IF YOU ARE LUCKY, YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE GOOD

[sam-loml]

@whumpgifathon Day 19 | Gifmaking!

Featuring Sam Winchester and a recreation of this gifset. Not one specific skill I was practicing, just trying to show how different my gifmaking is :)) Though I did do a bit of a different layout ☝️

[memories-of-ancients]

The Gold Pectoral of Tovsta Mohyla, uncovered in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukraine.

Greco-Scythian, 4th century BC

[cloudmancy]

unreasonably charmed by Pendant in the shape of a ram's head, Eastern Mediterranean, 5th–4th century BC, made of glass

[cloudmancy]

I never thought about this... you're right, that's awesome

[yeehawpim]

a comic about fix-it fanfics

[fashionablyfyrdraaca]

PSA: BAD LITTERBOX

i don't usually make posts like this, but this is a truly upsetting topic to me as a lifelong cat owner, so i feel i have a duty to share my knowledge with others.

there is a type of automatic litterbox for cats being sold that is EXTREMELY dangerous and has killed numerous cats through blunt force trauma, suffocation, etc. this litterbox is being sold under different brand names and logos, so i will include the picture of the model and two links to informational videos with more evidence and eloquence than i am able to provide.

please consider not having this type of litterbox in your home for your furry friends. me and my 16 year old tortie, puddy, want the best for all your kitty friends

image of litterbox below:

here are my two video links that provide proof and testimonials of this harmful product:

This Scam is Killing Cats by penguinz0

The DEADLY self-cleaning litter boxes that have flooded the market by One Man Five Cats

[ktempestbradford]

Adding a content warning for that second video (I did not watch the first): the creator uses a plush cat toy to demonstrate what happens to a cat if they get caught in this thing. Even though it's a toy, I found it very upsetting. Not so much that I don't think you should watch - this is VERY important to understand - just be prepared for it. It's not okay. This thing is dangerous.

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

realised. dean is the perfect viewer avatar for a horror show. he gets to be both the action hero and the quippy, self-aware wiseguy who knows he's in a horror show. he provides a safe point; a comfortable power fantasy for you to experience a story through. he's ash in the evil dead. he's a gunslinging tough guy, and you get to see those moments where heroism sits on his shoulders like an ill-fitting leather jacket. and even when he gets his turn at being captured and victimised by the narrative, it's filtered through this mythic lens first. he's the tormented hero; tortured by villains, tortured by the constraints of his role. yeah he gets bruised, beaten bloody to a pulp, torn to shreds and killed, but his perception of reality never gets thrown into serious doubt (unless it's played out as a gag). the narrative valorises his sense of right and wrong, because that's what heroic stories do. their heroes provide moral center, regardless of how we might judge them. the lines dividing hero, anti-hero, and villian are paper thin, and dean isn't truly ever allowed to be ambiguous. and the hero always wins in the end, even when he dies.

meanwhile sam is the abject object of the horror show, a character who gets trussed up, chased, tied up, ripped apart, cut into, possessed, exploited, manipulated and psychologically hounded. he's carrie covered in pig's blood. he's the marginal person people are cheering on either to die - or to live past it all. he gets his turn at playing both movie monster and victim, always occupying the liminal space between both. abject horror lives within him. he's violated with demon blood, he consumes demon blood. he hates halloween because he vomited his guts up in front of a room of normal children. he will never get to be normal, he's designated the freak on multiple levels, but most significantly, by the way his narrative frames him. he's living inside a world that is at its core, fundamentally frightening and horrifying - full control over himself and his surroundings is always slipping away, just beyond his reach. his grip on reality and the world around him gets thrown into question by the story consistently. what's right? what's wrong? what's real? what isnt? the narrative punishes him - because that's what happens to you when you're living in a horror. he can never run away from his nightmare reality, it catches up to him like a curse nipping at his heels. the only way out for him is through the punishing fire. in order to survive, he's required to be pushed to the absolute brink of instability; emotionally, physically and mentally. he emerges out the other end, barely holding it together but somehow alive - like the bloody final girl, changed irrevocably by what she's experienced.

