas is the one getting severely burned by Dean (with the disarranged wings and feathers being the proof), and Dean got the frostbite burn of a handprint.

I personally hate any kind morality thought policing. I'm not Catholic or religious and I do not feel guilty over my thoughts. You are not an inherently evil person because you saw two athletes in an interview and went "Hmmm...... what if...." The Feds are not going to come banging down your door because you wrote about one band member dicking down the other and sent it to your friend.

Wondering about other people's lives is very human. Being nosy about their personal lives is very normal. People have been writing fiction about other people's lives since the dawn of time. Some people even manage to write New York Times Bestselling Books that are "historical fiction" or "alternate reality." It does not make you inherently bad to be curious about the details of someone's personal life. That's being human. Being nosy is kind of fun.

The problem, however, comes with the ways in which people engage with it, and involve the real people in this. Harassing an musician's real girlfriend because it doesn't fit into the RPF ship. Showing up at real sporting events holding signs about how certain teammates should kiss. Trying to get actors to sign art of them fucking their coworker. Flooding social media with comments using the celebrity's full name and speculation. There's a line, there's a fourth wall, and there's fandom etiquette.

I hate the question of "Is RPF ethical" because it feels like morality thought policing. Post your fics on locked accounts, censor someone's name when you tweet about it, blow up your groupchat with hundreds of "DID YOU SEE THE WAY THEY LOOKED AT EACH OTHER??" texts. It's not inherently evil to wonder what other people are doing when they're out of the spotlight. Kill the cop in your mind.