#denugis

I took a sabbatical from these for the end of s15, but now I’m Back. Here we go!

6.07 Final Thoughts

I love early season 6 as a meditation on the ways that Sam is present when he is absent, and absent when he is present. Making Sam objectively, provably Not Himself does some lovely and horrific things to drag the ways he has been forced and forces himself to fit certain molds into the light. 

We open on Sam, whom Dean has beaten bloody and unconscious and tied to a chair, for the crime of—*checks notes*—saying he feels there’s something wrong with him, and that he needs help. Boy, I sure do wonder why Sam was reticent. A mystery. 

Okay, but actually, those aren’t Dean’s reasons. Because he went way overboard. Sam was not a physical threat to him. Dean was certainly upset about the you-let-me-get-vamped thing, but he wasn’t overcome with rage over it. This was not 4.21, or 4.04, or any time that Dean has lashed out at Sam in anger or desperation or because Sam was fighting back. In fact, this wasn’t Dean lashing out at Sam at all: Dean is cold, Dean is putting down a threat. Dean beat Soulless!Sam unconscious precisely because he was not Sam enough. Dean is lashing out at the unbearable possibility that the Cage might have changed Sam, indelibly, forever, to be someone that Dean won’t recognize. And that implicit degree of judgment is utterly terrifying. 

Lies and honesty in season 6... it’s a whole thing, webs within webs, really. Cas will later be excoriated for hiding his deal with Crowley from Dean and Sam. Both Samuel and Cas are lying to Sam for the whole season about who rescued Sam, and Crowley is lying to them both in turn. But the fact that Sam literally didn’t know what was wrong with him or how he escaped Hell but was expected to confess anyway, along with the way Cas and Dean stand there discussing Sam’s status and diagnosis over his head, is an excellent illustration of the way that lies to and lies about Sam are treated. 

Also, Cas, entering the brunt of his woes post-s6: the way that Dean and Sam, and especially Dean, take his assistance and his involvement for granted. He’s been inducted into the family, and he’s glimpsed the utter loyalty demanded, but now those demands will really start to kick in. “Your problems always come first.” lmao

Soulless!Sam is remarkably cooperative! He relies on a tactic that mid-seasons Sam uses actually quite a lot to win over Dean: persuasion via self abasement. (I’m the least of any of you, I know I’m a freak, I know I  messed up)… it’s appeasement, full-throttle. “I’m sorry, Dean, I won’t do it again,” he says, with admirably well-leashed insincerity. 

It’s so obviously, delightfully performative. It makes me think about 15.17, and other times in late seasons, when Sam is relying on these tried-and-true tactics to talk Dean down. How much of that is performative? How much does Sam truly believe? How much does Sam believe in spirit but not in word? The potential for dishonesty and slant truth is fascinating. 

Soul (or lack of soul) touching!!!! Cas didn’t even heal Sam’s face first, because he knew we wanted to see him all bloody :) 

The treatment of Family also gets a good shake-over in season 6, with the introduction of the Campbells. Dean’s open hostility towards the Campbells is unsurprising; he’s threatened, he’s suspicious, and it reminds me of how Dean felt when he discovered Adam in 4.19. 

And yet Dean uses a similar tactic on Samuel as Soulless Sam is using on him—offering trust in the hope that it’s returned. “You call the plays,” he says, apparently without any sense of irony. 

Dean accuses Sam of having “no instincts.” And that’s--both true, and precisely untrue. Sam able to figure out every kind of cue this episode quickly and keenly, not by empathy, but through observation. Also ironically, Sam’s ease with following Samuel’s orders is so close to Dean’s sense of instinct, as he would have defined it pre-series! Do what Dad asks, because he’s family: you can really see Sam’s confusion when Dean isn’t on board with that. 

I think we should appreciate how baffling the back and forth in Family (tm) is for Soulless!Sam. He set himself up to follow the Rules as he understood them: save people, hunt things, obey Dad Grandad, only for the goalposts to move. 

What’s interesting here is, as Soulless says himself, he doesn’t actually need to stick around with Dean. He could have left. Reasonably, around the time that Dean gives him the “I drive the bus, I call the shots” speech, he should have been out of there. We are supposed to feel disappointment at the prospect that they broke up but I mean goddamn, who wouldn’t run from that ultimatum. The real twist is that he decides to stick it out.

I love the brief flash of genuine fear Soulless shows when Crowley threatens to throw him back into the Cage. 

Soulless!Sam is still so fundamentally his own person, even when he’s allowing himself to be led around by the nose by Dean. And yet… he’s just as compromised as Sam is. He’s got that fear of being swallowed up, by Hell or by Dean. Being twisted into something he is not, being forced to fit a shape he can’t survive: that’s the point at which he’ll fight back. But up until then? He’ll stretch himself quite agreeably to meet expectations. He’ll fit himself into the imposed mold without complaint, whether it’s Samuel’s or Dean’s, and he’ll feel a real sense of relief to have that structure. 

Unlike many other soulless people we’ve seen, Soulless!Sam doesn’t operate at all on id. Rather, he reads to me as the precise opposite: ego and superego run wild. He places too much weight on divining and acting according to what his tiny society thinks is acceptable. All his survival drive is bent towards consequence, towards the judgment of pragmatic outcomes, rather that what he’d like in the moment. He doesn’t mind hurting or subsuming himself temporarily to gain a later advantage. He feels safest when fulfilling expectations, both practical and moral. He’s built himself a scaffold to support whatever it is he knows he's become, and he uses it to defend himself against the guilt and failure and agony that he remembers, that he’s desperate not to return to. 

