Supernatural is about everything and nothing all at once.
EDIT:
My art tag is: #jasdraws
Fanfic writing tag: #jaswrites
Episode opinions: #spn rewatch diaries
Fanfic blogging tag: #spnffblogging
Personal stuffs also here and there
POLITICALLY: Due to some real life events, lemme clarify: DNI if you have any sympathies for any kinda fascism (Zionism, Hindutva, Nazi shit, etc etc.). Miss me with that shit. I'm on the side of anti colonialism everywhere. Also, I love every kind of queer person, idc abt the labels like at all. Peace and love. But if you bring racism to my door, I will block immediately. Mwah💕
I do art! If you have requests feel free to send them my way!!!!
EDIT #2:
Alright, my adhd is getting out of control and I'm cluttering more than usual. So, here's the side blog about danmei/mxtx/yaoi. jasmine-in-the-danmei-zone.
FREE PALESTINE: GFM:
Help Maram with any amount you can give here: https://gofund.me/358683839
May 8, 2025 - Wise words from an antifascist Indian kid while a piece of shit Hindutva interviewer tries to intimidate him into supporting the war on Pakistan. [video]
If you think about it, Dean is often performing for the male (audience) gaze.
I think I should pass this ask to a Dean understander somehow; maybe @soft-pine or @jasmineintheforest.
Yeah, I think he is offered up for a lot of audiences, in fact. I also think many people get stuck in using shorthand for him, both visual, cultural, and stereotypical.
Also Lisa: bring me my papers and my cigars and my breakfast (but coffee I can handle)
also also lisa: i like bikes and motorcycles and guys on motorcycyles
...man i really want to go get on a bike on the road and be freeee... like a man on a motorcycle that's actually who i wanna be
this youth mini dirt bike will have to do for now
COME ON BEN BIKES ARE COOL BE IN THIS RACE
(note that EYE actually want to be in this race i'm so unlucky; please live out my freedoms vicariously and embody how cool they are and all my fave bands and all the men i chased this is in NO way dysfunctional)
lighthearted ask: on a scale of one to ten how put out do you think sam feels about not having the same music taste as the rest of the fam. dean cas and jack can all find common ground when it comes to pop, rock, blues, etc but the second sam tries to touch the aux cord or put in a song request he gets shot down every time because no one wants to listen to his terrible hair metal (iirc that’s what he was into 😭)
Sam is 9 out of 10 put out, until he discovers he can get everyone drunk enough to like his hair metal mixtape.
But if everyone else's tipsy, he has to drive, and he HATES driving so. it's not worth that.
conservatives are like "if we let immigrants have rights then whos gonna do the free labor" liberals are like "if we don't let immigrants have rights then whos gonna do the free labor"
As a native American, it's poetically ironic to me. All this nonsense of immigrants, when genocide was committed here to let the immigrants settle and pursue their gold and spices. Only to end up saying "it's too spicy" generations later, and no gold in their pockets, and complain of immigrants.
see the thing about iwtv is that i will always believe louis no matter what unless claudia says something different. then i believe claudia. lestat could tell me that it's raining during a thunderstorm and id need a peer review.
But our ordeal isn't over yet. After the surgery, the doctors urgently recommended medication, painkillers, and post-operative care to alleviate his pain and help him recover as best as possible. Unfortunately, the cost of this medication and treatment is around 500 euros, an amount beyond our current means.
Please, this is a young child who cannot bear the pain and cannot tolerate any delay. Every hour that passes without providing his medication means more suffering and pain for him. He is currently under the influence of painkillers from the operation, but in a few hours their effect will wear off, and he will begin to experience severe pain if we cannot provide the necessary treatment and painkillers as soon as possible.