[calder]

vegans make peace with honey

no shut up do it

[calder]

vegans will pretend not to hear when natives tell them their agave products are unsustainable because they have whimsical feelings about, and i cannot stress this enough, the freedom of hive insects

Honey is literally murder but go off

[kasaron]

Prove it.

They literally puke their guts up to make your honey

[kasaron]

I have not seen any evidence tonsugges they are harmed or die in the process of production. They do regurgitate the nectar as part of the process to concentrate it into honey (an interesting process) but they do not suffer any injury during this process. If they did, the cost to produce honey, which is done naturally as a measure to survive over winter and through times of lower availability, would outweigh the benefits. If you kill several bees to produce enough honey to make one more bee, It makes no sense. Any animal that did that would die, even with human intervention.

Do you have any sources which suggest otherwise? I’d be interested to hear of this (relatively publicly available) information was false or misunderstood.

Bee farmers use whats called a honey maker. It’s a crude devices. It similar to a meat grinder. They force the bees in and grind them up. What comes out is a paste. That paste is later filtered into what we know as honey

[hematite2]

This is the funniest thing I’ve ever read

[leonardo-nierman]

@zoologicallyobsessed please show us pics of your bee grinder

[gemstone-gynoid]

they might be falsely thinking about a honey extractor machine. but all these do is you place the beehive frames inside and a motor rotates it at a speed that removes the honey, which is then tapped through a tap at the bottom. 

[darkenedyeastextract]

…do they think they put bees in that and spin them around until they vomit…?

[demonius-darkblade]

bee carnival

[yeah-yeah-beebiss-1]

bad and naughty bees get put into the b e e c e n t r i f u g e to extract their honey

[bastlynn]

Vegans coming after beekeepers is one of my major teeth grinding annoyances. For many reasons, because there’s so many lies. And to go one step further because it’s such a waste. You see, the strongest vegan argument is that they don’t want to exploit animals or take from them without their consent.

… but… Bees consent. NO. I’M NOT KIDDING.

How? Bee hives aren’t kept on leashes. They’re outside, the bees can travel miles every day. They follow their queen. Who is also outside, not on a leash, and can travel miles every day. If she doesn’t like the hive for any reason - for example: it got too hot, too cold, too messy, too filled with sugary stuff and they need more space… then the queen leaves. And with her the hive.

The queen stays in the hive because the hive is the best place to live. Period. Done. End of. If the hive is staying with the beekeeper it’s because the keeper is doing their job correctly and keeping them happy because the bees can, and do, leave bad beekeepers.

Of all the animals we have domesticated as livestock, bees are the ones you can most easily argue are consenting participants in their keeping.

[alicentsgf]

[mystical-mew]

Here it is. The bee post is back

[korrasera]

I feel compelled to explain the misconception part for anyone who doesn’t know anything about beekeeping and finds any of this confusing. This might be a little redundant, but I’m scratching an itch.

Harvesting honey does not murder bees.

The device pictured above does not mash up bees or their hives.

There’s no ethical concern when it comes to eating honey, it’s totally ethical as food is concerned.

Bees manufacture honey using pollen. They store it in the cells of their hive, where it’s used as food for the colony, particularly the larvae growing into the next generation of bees.

When you harvest honey, you remove parts of the hive that are being used to store the honey, without taking any bees along for the ride. Those parts of the hive are then put into a device, like the centrifugal extractor shown above by gemstone-gynoid, where the parts are spun really fast to pull extract the honey. The honey gets collected on the walls of the extractor, drips down, and can then be filtered and bottled for human use.

So.

It turns out that bees love making honey and can make more of it than they’d ever need. It also turns out that beekeepers taking care of hives and harvesting their honey keeps bees healthy and thriving, more so than they’d normally accomplish on their own. And we really need bees healthy and thriving because they help us grow an astonishing amount of food by pollinating plants.

Like, there’s no need to have a conversation about this, anyone who claims that harvesting honey requires that you kill bees is lying. Either they don’t know anything about beekeeping and are just repeating a lie someone else told them, or they know that they’re lying and they’re just straight up trying to deceive people. Neither is a good look.

