forever grateful i was simply too lazy to let the makeup industrial complex get its hooks in me. I was just like im not doing all of that. in fact. im doing none of that
yeah I have political reasons for it now but my original and still most powerful reason is "I am not getting out of this bed one single second before I have to"
As is tradition in tumblr culture the locals unearth the corpse of a long deceased figure and drag it across the streets merrily, laughing at what is preserved of the person’s words. This custom, seen as morbid in other cultures, is instead done gleefully and with an unmatched enthusiasm
some royal jewels were stolen from the louvre which is unfortunate for historical reasons but you gotta appreciate a classic crime. so many crimes are online these days it’s nice to see heist culture is still alive
Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that gaslight gatekeep girlboss meme, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you think modern feminism has been co-opted by corporations. But what you don’t know is that that meme is not from Instagram, it's not from Twitter, it's not from Tiktok, it’s actually from Tumblr. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in January 2021, Tumblr user missnumber1111 posted, "today's agenda: gaslight gatekeep and most importantly girlboss." And then I think it was a-m-e-t-h-y-s-t-r-o-s-e, wasn’t it, who reblogged it with an image of the phrase edited over a piece of "Live, Laugh, Love" wall art? And then gaslight gatekeep girlboss showed up in the feeds of eight different Twitter repost accounts. Then it filtered down through Instagram and then trickled on down into some tragic “alt side of Tiktok” where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that meme represents millions of notes and countless Tumblr users and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from Tumblr when, in fact, you’re wearing the meme that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of “stuff.”
hate when I see the comment "big news for unemployed people" on internet drama. really discounting the dedication of us chronically online employed people. does my 15 minutes in a public restroom at work scrolling online mean nothing to you...
Okay so I'm in my thoughts because of this post, and I was thinking about something.
If Castiel was lobotomised thousands of times and factory reset, wouldn't that explain his strange lack of nuance, metaphors, and human pop culture that no other angel suffers from? Even Zachariah, who hates humans with a passion, knows about human pop culture enough to make very specific references.
Any time Castiel learned about humanity, he would come extraordinarily close to falling, but he was such a good soldier the angels couldn't afford to lose him? When they remove everything that makes Castiel who he is, they're left with someone cold, calculating, and ruthless, who follows orders to exact. When he is mindless, he's everything they need.
And right as they think they've finally got it right, Castiel's lobotomy has worked 100%, and he'll never fall to the wayside again, he rescues Dean from hell. It undoes every bit of work Naomi put into breaking him down and remaking him as a cold, emotionless shell.
Slowly, his true personality begins to shine through over the course of season 4, until Dean takes a sledgehammer to the proverbial wall in Castiel's head, and that is the end of that. He "begins" to learn thoughts and feelings, but in reality he's just regaining everything that was stolen from him.
The moment he rescued Dean from hell, he found himself again. And that was why the angels have always been horrified.
I remember hearing or reading something about how Misha Collins, as the first angel to appear on the show, was trying to sort of set a standard for angels as a species with Castiel's odd behavior, and then other actors playing angels didn't emulate him which left Cas as the odd one out. But disregarding acting choices, I think there could be several explanations for Castiel's comportment in-universe. Long post warning. Also, tw for discussion of medical procedures (?) ig.
I looked into lobotomies a little bit here to get some more info. Lobotomies were first used in the 1930s to treat patients with severe mental health conditions such as schizophrenia. It was a surgical procedure that severed the connections between the frontal lobe and other parts of the brain. The frontal lobe is the area of the brain that is associated with judgment, impulse control, emotion, motor functions, and planning. I believe it is also somehow involved in forming long-term memories, but I'm not sure how or to what extent. It didn't really treat the mental health conditions of the people it was used on, it mostly just induced docile behavior which made it easier for the caretakers of these people to manage them. The type of lobotomy that most closely resembles what Naomi was doing to Cas is called a "transorbital lobotomy" - an ice-pick-like tool was used to pierce the brain through the eye. These procedures were usually not performed in sterile conditions.
Obviously, any procedure that angels would use on one another would probably not be exactly comparable to the procedures we are familiar with in human medicine. But from the perspective of the writers, familiar things are used to make the viewers make associations in their minds. We see Naomi sticking a drill through Cas's eye socket, and we think "lobotomy = mind-altering medical procedure." I think it's pretty safe to assume that this procedure would operate similarly to the lobotomies we are familiar with, even considering that angel anatomy would be vastly different from human anatomy (and psychology, for that matter).
In the show, the procedure seemed to have two purposes: wiping Cas's memories, and encouraging him to comply with Heaven's demands. What I found interesting is that Naomi could not directly influence him to do anything - she made him kill Dean over and over again to make the actions familiar and to mitigate Cas's emotional reaction (to desensitize him), and she encouraged him to do as she said, but she could not directly control his actions. She had to manipulate him into doing everything he did one way or another. This definitely qualifies as psychological torture, which - poor Cas. But it leads me to believe that they could only take his memories, not his values or emotions. This is tricky because memory and emotion are intrinsically entwined - memories have a huge influence on emotion and the way we perceive and process the world around us. So in this regard, by removing his memories, they definitely took away some of "who he is." But I don't think it is as simple as a personality-ectomy.
Naomi said that Cas "came off the line with a crack in his chassis" - implying that he was never 'normal,' if you will. So I think that Cas is fundamentally different in some way from the other angels. You could headcanon a lot of things for this - maybe something traumatic happened when he was young that changed the way he saw things, or maybe he was just created differently on purpose. I've seen some people theorize that he is somewhere on the autism spectrum, which is plausible, though you also have to take into account that he is not human and therefore unfamiliar with the sociological intricacies that come with being human (one of the main symptoms for autism that he displays is a lack of understanding metaphors and references - this could in part be because he is an angel and English is not his mother tongue. But, he is also much slower than the other angels to pick up on these things, and so it could be taken either way). It could be a whole different thing that only happens in angels, too. Who knows?
In any case, I think that the whole lobotomy thing is horrible. I think that Castiel is a 'repeat offender' because there's something about him that is intrinsically different from the other angels, whatever that might be. And I also think that it is plausible that the lobotomies might have worsened or exasperated his "strange lack of nuance, metaphors, and (understanding of) human pop culture." Really neat post op, thanks for sharing. It was very thought provoking. :)
a few people pointed out that they probably wouldn’t understand what they were saying and just mimicking whatever sounds they happen to hear so I wanted to add this
no because it makes so much sense now that jeremy is so deeply in control. he does not lash out on the court, he looks out for his teammates, he smiles at the cameras and shakes hands with his opponents, he walks an impossible line between being himself and being what his family wants, and he does it all because when he wasn’t in control, someone died, and he can never fix that, and he will never not see it as his fault.
and it also makes so much sense, then, that he’s deeply self-destructive. that he hooks up with men who have hurt him, emotionally or physically, and brushes it off. that he doesn’t fully rebel against his family and their treatment of him. that he doesn’t sleep enough.
he’s built himself into something new, someone different than he used to be—better than he used to be—but even if that’s real (and with the way he lies as easily as breathing, even he doesn’t know what parts of him are real), it’s not enough, and if he can’t ever make up for what he did, he will at the very least make sure he’s punished for it, even if he’s the one doing it.
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