I swear to you, seeing a child in pain before our eyes and being powerless to help is an indescribable feeling. Please don't let my nephew suffer any longer. Help us secure treatment before it's too late. Donate, donate! 🥺💔
Guys, it's been two hours and no one has donated yet. We still need 500 euros to buy medicine and painkillers for my nephew. Please don't let us down. Please donate to ease my nephew's pain. He's only 4 years old. Please, I don't want him to suffer anymore, and he needs his medication quickly. Please don't let us down. Donate, donate! 😭💔
Guys, only one person has donated five euros, and we still need 495 euros to buy painkillers and medication for my nephew. Please donate! Save my nephew before the painkillers he received after his surgery wear off and he suffers. Please donate! Don't let a four-year-old boy, who survived the genocide in Gaza and lost his father, suffer. Ease his pain! Please donate! 💔😭
If anything bad happens to my nephew, please remember that I begged you to donate even a small amount or to share my post. I will not forgive anyone who sees this post and doesn't support me with a single word or a small donation, and ignores me.
Imagine you had surgery. Could you bear the pain afterward? I don't think you could. So how could a 4-year-old child? Please donate. We still need 490 euros to buy painkillers and medication for my nephew. Please donate. Don't let my nephew suffer for even a second. Please donate, please donate! 😭💔
Guys, we still need 400 euros for painkillers and treatment for my nephew. He's still crying so much from the pain. Please help my little nephew! He's crying so much because of the operation. Please don't let him suffer any longer. He's in so much pain right now. He needs treatment. Please donate! 😭💔
Oh my God, oh my God, my nephew just fainted from the pain and we still need 380 euros. Please, please do something, do something, please save my nephew, please donate, donate 😭😭😭💔
Please continue donating if you can!!! Or share with others so they can donate, we can get to these amount very fast if you donate even a small amount !!
Guys, we still need 360 euros to get painkillers and medication for my sick nephew. It's been two days and he hasn't received his treatment. Please, please help me get his medicine before his pain gets worse. Please, please donate, donate! Don't let us down. Prove to me that the world is with me and that I'm not alone. Please, I don't want anything bad to happen to him. Donate, donate! Don't ignore us! 💔😭😭
Has what my nephew is going through become normal for you? Have your hearts turned to stone? I swear I will never forgive anyone who sees this post and ignores me. We still need 360 euros to buy medicine for my nephew. Please donate. 😭💔
He was admitted to the hospital today, and his condition is critical. We are terrified and running out of time. We cannot afford the treatment and medication he needs every day. Without it, his life is in real danger. I’m begging you please, don’t ignore this. Help us in any way you can.
Even a small contribution or sharing this post could save his life.
Please… we truly need you right now. 🙏💔 :::
📌 Fundraiser vetted (#167 by el-shab-hussein & nabulsi), But we created a new GoFundMe page because GoFundMe suspended the beneficiary’s account on the platform, which put us in a very difficult situation.
Shal's post also got me thinking about how John is a lower class man who bought into the American imperialism structure and actually went to Vietnam as an aggressor. But he can come back home fucked up from it and get recruited into another kind of war and have that specific kind of invasion and violence happen to himself and his family.
You can't escape repeating that violence in other contexts. As a victim and abuser both. The ultimate john position. (Not much of a unique one imo).
To Me it's demonstrative of how buying into ugly system will never save you, it will only leave you more available and vulnerable to further exploitation. You can't become the oppressor to escape oppression. Opposing it fully is the only slightly reliable way to build your own gut instincts about it.
You know, I could be wrong but....I think the fandom doesn't have the time to talk about how John's violating experience of being possessed by Azazel and almost being made to kill his sons and so on...well, it does affect his decision uk. In the very next episode or whatever, he's selling his soul coz Dean is dying and Sam's clearly doomed etc etc.
(I'm a certified John hater ofc but there's smth about how Azazel uses like a gross incestual abuse thing as a weapon uk. Idk how to say it but it's there and it's super horrifying. Visually, it can feel like it's saying something about John, but in reality, it's saying a lot about Azazel and how dark the demons can get.
//I do think Dean's reactions says a lot about Dean and John, ofc. But that's different).
And in general, there's genuine horror elements to John's experience, esp pre-Mary's death. His reproductive autonomy, his consent even in terms of what Mary hid from him, Mary's crunchy choice to have two kids with him without telling anything etc etc. Idk I think if we can be sexy and reasonable, it's an interesting layer fr.
Ukwim?
(as usual, no pressure to answer this hehe <33)
Oh, yes very good. John has a lot of reproductive horror tied up with his character before Azazel ever rapes him gets his hands on him.