[ariaste]

And just one more point of clarification – “cells of the hive” doesn’t mean the anatomical cells of the bees’ bodies, it means the little holes in the honeycomb of the physical structure of the hives, which they build using beeswax. Think of it like a bee pantry. They put their honey in the pantry, but since they’re working hard every day, they often make wayyyyyy too much of it. So the beekeepers come along and take the extra honeycomb that the bees don’t need and aren’t going to use, but they leave plenty behind for the bees to eat. Additionally, if anything happens to the hive’s honey supplies in the winter, the beekeepers can supplement their food by either giving some honey back or giving them sugar water. Also, fun fact! When beekeepers extract the honey from the comb, they often leave all their equipment out afterwards so the bees can come along and clean up, re-collecting any traces of honey or wax left behind, which get put back into the hive and recycled. Any leftover waste (dirt and grime from old comb, for example, or bees that died natural deaths of old age) makes great fertilizer for the plants that produce the pollen the bees make next year. No waste!

Vegans, the bees are not going to stop making honey if they’re left to their own devices in the wild. The bees are just doing a thing that bees do. Eating honey is not exploitation, it’s sustainability. That said, if you’re still worried about the ethics, I’d recommend looking up some local beekeepers/honey farms in your area and reaching out to them for more education! I’ve known a lot of beekeepers that are really excited about doing education and outreach to teach people about the importance of pollinators, the partnership between bees and beekeepers, and the process of how honey is collected. Some honey farms will even give you a tour of their process so you can see in person how it’s made and that it’s not a harmful or exploitative process for the bees at all! (and of course eating local honey gives you an amazing connection to your local environment, both spiritually and physically?? like apparently eating local honey can help with seasonal allergies??? it’s really cool)

[neil-gaiman]

Good day, Mr. Gaiman,

I see that most of the questions right now are about The Good Omens (rightfully so, the show is incredible), but I'm doing my recurrent reread of American God, and I have a question. I reread it every 3-5 years and already gave myself several answers, but I would LOVE to know yours. Was it important in terms of meaning that Laura was the one who used a spear in the finale? Or was it just more convenient plotwise? I'm quite hesitant about her place in this story still, honestly. If you already talked more about her somewhere, can you point me in the direction, maybe?

And a huge Hi from Kyiv, Ukraine! Your worlds help)

Laura's really important to the story and her actions at the end are vital to how it all comes out. I've probably been interviewed about it somewhere, but I do not know where.

[lagarta-isabo]

Wow! Neil Gaiman answered my question! O_O I'll mark this day in my calendar! I need to do some deep dive into Google and find more info, I guess)))

[quietwingsinthesky]

thinking about how dean’s character gets simplified in fandom, or more specifically, the very black and white lens that gets applied to him. because integral to dean, from my point of view, is that he is both a victim of abuse and a perpetrator of it. that these two things do not cancel each other out or outweigh each other to the point that only one matters. he’s both, you cannot separate him from the fact that he’s both.

but very often, people do. dean is either a victim. or he’s an abuser. it’s like it’s hard for people to hold both those facts in their heads at once. dean went through incredible amount of trauma as a child and an adult, is routinely faced with violence, has resorted to alcohol abuse to cope with it. he’s also a violent person, someone who retreats into tactics of emotional abuse and control when he feels threatened, who hurts the people around him constantly and the people who are closest to him (ie Sam, Cas, later Jack) get the brunt of that abuse. these are just facts. they’re things that happened on the screen and cannot be denied.

and it’s. idk it’s weird to me (not unexpected, because he’s hardly the only character to ever get this treatment) that dean of all people is the one portrayed in such an either/or way when one of the defining moments of the show for him is that during his stint in Hell, he was tortured and then became a torturer to escape that, to feel like he had some control again, and he relished in it. it’s baked into who he is.

[adihildilid]

like it is, on that subject. and can I say this without invoking a 'who's a worse person' debate because I don't care and obviously none of this is an ideal way to handle domestic squabbles. but it is, on that subject, remarkable to me how frequently dean hits sam or points a gun at him purely out of anger. whereas when sam hits dean it tends to be in order to accomplish something very immediate like 'stop dean from killing him' or 'stop dean from killing jack' or 'make dean permit him to leave the room.' like sam said in s2 go ahead take another swing if it'll make you feel better and dean just lived there for a decade. almost as if dean's moods as head of household carry as much weight as sam's desire to idk not die. like I think the distinction is less a moral issue and more telling of the family dynamics.

