#katsidhe

5. hurt/comfort

i'm fucking terrible at writing this (see: my failed attempts at whumptober) but i love reading it. there was a time when i favoured the hurt over the comfort but i don't anymore. i feel old. i want to read the hugs and cuddling and the worry and the silent understanding and all the medical inaccuracies to give my professor a stroke. let me live vicariously!

4. snapshots of domestic life. again, this is something i've come to read and write more lately. it's just less stressful and gives some breathing room to explore characterisation and relationships.

3. and this is going in the diametrically opposite direction, but: fucked-up horror. not whump, mind, but straightup mindbending horror. the more creative the better. sometimes there's just no way out of that cave. sometimes things just don't get better. the universe has infinitely more ways to fuck you up spectacularly.

2. hair. i just love hair. @hacash and @hippity-hoppity-brigade can attest to this, but i have literally written entire fics around hair as a motif, and i will write more.

1. rarepairs. i have some set-in-stone notps and some pairings i like more than others, but i like writing (and reading) any kind and number of ships, the rarer the better. and by ship, i don't mean just romantic, but platonic, sexual, antagonistic, friendship, just about any kind.

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2. when do you think the climax of the show is?

i think it’s 8.23: sacrifice.

it works as a fitting climax on a number of levels: for starters, as a spectacle, it’s probably the last truly Epic finale that the show has given us. there was genuine tension, enormous stakes, and final moments that were both frightening and awe-inspiring. before s8, spn had given us a number of finales like this but alas, none since.

the scale of it is absurd, but not the farcical kind of absurd that the later seasons delve into (though it is its own kind of interesting) like personifying primordial concepts like the darkness and god and reaching into alternate universes. the first big arc in spn ended with the gates of hell being opened to let demons out. now we have an attempt to close them for good, tying in everything else we’ve discovered along the way: angels and their weird politics, castiel’s downfall being his weird devotion to the winchesters, prophets, old angelic languages, and the winchesters with the power to change the world for good, but not condemn it forever because of their failure because honestly, who’s that powerful?

i also feel like it was the last finale with genuine, palpable conflict between the brothers and the closest we get to looking at the connective threads between the winchesters’ dysfunction and the world lurching from apocalypse to apocalypse (way before chuck is introduced as god/the ultimate scribe and ends up muddying the waters). 

sam has had a taste of what his life could be beyond hunting, of what it means to move on and build a future instead of building a monument to grief and guilt, and season 8 was a near endless parade of sam being told how deeply, fundamentally wrong he was. for his reality to be dismissed as gauzy fantasy while dean literally lied about what happened to castiel when he left purgatory. for him to be bent and broken and reshaped into this creature who would willingly endure unimaginable pain and sacrifice himself for this mission. and what was this mission? it was absurd from the start. locking away all demons forever? this is an objective without sense or pragmatic consideration beyond being something to Work Towards As Hunters Again. dean was willing to have the people he once helped save killed all over again if it meant this could happen, negating his own lectures about hunters having a responsibility to keep people safe. this mission created a domino effect of events that continued all the way to the series finale. and it is in season 8 that we see this connection the most closely.

the mission wins, in a spectacularly sad scene where sam self-flagellates and burns himself inside out both literally and figuratively for dean’s love. it’s depressing, but the show’s depressing. the very last scene of 15.20 is depressing. sam and dean become samndean after this in a way that’s depressing. it’s the perfect climax.

3. Describe the different ways in which limnality shifts as a central theme in Supernatural (or a specific arc/character given)

it exists as physical spaces: living out of the car and motels, heaven and hell and earth and entire universes as porous planes, living everywhere but belonging nowhere. it exists in the psychic split between your body and your essence; that you can exist as just body, or just soul, or just mind, or somewhere in between all three. it exists in the way samndean swing on the cusp of saving the world and condemning it; at the uncomfortable intersection of their violence and love. it exists as death: a place in between two breaths, two blinks, that can disappear like it never existed. 

sam and dean aren’t really hunters but they aren’t really men of letters either. they aren’t quite human, not quite Other--they’ve had their body and soul split apart and other things fill the cracks, killed the devil and raised hell, but it still only takes a misplaced nail and bad timing to kill them. they are separated from any kind of permanent community, cycling through friends and lovers (some more tenacious than others) who kill and die for them. and they end their story in an eternal ellipse, having changed nothing at all despite having shaped their own god in their image--

6. Do you have any psychological headcanons (or canon interpretations) of the characters?

i’ve said this a hundred times before and i will say it a hundred times again: soullessness is a wonderful depiction of the changes that a person might undergo after great trauma, how those changes aren’t going to be something socially palatable or something their loved ones can recognise, that person’s own desire to revert to a Before state despite not understanding what that even means and the terrible mix of good intention and inhuman coercion that goes into ‘correcting’ them.

i don’t like to ascribe diagnoses to anybody outside of a professional setting--even if it’s fictional characters--and i can only look at traits that suggest a bigger picture. that said, the portrayal of the central relationship as a progressively abusive one with all of its ups and downs and the despairing black hole right at its centre? masterful.

EDIT: oh, oh, oh! how could have i forgotten s7′s hallucifer? i think sam continues to hallucinate him, especially during times of great stress. hallucifer is distinct from lucifer himself in that he is sharper, and meaner: a product entirely of sam’s brain.

castiel taking on sam’s trauma in 7.17 (analogous to acute psychiatric treatment so that sam has the strength and resources to build his own wall, so to speak) and seeing hallucifer was like the imprint of a bright light on your retina after you close your eyes. hallucifer was bright, and loud, and everywhere. and every so often, he comes back. 

