— Claudia Jean Cregg, Faith Based Initiative. ° She/her - lesbian ° AO3: AllTheWorldIsBlind ° Asks are always open for questions and headcanons ° Mostly TWW ° Femslash and female characters
I'm a lesbian, I'm in my mid twenties, and I use this blog to talk endlessly about The West Wing and sometimes other stuff.
Fandom wise, I have a soft spot for rarepairs, for over-hated female characters, and for minor characters in general. I write a lot about CJ and Andy, and other favorite characters include Toby, Leo, and Ellie Bartlet. I love talking about the Wyatt-Ziegler family as a whole. (Including Julie Ziegler and Andy's unnamed mom.)(I named her Lucy)
My asks are open, anon included, and I love hearing any questions/thoughts/requests about different characters/ships or the fics I'm working on! Sometimes it takes me a long time to respond cause my ask box never seems to work on mobile, so bear with me, but I love getting them!
Common tags:
tww thoughts: musings on TWW that are longer than a quick post.
tww headcanons: shorter headcanons and quick thoughts.
west wing rewatch: my thoughts as I slowly rewatch the show in order.
tww memes: those TWW + text post memes, mine and others'.
tww edits: TWW video edits, mine and others' .
tww femslash: any type of post/reblog about femslash ships in TWW.
tww fic: TWW fic, mine and others'.
ask games: all ask games I've reblogged; always accepting.
My fics:
A feeling so peculiar
Tumblr | AO3
This is currently 14 chapters and 87K words long, and it's far from finished but it takes me a long time to get chapters out. Please mind the tags: it's a fic about CJ surviving a nearly successful suicide attempt. It focuses on CJ & Leo, CJ & Carol, and later CJ/Andy.
Masterlists of shorter fics:
Gen fic | CJ/Andy fic | Other femslash fic | F/M fic
yeah okay okay so charlie young goes in for a job as a runner and then gets tapped by josh lyman to be personal aide to the president and he denies the job about a dozen times before taking it. and then it turns out the job is great and he's met some really cool and awesome people and he started dating zoey and there's the threat of violence looming in the background, but maybe it doesn't seem quite so real. and then one day he offers the president of the united states something to say during a town hall type meeting. and then the president actually says it and attributes it to charlie by name. charlie goes up to josh and says josh was right you don't ever get used to the feeling, the very feeling that convinced charlie to keep the job back at the beginning of the season. and then he walks outside and white supremists try to kill him but instead of him they get the president and josh, the two people who charlie looks up to most in that workplace if not his life (not including his mother). and then months later he's walking around the white house looking at a little kid. that kid was charlie once. a long time ago, back before charlie lost his dad and his mom and took this job and got shot at by white supremacists. and that kid's dad tells charlie "if they're shooting at you, you're doing something right." and charlie says "yeah" multiple times as he's wrapping his head around the idea. his mom died in the line of duty. she died while getting shot at doing what we assume is the right thing. maybe if charlie didn't take this job, he wouldn't have gotten shot at. but he also wouldn't be part of the bartlet administration. he wouldn't be part of trying to change things for the better. so maybe he is doing something right despite it all.
I just rewatched this episode and it’s kind of the follow up to In Excelsis Deo in terms of the Lowell Lydell storyline (the gay teenager who was stripped naked and murdered for his sexuality) getting its closure. Which, for CJ, makes for an absolutely agonising episode that shows so many different things about her as a character and it really really speaks to me.
There’s three things happening for CJ this episode. There’s the Lydell storyline (in 1x10, we hear he was stripped and then killed by young teens who threw stones at his head, and CJ is the only one on the staff to make an active case for hate crime legislation, she’s clearly upset by it. In this episode, that hatecrime legislation is signed), there’s the sex ed report (basically saying that abstinence only teaching doesn’t work and that it’s better to teach teens how to have safe sex), and we get an update on her relationship with Danny (they’ve been kissing a lot, this puts CJ’s professionalism into question, she stops the kissing, and she almost leaks the Lydell story to him but he won’t let her.)
The only disclaimer to this is that I am as usual writing things about CJ from the basis of the headcanon that CJ is a queer woman, notably closeted at the time this episode takes place. A deeply important little canon note to take into account here, too, is that CJ went to Berkeley for college. That’s basically San Francisco. Given her age, this would have been in the mid 80s; putting her as a young queer woman in an epicentre of the AIDS epidemic. Which is really something to keep in mind in her reaction to being confronted with how little the government she works for cares about the lives and protections of gay people.