Putting a lot of this under the cut, because it probably deserves a trigger warning for once. I MIGHT edit this later, but internet is shitty and I JUST had my mojo and I'm feeling reckless.
Azazel is the literal embodiment of WAR, right down to the biblical meaning of it. Azazel taught humans to make weapons and war. That was one of his explicitly named crimes.
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SCAPEGOATS AND INCEST
Yes, there's the Gothic scapegoat reading of Azazel centered on incest anxiety, and honestly, if that's someone's thing you like, fine. But for me, it's become boring and predictable. Using incest as a shortcut to signal profundity through taboo isn't difficult or uncommon; it's one of the oldest tricks in the book.
Likewise, I'm not especially persuaded by the "secret self" reading of Azazel's possession of John... the idea that what was done to him merely reveals what he "really" was all along. That strikes me as a very US of A imperialistic logic: you are the thing that was done to you. The violation disappears, and the victim becomes identified with the invading force.
i.e.: "You ARE the thing that was done TO you."
It's an old habit. Just look at 1930s poverty tourism in the eastern and southern US of A (rich people and eugenics galore): pamphlets full of fascination, disgust, exoticization, and fantasies about degeneration, purity, and bloodlines. But OFC, the white self-made man was a capitalist fantasy, too! But communities that didn't fit that ideal like big families, dense social ties, mutual dependence... became easy targets for suspicion. Not to mention they kinda wanted to exploit these very people... espe in coal-mining regions.
the most base part tho is: "Look at those strange people out in the woods. Surely something dark is happening over there." It was less documentation than voyeurism, a chance to gawk at and, frankly, jack off to an imagined degeneracy from a safe distance. That's also how the cousin-fucking narrative merged with the older aristocratic Gothic tradition: different targets, same fantasies about bloodlines, corruption, and decline.
Which is partly why I find Samuel Campbell so interesting. He sits at a round table, distrusts hunters and recruitment models barging into his home, wants the civilian in the room to know the truth, occupies a distinctly maternal role in his family structure, and doesn't ACTUALLY force Mary into hunting.
Azazel, meanwhile, seems to thrive on casting suspicion on exactly those kinds of bonds. He wants to dominate exactly these kinds of people because they are HUGE BARRIERS to recruiting people for war, for work, for exploitation.
That's why it's fascinating to read Samuel C's season 6 self as reactive to that wound. Was Azazel his "super secret shadow self," or did Azazel simply rape him and use his body to do all the things that oppose Samuel C's values (and coincidentally, things that titillate Azazel: power, spectacular domination of the other).
//
With John, it's a little different... and more personal. John doesn't remember being murdered OFC. But maybe there's a fear he can't name, a sense that something is wrong just beyond the edge of his awareness.
Then Azazel murders his wife, completely blindsiding him, and in a sense narratively frames John for the death. Not literally OFC but the story is the culprit (as tje Bloody Mary episode meta-textually plays with every whodunit in the playbook BUT THEN shines the mirror on the audience in the end).
The question isn't whether Azazel is John's scapegoat or dark double. It's whether John becomes Azazel's scapegoat. The story's scapegoat. Same for Chuck re: Lucifer. Sure he did bad things, but ALL of them?
That's what makes the "secret self" reading feel backwards to me. especially with USA army... tendencies.
Azazel invades John's life, destroys it, exploits his fears, and then leaves John carrying the consequences. John gets burdened with the paranoia, the grief, the violence, the instability, and eventually the suspicion that perhaps he was the problem all along. That risks reproducing Azazel's own logic: the invader disappears, and the invaded person becomes responsible for the damage.
In that sense, Azazel doesn't just possess people. He recruits them, uses them, and leaves them holding the bag.
//
There's an irony here, too with Azazel's whole army-talk and recruitment dialogue.
John is a traumatized soldier who watched his wife die in a way that made very little sense, and a lot of that trauma ends up doing Azazel's work for him. John's fear is one of Azazel's greatest tools. Hypervigilance, isolation, suspicion, survival training... all of it keeps John SUPER paranoid and on the run, which I'd argue is part of the strategy. If John's distance from his children produces parentification, trauma, grief, militarization, and isolation are more than enough, which might be the truer picture of the Plight of Western American nuclear families. If you squint, even the desolate isolation of suburbia. A family cut off from wider support networks will often place adult burdens on children, or too much specialized labor on wife / husband dynamics, for that matter!