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i’ll be honest: late s7 is a bit of a blur to me, because it felt like around 7.17 Show put on its brakes and kind of... spun its wheels until the season ended so it could start afresh in s8. which i found infuriating at the time and a little disappointing even now, but with the benefit of hindsight and nearly a decade’s worth of watching, thinking and writing about this show, i can appreciate it for its insights into samndean.

after spending so much of s6 and s7 in sam’s head (a progressively rare treat!), it’s a bit jarring to see sam kind of... fade into the background towards the end, but the move makes sense to me as part of sam’s recovery from his hell-trauma and also sets the stage for what he does in between s7 and s8. castiel ‘taking on his pain’ in 7.17 is to me, analogous to acute psychiatric treatment: something to control the more debilitating aspects of your illness so that you can reach a state where you can actively work towards a more holistic recovery. it doesn’t mean sam’s sense of unreality is gone, or even that hallucifer is gone: just that sam isn’t spiralling anymore, and he can go back to building his own wall, so to speak. for the first time in a while, it’s quiet inside his head. sam’s going to enjoy that silence for a while.

(honestly so much of sam’s s6/s7 arc--and even beyond--is analogous to somebody struggling to cope with an acute stage of mental illness and the well-intentioned but ultimately clueless ways their loved ones react to it. it gets downright dangerous in dean’s case, from threatening murder-suicide in 7.02, to using sam’s psychosis to get an apology from him for having the temerity to be furious that dean betrayed him and killed his friend, to his helpless near-obliviousness to how sam was spiralling, especially after 7.14. once sam is no longer actively hallucinating, it’s never brought up again, and no effort is made to examine the things that might trigger a relapse. it’s sad, but makes so much sense--which might as well be my personal tagline to late-season spn.)

late season 7, also, was a weirdly hopeful time for sam--he had come out on the other side of a frightening psychotic break, was working on coping mechanisms for the stuff he was still dealing with (see: the emphasis on physical exercise from earlier in the season, the handscar), and his life looked like it was rapidly heading towards a real Turning Point: after the Leviathan there were no more Big Bad monsters to hunt, their previous lifestyle of travelling across the country in the Impala had been made untenable thanks to Levia!Sam and Levia!Dean, and like he said in 7.04, he felt like he’d ‘paid his dues and come out the other side’. and he still had his brother at the end of it. really, the future was what he was going to make of it, not just follow along the path that he was told to tread. of course, this would get beaten out of him in later seasons and the introduction of the men of letters would destroy any hope of breaking patterns and establishing his life on his own terms, but it does go some way in explaining why he did what he did pre-s8.

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19)   Favourite permanent character death.

you remember the couple that eats each other to death at the beginning of 5.14: my bloody valentine? yeah.

... i kid, i kid! sort of. this question did stump me for a couple of minutes, because spn never saw an impactful and meaningful death that it couldn’t reverse in some manner or another, be it as a spirit, or an alternate-universe self, or just plain old resurrection. i find myself reaching towards earlier seasons: john winchester’s in 2.01 was great and he went out determined he was doing the right thing while also being monumentally shitty to both of his sons, and it was interesting to see the ripple effect of that play out not only over the rest of the season but over the rest of the show. 

alastair’s death in 4.16 also comes to mind--it was just a perfect confluence of great writing, acting, and vfx that enhanced the horror of what was going on instead of distracting from it. remember how still sam was, even as his eyes were burning with a sort of excitement, that quick smirk, the way he said ‘now i can kill’? castiel’s dawning horror? alastair playing his part in moving the apocalypse along--breaking both sam and dean and pushing them farther towards the roles they’re meant to play--even as he died, the triumph in his eyes before he burned from the inside out? perfect. 

but i have to settle on the deaths of azazel’s children in 2.21 (except for the one who got resurrected the very next episode, which is a pity, because his death was the best one of them all). the uneasiness of it, the building tension, the and then there was one of it all? that incredible twist where it was my queen ava wilson finishing them all off with her mind? that excellent fight between sam and jake? this episode slapped, as the kids say, and the significance of these deaths gets bigger and weirder with every passing season. imagine if jake, or ava, or hell, andy had gone on to be lucifer’s vessel? azazel was grooming entire generations of children with demon blood to one day unlock the gates of hell and carry the devil himself when it is time for the apocalypse. it tickles me to think that heaven and hell groomed multiple familes like they groomed the winchesters into an ideal state of dysfunction that mirrored their own. sam and dean won out in the end because their dysfunction won out over everybody else’s.

26)   Pre or post-hell Dean?

maaaan, you know what: i was so fond of pre-hell dean. the signs of what was to come were there from the beginning but it was just so much easier to like him. post hell dean is more interesting, tho, in that the fact that he went to hell for his brother defined how he would look at their relationship for the rest of his life. in 3.16 he was saying a lot of great things: when i die, move on. break the cycle. keep hunting, but don’t let demons exploit us like this ever again. after hell, though, his expectation changed: in s8 he was incredulous, furious, that sam never tried to bring him back to life. while underscoring all the dysfunction that was already present, going to hell and back brought a new kind of resentment to dean’s relationship with sam: dean went to hell, for sam, and sam... hooked up with a demon chick. drank demon blood and experimented with his powers. lied to dean and snuck off on his own revenge plan. installed an ipod jack in the impala! how dare he

i also wonder if dean wasn’t projecting at least some of his horror at what had happened to him in hell and what he was afraid he was capable of onto sam, the ways he othered him and accused him of being a monster. 

it’s just... going to hell was a deeply formative experience for dean, and we have nearly twelve years of post-hell dean to work with, so yeah. he’s more interesting.

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