++

Jesse, they/them | spn sideblog | no minors pls | follows from @pkchanwook | majoring in Sam Winchester studies with a minor in Gothic family horror

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

Tony Williams, Hearths of Darkness : the Family in the American Horror Film / E. Subirats & C. B. Arredondo, Totalitarian Lust: From "Salò" to "Abu Ghraib"

[orcbara]

i swear to god if people don't start understanding that responding to doylist critique of a piece of media with watsonian exonerations is not an actual rebuttal

[orcbara]

somebody saying "hey i don't like that the only gay man in this story is a weird pervert and it portrays gay sexual promiscuity as a moral failing and character flaw" cannot be rebuked by arguing about how the character's backstory or personality traits explain their behaviour. the choices made by a writer are all fundamentally mutable; somebody saying an author's choices should have been different is not going to be persuaded by an argument that takes those choices as immovable fact

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

re: last post and rambling thoughts on torture before i pass out - the key thing about represented torture to me is a matter of bodies being humiliated and punished before an audience. there's a distinct line between who experiences bodily torture and gets violated on screen vs. the threat of or implied past torture. more important to me is the matter of who gets visually stripped of power before us, as the voyeuristic audience. when i speak on humiliation - it can be something as simple yet starkly different as dean getting to keep his shirt on while hooked up in hell vs. meg strapped to a table naked in s6. abbadon threatening dean with possession described as a kind of rape (9.02) vs. crowley making a rape joke before possessing sam a few episodes later. (and yeah, stuff like possession falls under the added filter of genre fantasy, separating us from the reality of the violation that's occuring). really, torture just comes down to one thing: what gets shown to us. what gets lingered upon.

no one's free from physical torture/humiliation on this show. but there's a hierarchy for depicted humiliation etched out on the basis of masculinity (a Hero can never appear too weak) and gender - but most importantly, divided by monstrosity/humanity - especially obvious in how it treats its women (thinking on the good charlie/bad charlie plot from s10. who gets brutalised on screen?). there's also the added dimension of race, and the brutality of deaths inflicted on characters of colour on this show. there's a difference between a regular on-screen death and an excessively cruel one. the difference between getting stabbed vs. being made to drink bleach while your wife watches (3.01) vs. your head garroted on screen (3.07). one carries heavier overtones of humiliation. because to bring it back around again - torture is a theatre of punishment, first and formost, just like a public execution. it functions as a warning, but it also acts as a social sacrificial ritual. a means of collective punishment.

and on this show, the lines get blurred between its metaphorical hierarchies (monstrosity/humanity) and incidental inclusion of real world systemic oppression (along the lines of represented gender/race/disability etc.). monstrosity often gets used metaphorically in speculative fiction to stand in for categories of marginalised people, and it also functions similarly on this show. it all boils back down to a fundamental truth: torture, just like sexual violence, just like abuse, is the natural language of hierarchies. it's the language by which power (re)asserts itself. everything falls under the umbrella of systemic violence.

Black Sails S2E1 because this is one of the clearest illustrations of this principle i've seen yet on tv

(yes i'm throwing Foucault's Discipline and Punish onto a harebrained Supernatural meta i'm writing at 2 am. what about it)

[guiltrose-deactivated20180203]

do me a solid and just reblog this saying what time it is where you are and what you’re thinking about in the tags.

[an-android-in-a-tutu]

Supernatural doesn't have a coherent moral stance about anything but my favourite thing it seems to imply sometimes is that torturing people is fine but being good at it is immoral.

[an-android-in-a-tutu]

I feel like it occurs a few times but specifically thinking about that ep where they are trying very hard to torture one of the Jefferson Starships for info and then Cas steps in and gets answers in like. Five minutes flat and this is played as very scary and morally dubious of him to be very good at torture when like. All of them were participating in the torture in the first place, Cas just did it offscreen and more successfully.