17)   What’s an aspect of SPN people often point to as a flaw that you really enjoy?

i’ve seen a lot written lately about hbo!spn, with the assumption that this would allow spn to be bolder, darker and more committed to following through on wild premises and therefore better, but i quite like abyssal, unspoken horror that yawned beneath the bright, silly, pg-13 stuff. i think its restrictions did allow spn to do some pretty creative interpretations of fantastical things--my favourite is, of course, its mindscapes. 

i also think that spn displayed nuanced and affecting portrayals of things like psychosis, ptsd and addiction, in ways that i likely think would not have been possible if they had been given a much bigger budget and more leeway to write what the fuck they wanted. prestige shows usually have such lavish camerawork and an eye for detail but when they turn that onto mental illness they make it an uncomfortable and unhelpful spectacle. what spn did was weave it seamlessly into samndean’s characterisation--there to pick and up and explore if you cared to look.

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12. Draw one of your favourite characters in 15 seconds.

@denugis I’d be sad to delete too, not going to lie - I don’t necessarily agree with some of the things I have said here over the years, but it’s just a collection of thoughts and things I enjoyed and disliked both, and I would be sad to lose it.

I’ve just recently felt like I might be too negative or critical, that I’ve been generalising to much; it’s just in my nature to pick things apart to see how they work or find out why they don’t, even though other people don’t enjoy me doing it. I don’t think I can help it.

Tagged by the lovely @denugis and @ameliacareful Thanks!

AO3 Name: monicawoe 

Fandoms: My top 3 fandoms are Supernatural, MCU, and Venom, others include various Marvel comics and TV shows, Alien Covenant, Forever Knight, Good Omens, Hannibal, Legion (tv), Lucifer (comics), Preacher (tv), and The Mandalorian

Fic you spent the most time on: In terms of longest time spent writing? Probably Burdens Doublefold, co-written with @quickreaver just because it was such a beast of a fic: still my longest at ~67k words, and still one of my all-time faves.

The longest one from conception to actually completing the fic though was On His Head a Crown which I started thinking of while season 5 aired (back in 2009!) and then didn't write because canon went in such a different and also fascinating direction that I ended up writing more canon-adjacent fics at the time. This one veers off wildly from 5x03 with Sam as the Horseman Conquest, and was finally written last year as part of the Sam Winchester Big Bang featuring glorious art by @slytherkins. That means it actually took me a full ten years to get around to writing it. Glad I did though ; )

Fic you spent the least amount of time on:  A tie between Letters of Resignation, a cracky collection of letters written from the POV of the demons killed by Sam during My Bloody Valentine and Hunt, the first Sharp Teeth fill I ever did for the prompt Wile E. Coyote finally catches the Roadrunner.

Longest fic: Burdens Doublefold, as noted above, a 67k retelling of seasons 1 & 2 co-written with @quickreaver, aka the fic where I wrote myself into shipping Sam/Brady forever.

Shortest fic: a 100 word BuckyNat poem Mirror

Most hits: How They Make You a Weapon at 18,619 , Winter Soldier POV beginning with Bucky being captured by Hydra through and beyond the end of CA:TWS) This is the only fic I've ever written in second person but I found it worked rather well for the Winter Soldier's POV accentuating his missing sense of self.

Most kudos: Ink at 2165, Venom (movie), Venom admires Eddie's tattoos.

Most comment threads: Also How They Make You a Weapon at 133, likely largely due to the fact that this was posted as a WIP, which I don't normally do, but at the time I felt a burning need to immediately share all of my Winter Soldier Bucky thoughts!

Fave fic you wrote: Wow that's a tough one. I love so many of them for so many different reasons. If I had to pick one favorite from my top three fandoms it would be:

MCU: Bad Becomes Worse. I suspect it might be one of the best (albeit angstiest) fics I've ever written, you tell me.

Supernatural: Counteroffer and its sequel The King's Guard - I still really love the unreliable narrator POV in the first one and the unsettling tone I think I achieved there, and as for the sequel, writing Sam as physically containing all of Hell was just so damn fun.

Venom: Wedding Party (because this one was just SO MUCH FUN to write!)

Fic you want to rewrite/expand on: So many. Early on in my spn fic-writing days I ended on cliffhangers a lot because that's what the show liked to do, and I myself enjoy the open-ended nature of them, but some of them really are begging for a sequel. If there's any particular one you'd like to see a time-stamp to let me know and I’ll likely add it to the list.  

I am currently working on a sequel to my most recent Venom fic Many Thousand Feet Beneath because I'm told I can't just leave those biotech millipedes under San Francisco! (and you're right readers, you're right!) It will take me a bit longer because ::gestures at everything this year:: but I promise I'm on it!

Share a bit of your WIP or share a story idea that you’re planning: (see longish excerpt of my WIP of Kale!Sam / King of Hell Sam under the read more tag below)

Tagging : @wetsammywinchester , @slytherkins, @brendaonao3, @rokhal, @tigerlilynoh, @hafital​

soulless!Sam and not!Sam really look like they’re about to epically hate-kiss in the third one down.