That's tragic, but it's not the same thing Azazel is doing. In that sense, he's not so different from the poverty tourists of the 30s. He projects fantasies onto people whose real struggles are much simpler and more material. All the talk of corruption and hidden darkness distracts from what he actually wants: to break people apart, isolate them, and get their labor.
Which brings us to our next topic: imperialism, and notorious war crimes.
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WAR CRIMES
And not to bring an incredibly dark reading to my blog, but I keep thinking about a postwar confessional hotline in Japan where former soldiers were invited to speak about their experiences. There was guilt, of course, but what struck me was that some callers weren't confessing so much as reminiscing. It shocked the hotliners just how often and how much some of them missed it. They missed the power, the violence, the bonding with other men, and the sense of absolute control. The atrocities weren't merely things they had done; for some of them, they were memories they CHERISHED. "A man's paradise," one said of the raping.
I do circle back to the particularly devastating tactic across conflicts which is sexual violence aimed at families, not merely to harm individuals, but to demonstrate absolute power over an entire social unit. It was a favored war crime to force family members to rape each other, and delight if there was any whiff of arousal. (Funny! To! Them!)
One especially devastating technique was to rape the dad with weapons or otherwise, because it SHOWED the family how unsafe they were. Their protector was ineffective; Not Even Big Strong Daddy can't save you. That's true psychological terror. And sadistic soldiers thought it was funny. It was a bonding experience between them more than anything sexual.
With all this in mind, I think it maps onto Azazel's sadism quite well. The fingerprint kill veers from efficient (neck breaking) to torture (gut wound) to spectacle (bit booms and fire). He is WAR itself, and it's simply more interesting to me personally because of how shaped we are my this imperialism and exploitation. Azazel is a specific heart of imperialism, war, etc, and he's the scapegoat for the audience because he's generating the story and doing the violence to its characters who are getting "drafted" into the narrative by US, the voyeurs.
If you like possession as a secret self reading, I suppose that's fine. I like it too sometimes, I just get... less mileage out of it, that's all. Given how the USA works and how it exploits, I get more out of classism and recruitment and possession as invasion. There's just something about demonstrating that the victim's body, mind, and relationships are no longer entirely their own. And considering how we actually FIND John after Azazel possesses him, one can also read Azazel's taking of him as The Rape of John Winchester:
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What interests me is how often stories try to turn that violation into revelation. Chuck does something similar when he tells Lucifer that the Mark merely revealed what was already there. "You always cast a jaundiced eye."
The logic is familiar: the thing done to you becomes your true nature. The violation becomes evidence.
I.E. -> "You ARE the thing that was DONE to you. You secretly enjoyed it, especially if there's arousal, and it shows the shadow side of you," reads as more a reading from the oppressor/ imperialist side for me.
Pinned to the wall like a bug, not unlike the narratively echoing Campbell gut-kill that Ms. Monica Holt almost succumbed to
but instead of
EDIT: I probably should proof this before I put it in this wild, buuuuuuut. I'm not.
EDIT 2: I realized I didn't talk nearly enough about MARY. I make jokes about Mary having John barefoot and pregnant, but there are definitely overtones of that with how her specific trauma manifests. She's afraid of hunting, and she's afraid of the danger of hunting, and she's afraid of WHAT SHE LIKES ABOUT HUNTING.
I think it's interesting too that her instinct was TO TELL HIM THE TRUTH WHEN HE PROPOSED. "John, wait. There's things you don't know about me..." -> I think this speaks to her being on the cusp of revealing the truth. But then! Then! She loses her parents, she becomes, "little orphan Annie," and her supports are obliterated, making her RIPE for Azazel's recruitment, and he... makes recruitment sound not so bad, something she can handle. Which drags her truth understand and put a stake in the dirt of her lies. AND because she's so afraid to tell, she's robbing John of proper consent when it comes to starting a family with her!