[lagarta-isabo]

al’Lan Mandragoran has ultimate "I support my woman's rights and her wrongs" energy.

[arlos-warm-drpepper]

Jeff Davis is #1 on my shitlist

[lagarta-isabo]

Absolutely agree! Side eye to TVD and Lorenzo "Enzo" St. John.

But even this trope can be executed in a talented and full of meaning way. For example Quentin Coldwater story in The Magicians.

[animentality]

[batwynn]

This actively happened in my lifetime, and I’m in my 30s. A lot of us experienced it in real time and no one stopped it. No one helped us.

When I was 16 we would hang out outside and inside the library. We ranged from a group of 20 to a group of 3-4 people on any given day, because us 16 year olds also hung out with whatever other kid was around the area. (Mostly younger siblings and then their friends.) We never did anything wrong, never mind illegal. We were never loud in the library and were always polite to the staff. We sometimes got a little loud outside on the street when there was some contest thing going on, but not very often. We mostly hung out and talked about stuff going on in our lives.

Then one day someone called the cops on us.

And the cops showed up all ready angry, then started yelling at us for doing nothing. They couldn’t even come up with a real reason to be there yelling at us, other than to demand to know if we were a ‘gang’. When one of my friends started crying, I turned to tell her that it would be ok. The cop grabbed me, screamed at me to not look away when he was talking to me, then demand I get in the cop car and go down to the station. It took almost an hour for my mother to find out where I was because I didn’t have a cellphone at the time and the cops had just fucking kidnapped me. For comforting a friend while they screamed at us. And you know what happened?

We never hung out like that again. None of us. We all got banned from the library for a year. Again, all of this for literally no reason. They told us we were ‘misbehaving’ for simply hanging around outside being kids. And then we had no where to go. Some of those kids were forced back into their abusive homes. I literally never saw half of them again. Ever. And I lived in that town for several years after that.

So, yeah. They just started kicking us out from the outside years ago and not a single adult or group of adults gave a shit.

[scoobydoodean]

Sam has abandonment issues just as bad or worse than Dean's and they have a massive impact on how he behaves at various points. There's a period of the Winchester's childhoods we learn about in 7.03 and 11.08, where Sam was old enough for John to feel okay about leaving him alone by himself for days, and Dean was old enough that John wanted him hunting with him sometimes. In the same way that Dean's parentification leads to a warped, negative self-image leading into his adulthood, Sam's experience with silence does the same. Sam remembers two figures walking out of the motel room door and leaving him behind. Sam remembers silence for days stuck in a room in the aftermath, waiting for the phone to ring. Sam can't help but feel punished by the silence. If he was good enough, they would have brought him along. He wouldn't be alone.

[scoobydoodean]

Dean's stolen childhood looks very different through Sam's childhood lens.

YOUNG SAM (picks up the phone) Dean? YOUNG DEAN (on the phone) Hey. YOUNG SAM Did you ask? YOUNG DEAN Yeah, it’s not gonna happen. YOUNG SAM Come on. You said. YOUNG DEAN Look, I said I would ask. Dad said no, what do you want me to do about it? YOUNG SAM But I’ve been shooting. I can run two miles. I know silver kills werewolves, and... YOUNG DEAN Sammy. YOUNG SAM No fair. You started hunting when you were younger than me.

11.08 Just My Imagination

We also know from 3.08 "A Very Supernatural Christmas" that Dean was "trusted" with the truth when he was younger than Sam.

We know that this "trust" wasn't beneficial to Dean—it took Dean's childhood from him and Dean desperately tried to protect Sam from the same fate (2.22, 3.08). But from the perspective of a child being left alone in silence for days, the conclusion was "I'm the family freak" (1.08). "Dean is trustworthy and noble and good and competent and I am not. There is something wrong with me, and because there is something wrong with me (and I don't even know what it is) I am always going to end up being left behind."