In In Excelsis Deo, CJ spent part of the episode being talked down to about her opinion that hatecrime legislation is a good thing. Sam tells her to tone it down, Leo tells her to back off, Danny tells her it’s wrong. She’s the only member of staff portrayed to think that there should be a difference in how we treat a hatecrime in the justice system. In this episode, she’s again the outlier in her reaction to the Lydell parents. The issue here is that Mr. And Mrs. Lydell were scheduled to be there when the hatecrime bill was signed, but Mandy noted that Mr. Lydell was quiet when she spoke to them, so the staff assumes he’s homophobic and will cause trouble at the signing, and that’s not the kind of press they need.
CJ spends part of the episode fighting the idea that he really would be ashamed of his son being gay even after he was murdered (and quite gruesomely so) for it. Which, if you take CJ as a straight woman, is quite naive allyship. Of course plenty of parents are still ashamed of their children’s sexuality even if they’re dead, that’s a pretty basic thing, as sad as it is. But, if you’re looking at CJ as a queer woman in government, it’s less misguided naivety, and more… I want to say intentional wishful thinking?
Having seen some of the worst that happens when the government decides queer lives don’t matter to them, and knowing that while Jed Bartlet is a progressive man for the time, gay rights is just not on his agenda, but then on whose is it, there is a specific choice she has to make about her own work for that government. We don’t know that much about her relationship with Tal, besides knowing she loves him very much, does not get along with his new wives, and she doesn’t visit much.
Plenty of queer people fall into the ‘trap’ of telling themselves that sure, the world might hate them, but surely, surely, their family can be different, their friends can be different, surely they WILL still think of you as respectable, as a friend or family member, as someone worthy of love and protection, or just as human. It’s easy to know that your friends are good people, and hope without looking for confirmation immediately, that that includes that they won’t be homophobic. This is still a thing today, and I think it would be a deeply relevant feeling for CJ at the time, too.
She loves the people she works with. It’s a lot easier to do the work she does, if she doesn’t take time to think about how easy it might be for some of them to switch up on her if they knew she was queer. The disbelief in “but his son was killed for being gay, surely-“ is still naive in a way, but less about ignorance and more about lived experience and a need to believe in something nicer than that, when it’s said in the unspoken context of “surely, you’d give a damn if it was me”.
And the rest of the staff (mainly Mandy and Leo, and then Danny) are kind of speaking to her with the tone of ‘yeah, duh’ when she asks how it’s possible that a man would lose his son in a crime like this and still be ashamed of him. Which is fair in a way because it is quite an obvious thing! But it just is such a painful reaffirmation that CJ is the outlier in this entire discussion, the same way she was in 1x10.
But she’s right. Mr. Lydell is not homophobic, in fact he is much more upfront about gay rights than anyone in this administration has been out loud. His monologue to her is simply beautiful. I won’t type the whole thing out, but it includes his question how it’s possible that this President would take “such a lame-ass position on gay rights”, “what quality of being a parent does he think my son lacked” and, which I think hits the hardest for CJ in particular: “I’m not ashamed my son was gay. My government is.”
Which brings us to the second half of this story. Because when CJ and Mandy leave the room, CJ is on the verge of tears. (I’m not exaggerating, watch that scene back; her eyes are shining over when she talks to Mandy, she’s rubbing her face, she sounds Agitated. She’s simply not okay.) Despite knowing that her task here was to make sure the Lydells will be supportive of the President and be good press for the hatecrime bill, she wants them there anyway.
It’s painful, knowing that for the administration, good press for this means “not homophobic, but also not too loudly pro gay”. It’s painful being reminded so forcefully that this government is, in fact, so weak on gay rights, and so ashamed to talk about gay rights. CJ is so clearly upset about it, and Mandy has to loudly tell her to get it together already. She’s giving so much of herself to this President, to this administration, to this government. And what is she doing it for? Would they have her back the same way she always has to have theirs if the problem became her own sexuality, and is that a question she is in any way ready to ask herself?
Trying to keep the last items short but: it’s fascinating to me then that this is the very first and one of the only ever stories we see her purposefully try to leak to Danny. That’s all the more interesting because in this same episode, Toby ‘jokes’ (he is joking in that moment, but given her reaction, I doubt it’s the first time she’s had this comment, and remember it was a similar problem during the India and Pakistan situation) that she better not be leaking stories to Danny. She and Danny have been kissing randomly for a while, no further dating, but they’re close and people know that, it puts her at risk. She denies it, she breaks off the kissing in response to it, and then the Lydell story and how deeply that touches her is what makes her almost make all of that come true and leak a story to Danny anyway.