[an-android-in-a-tutu]

Did not expect this to make the rounds and I would like to address some of the excellent tags on this post eventually but my personal take for why this is is not so much that Supernatural doesn’t have a stance on torture but that it doesn’t even really have an idea of what “Torture” is. The show makes no bones about the idea that “Torture” is wrong and scary and, although perhaps sometimes necessary, genuinely morally wrong and tainting. But Sam and Dean using pain and fear and intimidation to extract information from someone? That’s not “Torture”. Torture is big and scary and usually happens offscreen, partially because that’s just good sense horror, but also because when it does happen on screen we get things like... Dean injecting Alistair with Holy Water instead of just, say, splashing it in his face like they do with every other demon. Sure that is certainly an escalation of violence, but it’s not really orders of magnitude worse, is it? And that’s the thing with “Torture” on Supernatural, you can argue that it’s about scale or intent or frequency and to an extent it is, but really it’s just about framing. When the show wants to talk about Torture it lets you know that by framing acts of violence as scary and morally dubious and when it doesn’t it drops the pretense and accepts what are largely the same actions as a natural part of the show’s world.

Supernatural routinely fails when it tries to examine the Morality of Violence because it truly has no issue with the use of violence as a tool of enforcement, other than a vague notion that some targets may be more or less acceptable and some levels of violence can be considered “too far”, but there’s no real answer as to where the line is and that’s not even really a serious question that’s considered. It’s like pornography, you know it when you see it.

[an-android-in-a-tutu]

Oh but also like. The thing I’m trying to express about framing is that like. When Sam and Dean interrogate a demon or w/e I truly do think that most of the time we’re not supposed to understand that as torture, unless the framing (and because supernatural isn’t subtle, the characters) explicitly tells us to. These are just... cop show interrogation scenes. The holy water and the exorcisms and the iron knives are trappings of the genre, but we are supposed to understand them as basically the same as two guys in an interrogation room with a suspect. The heightened violence occurs because Supernatural is a cop show without any concept of jail, so the only threats and concessions hunters can make have to do with direct violence and death. And like Supernatural treats threats of death as way more morally okay than threats of pain because Death is the sentence that is meted out for the crime of being a monster, whereas hurting someone is torture and torture is wrong although we’re not totally sure what torture is.

[autisticandroids]

#fuck where's that post about the violence on supernatural being partially metaphorical#but not knowing where the line is#Some of the direct violence on the show is like#a metaphor for the less direct violence of police confinement and interrogation#which a show like supernatural wouldn't really recognize as violence per se#but still expresses in the form of metaphorical violence so#in that way it's kind of interesting and revealling#like I don't think the minds behind supernatural would like#look at a cop show interrogation and view it as#an unacceptable use of force#but they portray it in their own show as something significantly more violent#while still clearly framing the violence as justifianle#which I find kiind of interesting and revealing#but anyway sometimes the violence on screen is happening and sometimes it isn't#like splashing holy water on someone generally doesn't count#it's not torture until you show someone a knife#and sometimes not even then#but mostly like#if the violence is being enacted through supernatural means on a supernatural creature#via holy water or like Bobby taking a blow torch to that demon's bones#then it's generally acceptable by virtue of not being entirely literal#whereas if you've got an explicitly shown and recognizable injury#meted out with regular human weapons#that's generally at least understood to be a form of torture#whether or not the show considers it justifiable in a particular instance#but even then it's not that clear cut#anyway food for thought

[hillhouseeleanor]

Sam and Lucifer // Inbred

June 25th: Ethel Cain for @holyfreaks mini event

[anassemblageofpassions-deactiva]

So fascinating how sam drinks demon blood and dean narratively has the right to kill him. And dean turns into a literal demon and sam and the narrative never even consider it

[monstersandbrothers]

we are ripe to fall.

too late, m83; spn 2.01; spn 2.22

[seasononesam]

Who doesn’t like Halloween?

Supernatural 1x01 “Pilot” Deleted Scene

[eversw]

He's a Winchester. He's already cursed.

SUPERNATURAL l S4E19 Jump the Shark

[milfsamwinchester]

listen up everyone

[nigeltde-fic]

The Partisan (38638 words) by nigeltde Chapters: 4/4 Fandom: Supernatural Rating: Explicit Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester Characters: Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester, Jody Mills, Castiel, Crowley (Supernatural), Ezekiel | Gadreel Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, First Time, Season 9 Summary: AU after 9x10 (Road Trip). Sam returns to the bunker and Dean before he’s ready; still, he tries to keep it professional. He fails. Tricky but satisfying to finish. Patron song is Eno’s Driving Me Backwards. A pleasure working with yanyann.

[sexygaywizard]

[atomic-chronoscaph]

The X-Files (1996)

[seasononesam]

Let me guess. You’re sitting on her couch like a stiff, trying to think of something to say.

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

there she is....miss america