This is why Sam has a complex about trust—why he tends to frame things around not being trusted enough, why he begs for trust—even when he's already getting it, or he doesn't deserve it, or he's being deeply unfair to frame the situation to be about trust to begin with and not about differing moral principles. Not being trusted reminds him of feeling alone and othered—it reminds him of feeling like a freak.

[scoobydoodean]

Sam resented John's silence and "Just do as I say" mentality because it reminded him of that lack of trust too. He thought he'd escape feeling like a freak by leaving, but instead, the fear followed him— "There is something wrong with me, and I don't know what it is, but maybe other people will see it too if I get too close, and they won't want to be around me either." It impacted his relationships in college. It became its own self-fulfilling prophecy.

The demon blood gave Sam false clarity—something he could point to and say, "This is what's wrong with me. This is why I can't be trusted. This is why I'm tainted".

SAM You used to read to me, um, when I was little, I— I mean, really little, from that— from that old, uh... Classics Illustrated comic book. You remember that? DEAN No. SAM Knights of the Round Table. Had all of King Arthur's knights, and they were all on the quest for the Holy Grail. And I remember looking at this picture of Sir Galahad, and, and, and he was kneeling, and— and light streaming over his face, and— I remember... thinking, uh, I could never go on a quest like that. Because I'm not clean. I mean, I w— I was just a little kid. You think... maybe I knew? I mean, deep down, that— I had... demon blood in me, and about the evil of it, and that I'm— wasn't pure?

It was never the demon blood. It was always the neglect.

[scoobydoodean]

Sam remembers two figures walking out the motel room door leaving him behind. One of them is dead. Dean is the only one left. He looms larger in Sam's memory than he actually was. Sam subconsciously believes that Dean holds the key to fixing that kid who got left behind. Sam longs for the Dean from the past who loomed so large to look at him and say "You can come with us".

In the present, what Sam begs is "Please trust me. Please believe in me". He says it small—like that lonely kid from the past—not like a man standing in a completely different context. All the context drops away and all that's left is that kid about to be condemned to silence. He's asking Dean to pluck his childhood self out of time—a stage in life that has passed them by. He's asking Dean to give him something Dean never had the power to give him to begin with. He was not John's spouse—he was not Sam's mother or father. He was a child who never had the power to invite Sam. Sam's a perpetuator of Dean's parentification because he's a victim of Dean's parentification. He doesn't understand why Dean can't give him this. Sam's clutching onto that big leather jacket, not seeing Dean's shoulders aren't broad enough to fill it. The man who used to wear it is gone and so is that kid who got left behind, and Dean was never as large as Sam remembers him being.

[rottingsam]

i think a reason why people find sam boring is because he’s not written with a lot of traits that make him seem more ‘quirky’ or personable, unlike dean. for example, dean likes cowboys and westerns, he’s into outdated pop culture, dean likes to play dress up, dean loves scooby-doo, dean likes to cook, deans really protective of his car, dean likes wearing women’s underwear. dean is given a lot more personal details and information that doesn’t contribute to the show or narrative, where as sam’s unrelated traits are reading, exercising, decently healthy, and researching.

[sweetpapercroissant]

i’m gonna need to think on this some more but i think you’re right. we don’t really know a lot about sam’s interests. and i think that it’s, at least partially, done on purpose. because one of sam’s characteristics is that he’s very closed off. there are details about him that no one but dean knows and even that is a lot of the time a result of them sharing space than sam actually telling him. for example we’ve heard him complaining about dean’s taste in music but we don’t know anything about his. we know he likes listening to podcasts but on what topics?

i also think it’s important to him to keep these things, these parts of him, just to himself. first, because of the utter lack of privacy that came from living in motel rooms he was almost never allowed to be alone in, and later from the repeated violations of his mind and body.