That self destructive willingness to risk her damn reputation, her job here, for this specific story? For the chance to let this specific man speak the truth about this administration’s position on gay rights? After all she’s done to get here? It’s devastating, actually.
And then this is the same episode of the sex ed report, where again the main thing that report proves is that teaching abstinence only doesn’t do shit, and it’s better to teach teenagers about safe sex. Jed, Josh, and Sam, have agreed to wait with the release of that report until after the midterms to avoid making it an issue during the midterm elections, and CJ is deeply upset about that, too. No doubt more so because she was already breaking bit by bit this episode, but it is the first time in the show we see her and Jed really just disagree and get genuinely mad about it.
She’s agitated, he is tired of her, and I want to write more about that later because there’s a great scene to compare it to later this season, but he tells her to let it go and to back off and she eventually caves and says that she understands. There is a genuinely kind of warning tone in the way he tells “I was hoping you would.” And it just ends on such a Sad and kind of tense note.
This was in no way intended, obviously, but watching it back knowing they’ll make it canon she went to Berkeley in the 80s, especially through the lens of CJ being a queer woman herself. The combination of her being hit with the realisation that even this administration she’s giving her life to doesn’t care that much about gay rights, and the understanding that of all things that makes her more upset this episode is the refusal to publicly talk about safe sex practices? It’s not nothing. It’s not the point of either of these storylines, but it’s there anyway, and it adds another one of those layers to how deeply complicated it is for her to do this work, represent this President and this White House, wondering if they’d have given a fuck if she’d died as a result of being queer outside of the political (in)convenience it might have posed.
(And they would, sure they would, because she’s CJ and these people love CJ, but would they put their necks on the line for her reputation if she was outed as gay the way Leo was outed as an addict? Would they be pushing around legislation to protect her job if that’s what put it in trouble? Would they even consider any of that if she wasn’t CJ and wasn’t as genuinely beloved as she has become to these people? Are those really questions anyone wants to ask themselves?)
This will sound biased because I am a girl with freckles everywhere, I think it’s very important to appreciate girls with freckles everywhere. She’s got cute little dots all over her body how could you not love that
And the moon hangs above like a Valium pill/ And I say I'll be fine, but I don't think that I will
But today I got work, and I like it that way/ It's a case of a still life gone cinema verité/ In love but not at peace
In Love but Not at Peace by Dar Williams very much embodies Andy before the divorce. Specifically the feeling of having finally just found herself in the clutch of a love that can stick, and should stick, and it's just not peaceful.
The very much lonely in love but restless or in love but incomplete feeling especially during the campaign for both of them.
And especially throw Andy after finding out Toby cheated in the wringer. Just wanting that perfection, and the idea that peace comes with love, to come crashing down so quickly.
We'll argue it out and we'll call ourselves lovers/ And I'll stay in my body and you'll stay in your own/ Cause we know that we're born and we're dying alone
no one ask where i get my fix of my bullshit re: the accoutrements on this still cause i needed it on my dash so bad i just screenshotted it straight off... a website.
She first meets Andrea Wyatt in class — eighteen years old, studying international law, with big, loud aspirations for what she’s gonna do to change the world. She has bright red hair, a shade of lipstick she always lets CJ share, and all the confidence that CJ has been trying very hard to pretend she has too since arriving at Berkeley.
She likes her the moment she hears her name. She likes the way Claudia Jean sounds when it’s said by Andy over notes for one of their few shared classes.
guys im feeling a type of way can anyone and everyone drop any trans tww headcannons they've got. either "they've been stealth the whole time" or "they realize something foundational to themselves at the ripe ole age of Adult" or anything in between?
There are so many possibilities but I always just love CJ and literally any form of making her not cis actually.
Most generally CJ as a genderqueer or non-binary person works just so well. The experience of living a life where they are heralded as this influential woman in politics. The first woman to be the White House Press Secretary and then again to be the White House Chief of Staff. The way their entire career is framed through the lens of Being A Woman in the praise and the boatloads of criticisms and misogyny faced. And then having to come to terms with not being a woman at all? Terrifying.
Recently I started really thinking about CJ as a stealth trans woman though and that ALSO works so incredibly well. (And? Really both of these, or any queer CJ headcanons, just fit into canon themes and quotes about her character very well.) CJ who is very painfully and completely aware of how bad it could be if the press ever found out; who's been stealth since college and only a very small group of people know. (Toby because he's Toby. Carol because she needs her assistant to know some important things that could impact the office if revealed and also Carol is better at keeping track of the time for CJ to take her estrogen than CJ is. Andy because they dated in college. Leo and Ron Butterfield because the secret service had to check Every reason someone might stalk her.)
