AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHoh my goshhhhh don’t be frustrated! We can yell about it no matter when you choose to watch! (If you do choose to watch.) But thank you for the wonderful message. You’re the best. ♥

Though ofcourse if you ever watch the show please (please please please I begyou), tell me and I would be the happiest person ever to yell aboutit with you. It’s sogood.However. Just in case you ever do watch at some point in the future, there are acouple things to be aware of before starting. I nearly let them stop me when I first started watching and hooooo boy I’m glad I didn’t.

ThingsViewers-To-Be of Nirvana in Fire should be aware of:

Thefirst episode(s) will concuss and frustrate you. 

A brutal blunt-forcewhap to the skull of waythe heck too much information. Youwill want to start it on fire and glower at its flickering corpse. Asif having to follow the subtitles (if you aren’t a native or fluentspeaker of Mandarin) wasn’t quite enough to add a level of challenge,the show takes its viewers very seriously and assumes that ofcourse it can drop us face-first into a freaking ensemble castsmack-dab in the middle of Political Machinations in time-period-ambiguous ancient Chinaand we’ll be totally fine.So you’re making this face at the screen

andTEN MORE CHARACTERS pop up and they’re all doing Very ImportantThings (which you will be tested on later; take notes) and you’re not sure who to care about or if you care aboutanything at all—

Okay, so maybe it’s not quite that bad, but it can certainly feel like it at first. That said, enjoy the confused apathy while it lasts because as soon as it fades, this show lives to rip out your entire heart every second of every episode. You know how sometimes a particularly well-written line has a second layer of meaning that is profoundly moving? The best ones in this show have like five or six and each is more wrenchingly beautiful and awe-inspiring than the last. Mmmm, also whump, such beautiful whump

The upside of this is that this show has unbelievablerewatch value.Things that become relevant in episode 40-something get introduced in the firsthandful of episodes. There is amazing, dedicated consistency on thepart of the actors and writers. It’s breathtaking. A telling nervoushabit a character has is a nervous habit he displays throughout thewhole show. A book that becomes relevant midseries? Yeah, someone isreading and annotating it in episodeone. Ifthe first watch hurts, the second will hurt morebecause holyfrick there are layersof pain.Like an onion, if you set it on fire and then liquified it and used it as eyedrops.

I will personally guide anyone who wants to take the plunge through the first episodes of the show because it’s freakin’ worth it. 

More under the cut because this is getting long.

My Tumblr Crushes:

bitchypersonbluebird

oh-jesus-sammy

transgendersam

ross-faer

hufflepuffsam

yuki00yo

pathossam

arclucifer666

I WILL NEVER STOP CRYING ABOUT IT.

It is the most beautiful thing. Jack’s happiness at seeing Sam again when he thought he was dead and his endless, unshakable faith in Sam’s goodness bring me life. I saw some commentary about how the show intended to have Jack be evil and make Sam kill him (*hisses*), but kept him alive due to audience reaction and how compelling his interactions with Sam were. I can’t confirm any of that and am not entirely sure if it’s true, but yikes. No matter what, I’m glad that, for once, the writers didn’t vilify Sam for trusting and supporting someone. Jack is the hugest Sam!Boy and I hope they have many happy adventures in s14.

I truly

have 

no idea

what

you’re

talking

about.

No idea at all.

Oh my goodness, you speak truth! Well said. Seasons 7 and 8 were great for Sam hair (I can even forgive the face-eating mutton chops in s7 because his hair was on point), but there’s just something about the much shorter dandelion fluff of s13 that brings me joy. 

OH MY GOSH. Yes. Yes, I adore him. I watched the whole show by myself, then promptly rewatched it twice by introducing my sister and dad to it. And you’re so right! Will and Sam have an unbelievable amount of things in common, though the way those beliefs about themselves are nurtured and developed ends up being quite different. But they have so much in common and I need to scream about it, so—

Both Sam and Will recognize something in themselves that they deem “evil.” It affects their self-perceptions and the way they form attachments. Sam believes his psychic abilities (especially once he discovers what, exactly, awakened them) to be evidence of some evil or wrongness inside of him. Both John and Dean, no matter how much they might try to support him, both fear that to be the truth, so neither can help him. Will’s unique ability to empathize with even especially warped minds makes him believe that he is also somehow twisted. (Hannibal, of course, fascinated by his especially rare new buddy, doesn’t really tell him otherwise, poor Will… :D). 

Both Sam and Will have very limited and often surface level connections to other people because of those feelings about themselves, whether because their connections to people lead to those people being brutally murdered (Sam, mostly) or because their personalities and abilities make it difficult to form meaningful attachments, either because of the type of people who seek them out or because of the restrictions they place on themselves because of their self-image.

They’re both sassy little shits. Admittedly, Will takes this to a wonderful extreme because of how very few fucks he gives about what other people think, while Sam’s doe-eyed empathy with witnesses and his need to perform good so that he can feel good tamps down on the sass, at least until he literally doesn’t have a soul and thus doesn’t have any moral compunctions about verbally cutting people off at the knees.

They both, as mentioned above, feel an intense need to perform good deeds to act as a counterbalance to their “darkness”—or at least their perceived darkness. Will won’t quit his job consulting with the FBI even though it is literally shredding his mental health, and Sam will drive himself to death and beyond to atone for his imagined sins.

Both have unshakable beliefs, and they’ll act against their own desires to be in line with those beliefs. Will fares a bit better in the self-image part of this, perhaps. He was able to believe himself capable of murder thanks to some highly emotional circumstances (and very convincing evidence), but it didn’t take long for him to advocate for his own innocence and take concrete steps forward. Sam, on the other hand, unfortunately has such a crappy view of himself that it’s remarkably easy to make him take responsibility for things he wasn’t at fault for. Despite all that, when it comes to others (let’s just specify innocents), both Sam and Will can be quite firm.

Thank you. *big hug* ♡ And I’m sorry, too. I want so badly to have a bottomless well of optimism for the show, and it kinda sucks feeling so hopeless about it. Maybe I just need hiatus to recharge. I guess we’ll see.

I will also be a Sam girl to the end. The reason I watch, really, is to share the experience with wonderful Sam fans like you, and that may well keep me going to the very end, but the fact that the show itself is not one of my reasons for watching has made me reconsider some things.

The hope is still there and always will be for Sam, but the optimism I have tried to nurture for the show is at a low. (I swear, though. Gimme a single plotline like the Trials or Sam’s hell wall or his psychic powers, and I won’t be able to stop watching.) If I’m sure of anything, it’s that if the show keeps going, there will eventually be a cool arc for Sam again.