but i also think there are certain personality traits-and these aren’t quirky ones but still-that a large part of fandom chooses to ignore (for reasons i will never understand). he does have a lot of anger, and he can be stubborn, bullheaded even. he lets his emotions get the better of him and doesn’t always think things through. he is bitchy and sometimes judgemental. he also really likes to make fun of dean and annoy him for little brother reasons. and while dean does see him as endlessly kind and good-hearted (in s1-mid s3 at least) that’s not actually him. sam’s vengeful and he can be cruel when he wants to be. he’s single-minded and it helps him get shit done and see some things clearly but also tends to blind him to others.

he does look up to dean, still, in some ways even if he wishes he didn’t. he wants to be normal but there’s a part of him that absolutely loves hunting, loves the rush, the chase, the mystery, the lore. but he’s also so scared of being evil. and he’s scared of being a freak, cut-off from human society even though he’s very antisocial. he doesn’t really interact that much with other people but he wants the access (for lack of a better word) should he choose to.

and all these are characteristics that by themselves might seem very “negative” (which is why i think certain fans don’t want to acknowledge them) but combined with all of sam’s other “positive” character traits make him a very layered and interesting character. and also very human, which is something i always appreciate in any character but apparently the current trend is to not, unfortunately.

there’s so much to sam’s character but it all unfortunately gets buried under smoothie-drinking vegetable-eating lawboy (which, just to be clear, isn’t bad. but it’s far from all he is)

[itsokaydean]

Alright, so.

Sam Winchester is incredibly private, but also? The show follows Dean's perspective to the extent we will watch him sneak behind a building to privately punch out a wall or collapse in tears. Even when it's implied well that he's hurting, we as an audience follow simply to witness how deep the wound goes. We see him dorky by himself for no reason. On Winchester downtime, we see him hang with Castiel, Krissy, Claire, Crowley, Charlie, Bobby, Jo, Ellen, much more than Sam. Dean can be funny, heartbreaking, enraged, cruel, and so very vulnerable on the regular as Mr. Tough Guy may recommend bottling emotions... but he sure keeps that bottle on his sleeve.

Unless plot-relevant, similar Sam moments are hidden from us and suggested through the times he ultimately shatters --or, delightfully, the rare instance an episode calls for a Moose detour. Just Your Imagination, anyone? Marshmallow nachos? I mean, what. And yeah, so very lonely, not only excluded from the world, but the third wheel in his very own family. If we take that a step further, ~lonely~ as an outlier of humanity, arguably a branch-off entirely into something not quite natural. The last of his ~species as a special child. To ignore Sam's soul or, uh, blood-deep difference is to miss something foundational about him as a character imo. There is a caged creature beneath his skin that he is constantly warring with himself to drown.

Sam bottles his emotions with remarkable success after their father's passing ( lbr, those two were PURE PASSION in scenes, amazing, beautiful ) and subsequent unsavory discoveries about his being. Where Dean lashes out, Mr. Totally Normal -concerned about his confirmed difference/evil/darkness- lashes inwards, and he becomes quite accustomed to taking the blame for things beyond his control. In him is a gentle brokenness. Notice how often he befriends the misunderstood or outcast, how much easier it is for him to comprehend doing wrong for a good reason and forgive even those that have done him wrong. None of this is particularly ~quirky~ ; it's actually heartbreaking and, er, a bummer? Tough for people to hop on the Sammy-train without sensing a deep ache.

I do wish we learned more of his quirks besides coulrophobia (does this count as a quirk?? poor guy) and his weirdo love for true crime. Also wanted more time with his faith. It was so pure and innocent, and the scene Sam meets Castiel? Phew. Again, more sadness drenches the fact his faith derived greatly from his need to belong to something greater and not be whatever he is. In the end, that, too, ends up tainted by his very existence. Everything about his life is just faintly tinged sad and suffocating. Everything, from his quirks to his joys to his self worth, is restrained by what he views as necessity.

Okay. I thought I was done, but apparently not. I DO want to point out the creature I mentioned, that he often drowns, is very much alive and electric. When someone(thing) threatens his family or has, in fact, harmed someone he cares for? Hoo'boy, there's a sure chance he may backslide into bloodthirst mode. He is easily the scarier Winchester when push comes to shove, mhmmm. If that's boring to someone, I dunno what to say.