Honorary mentions too to trans man Toby Ziegler (and the mere possibility of the family planning between him, and CJ and Andy in Any variation of genders between them actually) and trans girl Huck
i love making friends in fandom, i love playing with our toys together, i love coming up with increasingly niche aus, i love lifting strangers up, i love motivating people to create, i love watching someone get excited over an idea and immediately running with it, i love yelling in tags together, i love seeing someone gain confidence in their writing/art because people were kind to them <33
Privateers would be a really great episode to play ‘Add Andy to an Episode’ with because in between the Marion Cotesworth-Hayes scene and Amy’s hazing and Donna having to babysit someone’s boyfriend at a White House event? The issue that Amy is actually working on for Abbey is the global gag rule. It’s a foreign policy bill that’s received an amendment that foreign aid can only be granted to hospitals and clinics that don’t offer or even talk about abortion as an option for pregnant people.
This is set in the later part of season four, which means Andy is not only an established Congresswoman who we already know is very passionate about her work for the International Relations committee and who surely has had many meetings about the bill this was an amendment to. She’s also in her third trimester with twins she conceived Very Controversially. And I really do think there would have been a great opportunity to bring her in for conversation around the this amendment and how awful it is, Abbey’s frustration on not being able to do much about it, Amy’s rough first day trying to get half the things she wants done.
It gives Andy an opportunity to be part of this policy conversation we know she’d very reasonably have something to do with, unrelated from Toby. Because as much as her and Toby are so fun to watch in meetings, it’s a little sad that Andy’s only on screen opportunity to talk business is usually with her ex husband. It further establishes the connections in Congress we already know Amy has (and how we later find out she has a lot of experience coaching Congresswomen through debates? Show some of those relationships in the House!)
But also there really is just that powerful visual of a member of Congress who is already literally being sued for CHOOSING to be and stay pregnant in the position she’s in, unmarried and working, this very visibly pregnant woman being very passionately pro-abortion and talking about that with the White House. The juxtaposition between women overseas being made to stay pregnant because their hospitals and clinics won’t receive funding if abortion is an option, and this Congresswoman who wanted so badly to BE pregnant being crucified by those same conservative lawmakers for making that decision would be so easy without even directly mentioning it, just by virtue of having Andy there in the middle of this pregnancy and the controversy around it, making her voice heard in this debate. And that could have been so good.
You put a Congresswoman who is so willing to pick the hard fights and have a good time doing it, in a room with the senior staff too much to make her listen to their excuses as to why it's all so hard and impossible and stressful and not the right time to take a stance on any damn issue. They can't get away with it anymore and it becomes more and more obvious how little they accomplish in the specific progressive ways they always said they wanted to.
Get Andy's attitude in the room for discussions on feminism and abortion, on gay rights, on foreign policy, on health care. And "the country isn't ready for it" starts sounding like even more of a lame excuse than it already does.
I can't even think about it too deeply but oh knowing that Dulé Hill was given the acting note of "remember that Charlie has a lot more experience with death than most of these people" for the moment he tells Leo that Dolores is dead really just adds even more to that scene. The way Charlie is just standing there, phone in hand, shell-shocked but not crying or even sounding that upset. It's so well done. It fits so well. It just rips your heart out.
The detail in the dialogue of the whole staff repeating the statement that they need a meeting on whether or not the President will run again, but CJ is the only one adding a caveat of apology in there and specifically saying "I hate to sound shrill" before saying it? Is so well done.
Leo referencing to the lawsuits and every loose hell they're about to face as "extracurricular nonsense" is funny and terrifying. And him insisting that they're not gonna back down off of any of their goals and policies when really they will in the long run is just a little sad
"When did I stop being Dr. Bartlet? When in the campaign did I decide women were going to like me more if I called myself Mrs? When did I decide women were that stupid?" I need essays written about this decision and Abbey's feelings about it and to what degree it was her idea and to what degree it wasn't but she didn't think it worth the fight.
But really in general the entire scene with Abbey and Sam and then Babish is so good and you can really see how defensive she is about this and it's such a layered thing. She fucked up. She did something illegal, she risked her medical license, to get her husband elected. And now because he considered another term, it's all coming out and the consequences are back to bite her. And it's sinking in and it's getting to her and these guys have a great way of being harsh as they should and still with this kind of total lack of understanding where she's coming from.
And then her eventual "I want to be next to my husband when he does this" cuts right through all of that to really the emotional core of what Jed is about to do and say, and her entire motivation for ALL of it in the first place.
