#weekend thoughts

खामोशियाँ ही बेहतर है...

शब्दों से लोग रूठते बहुत है..!

Experience teaches us…

Silence is often better....

that I got to watch the Gladiator 2 trailer during my showing of Deadpool & Wolverine! It looks amazing on the big screen!

Aside from that, Deadpool & Wolverine exceeded my expectations! Comedic perfection!

I will gladly watch Jackman and Reynolds play Wolverine and Deadpool until they are 90!

Finally had time to draw a piece for Mermay, was inspired by Breyer Horses Merpony Cora. Really love her color palette they designed for her!

🧡💜🩵

In retrospect of the final episodes, it’s easy to find yourself wishing 15.18 hadn't happened. Without the confession, without hope, the finale’s emptiness may have been more bearable or at the very least less pointedly cruel. I’m not saying that this isn’t on some level true, or that anyone isn’t entitled to feel this way, but I want to speak to the roots of this, and why 15.18 was so fundamentally important despite (and because of) what happened to the finale— and why blaming the confession for the pain caused by its attempted erasure misses the fuller picture.

As said before, Supernatural is a narrative of subversion at its core. It's about dismantling controlling structures through the expression and experience of truth. Both essential truths— our souls, and truths we have fought for and built— love for ourselves, our families and friends, for the world; love which feeds from and back into those souls.

15.18 is the epitome of this. The angel who grew a soul, who always had something “wrong” with him and whose wrongness was the avenue by which he was able to experience love, defiance, and fundamental connection, expresses his truth in direct resistance to God's control. In disregard to God’s story.

Castiel's is a truth that draws from the soul, but is built by choice. A truth that exists by nature of its opposition to the structures built on its nonexistence. In a corrupted system whose power is rooted in maintaining imbalance between existence and nonexistence [God, Amara, the Empty]— toxic control over what gets to exist, and the empty spaces left by what does not—  Castiel’s choice is the greatest subversion of all.

He chooses to be. He creates wholeness through emptiness.

Cas chooses to not only exist through love, but through a love that was never meant to be within the system’s relegation to nonbeing, to empty space. This is how the system ensures its own downfall; it creates the space where this love would grow by attempting to remove it.

In a story about this truth, 15.18 is its voice. It is the crux of both the internal narrative and external metanarrative, of Supernatural’s connection to something much bigger than itself— to what happens to stories in the real world.

It affirmed what we knew to be true: this is a story about love. That our ability to choose love despite pain, fear, and guilt is our salvation from a system that uses anger and doubt to control us. Cas loved Dean, and it changed him. Dean loved Cas, and Cas changed the world. But it is also a story about how this love, when forced into spaces of silence, emptiness, and fear, will use those spaces to grow into something fundamentally outside of the system’s control.

It is about how the process of suppressing storytelling creates the mechanisms that silenced stories will use to tell themselves. 

And so 15.18 represents Supernatural’s own elevation from narrative to real world resistance.

By expressing this love, by being, Cas's story and the story as a whole break free from the cultural/political/ financial controls over what got to exist in Supernatural, which had created the very empty spaces where queer love had quietly grown until it could no longer be contained. Castiel’s confession, by tying his love to the entire narrative, imbuing each moment of his impact on the story, and Sam and Dean’s impact on him in return, with love, ensured that no moment of the show could be separated from this act of resistance.

It cemented the entire story as one of queer revolution, of love’s victory over control. 

What happened after does not take away from this importance, but proves it.

Dean’s silent death, Dean never getting to answer Cas— the retaliation of the system’s imbalance between existence and nonexistence, one half of a whole speaking without reply— does not hurt because the confession happened. It hurts because of what was taken away.

Because this episode was so important; because it was so validating to the characters’ journeys, the story’s subversion of both internal and real world controls, and our own journeys toward understanding what we saw of ourselves reflected and legitimized through it all, its erasure in the final episodes is that much more painful, disappointing, and disillusioning. But that's the point— this pain exists in relation to the significance of what we lost.

When what follows is silence, it is easy to wish that we had never spoken at all. But this is not the answer.

The pain was caused by love's erasure. By the system, the structures AND decisions made within them, that punish and control marginalized storytelling.

In all likelihood you do not wish the confession never happened. You wish that being was rewarded with living, not death. You wish our existence was not met with demands for nonexistence. You wish that the confession could have happened without a cost. 

So call for an end to the cost, not the love it was paid for. Fight what imposes silence, not what tries to fill it.

15.18 broke free of the empty space. It cracked the structure. It showed us all what we can be, through love.