[largishcat]

Audrey R., who’s running for the OTW board, is apparently also currently running for office. As a Republican

so uhhhhhh keep that in mind when you’re voting

[forevergulag-deactivated2026013]

you’re saying this like a liberal who has the view of republicans.bad dems good and vote blue no mayter who.

[largishcat]

y-yes? i sort of think the website that was founded because every other website was purging queer fanwork would be best served by someone who isn’t a member of the We Love Burning Books and Killing Gay People party. but that’s just the humble opinion of someone with a brain that works

[everbright-mourning]

For give me, but is this person running for Ao3 board and CONGRESSS at the same time??

[white-throated-packrat]

Read Fairestcat’s breakdown of Audrey R’s answers to the OTW candidate Q&A for more in-depth reasons you probably don’t want to vote her onto the board https://fairestcat.dreamwidth.org/678527.html

Then read about all the other candidates and decide who you DO want to vote for -- there are 6 candidates and 4 open seats -- https://elections.transformativeworks.org/otw-elections-candidates/

[fremedon]

Reminder that if you want to vote AGAINST someone in the OTW Board elections, you need to NOT RANK THEM AT ALL. If you rank them last, you've still voted for them--just less enthusiastically than you've voted for everyone else.

Rank ONLY the candidates you would be WILLING to see win. DO NOT rank any candidates you would not be willing to see win.

[quickreaver]

Emptying my brain...

Recently, there was quite a kerfuffle in the SPN fandom, over the realization that several self-proclaimed “BNFs” had been Mean Girling fellow fans into hating on certain other fans and certain other members of the cast of SPN. Thoughts have been percolating around in my head about this for a bit. Here goes... There has already been some discussions of warning about how cult-like these tactics seem: the initial lovebombing, indoctrination, evolving into intimidation and threats if people don't fall in line. The hunger to belong and smug feeling of group-think is a helluva drug. The fear of losing favor and being ousted from the silo is also a helluva withdrawal. I wonder if there's a reason all these manipulative personalities, every one of them, have been from the Destiel quarter of the SPN family. Is it sheer numbers? Or does it begin with the selling of the ship as this monumental slow-burn greatest love story ever told (even though the show's actual canon does very little to support this fable)? The relationship between Dean and Cas has been romanticized to a legendary degree, and the fanon has become the preferred telling of the tale, replete with lengthy subtextual navel-gazing over lamps and fictional beer brands and artfully staged gif sets on tumblr. Every whiff of the show has been recontextualized to point to Destiel. A stroll through any given list of Destiel All-Time Fave Fics is chock full of AUs and characters that feel more like Any Two White Guys than the actual characters from SPN.

Maybe this primes D/C shippers to be more susceptible to grift, to believe anyone with charisma and confidence and leadership aspirations, who promises the fruition of some manner of Destiel endgame. Which, okay. I totally get how deeply we often feel about our fandoms and the dynamics, how we project onto the characters and idealize the ships as more than the show intended.

It'd be fine... if fans then didn't feel the need to evangelize for the ship and punish those who got in the way. Some groups have been actively attacking the cast and parts of our fandom for years, as well as making actual bank off it all. Under the guise of inclusion and camaraderie, they dangle paying admission into their sacred inner circles like worms on hooks. They took, and are continuing to take, money to offer glimpses behind the doors of their Patreons or special levels of their Discords, where those lucky customers would theoretically be honored with friendship (parasocial, much?), and gifted with the potential of supposed insider info, and/or proximity to the cast and crew at conventions. In return, that same congregation would be used as a tool to attack and discredit the parts of the SPN milieu that the grand poobahs dislike. They would be asked to buy their merch, to keep their secrets, to send hate mail to each other in order to place the blame on “the other side”, try to get competing fans (or even TV shows) canceled, carry the torches of hate, and the list goes on. I don't know where this is going exactly, but there's a difference between bickering over which ship has the best blorbos or whose fave is the most girlboss, and actively trying to generate a lemming-like mass of obedience, enough to impact the IRL health and well-being of other people. Fandom can rally to accomplish such good feats (and lord knows the companies and studios that own our favorite franchises have figured this out), but every coin has two sides. Just, be aware of which one you're on, I guess.