badcompanys replied to your post: Have you ever thought about writing your own boyking!sam fic?..
Boy King Sam doesn’t have to be evil. He could have gotten there with good intentions
I wish that my kneejerk reaction to Boy King Sam wasn't how people make him abusive and terrible and just a dick that it's put me off from it 'cause I can't even find Boy King Sam without that recipe and it's so frustrating. Only one fic I found and it's so long and didn't have Sam as an abusive little shit and was actually submissive to Dean.
I think Sam could have ruled Hell, or use it to fight battles but he'd b a gentle ruler, not malicious but that seems to be an impossible to a lot of people.
The standard Boy King Sam fics feature him with no emotions and tortures Dean 'cause he wants to.
badcompanys replied to your post: mywinchestermademedoit replied to your post: ...
also a lot of Jared’s physical traits are common in seme designs: slanty eyes, sharp angles, muscular, tall, big hands, etc. And Jensen has the big eyes pouty mouth and is slightly shorter. His fate was sealed
I used to be really into seme/uke tropes back in my early Anime days and I've been trying to distance myself them and it's much easier to forget them now.
But when I first looked at Jared and Jensen, I immediately saw Jared as the uke-type and ugh, I really hate that term. Maybe I saw that Jared has more classically-considered traits that make him the pretty one--angular eyes, wide and pink mouth, beauty marks, a tapered waist, slender and long fingers, etc, that I didn't actually consider Jensen with uke traits. I dunno, Jensen just looks more physically masculine than Jared to me.
I think it's funny because in early J2, in the first few years, people considered Jared the pretty one, as I've been in a lot of people's LJ journals around that time and people favored Jared as the one that's more feminine but because Jared bulked up more, people turned to Jensen.
It's different with everyone but I just find it really interesting with the different attitudes of then and now.
Do you ever get irrationally angry when you see a graphic with a quote or song lyrics and you're like NO THAT'S WRONG THAT QUOTE/SONG IS NOT FOR THEM IT'S FOR _______ HOW DARE U
Anna Milton Meta, Part 2(C): Agency and Ambiguity in “The Song Remains the Same.”
Part 1 was about why Anna chose to become human. There’s also a spinoff post about Anna as a feminist/humanist response to misogynist stereotypes.
Part 2(A) was about how forgiveness and love guided Anna’s choices as a human. Part 2(B) was about how Anna's human upbringing shaped her choices as an angel, including her relationship with Castiel.
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Dean: Are you okay?
Anna: No.
There are big chunks of this episode that I love. I love the interactions among the Winchester family, especially Sam’s with Mary and John. I REALLY love the last seven minutes, from Michael’s conversation with Dean to the end. Good stuff. You know what I also loved? Anna. I felt both frightened of and frightened for her, which is how I think we ought to feel for her this episode, and Julie McNiven’s performance delivered.
That said, there is one thing about this episode that bothers me, and one thing I hate.
Sam Winchester must die
The thing that merely bothers me: the ambiguity of Anna’s motivations. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the ambiguity. It’s just frustrating. As a fan of the show, and a fan of Anna, I want to know.
Either way, she is quite obviously not herself. We know from the first moment Anna appears in Dean’s dream that she is not okay. The Anna we know smiled a lot, even when those smiles were sad. When this Anna smiles, it’s bitter. They don’t reach her eyes. It’s creepy. She’s also wearing little or no makeup, which is standard film-code for “the lady is not okay.” Everything about the way she presents herself screams, “Run.” So, why? Why the abrupt change in character? At what point did loyalty, forgiveness, and love become “Sam Winchester must die?”
The way I see it, there are two plausible options. The first is that Anna was telling the truth the whole time: after months of torture in Heaven, she broke free. Having learned that Sam was going to bring on the Apocalypse by saying yes to Lucifer, she decided that the only way to prevent the Apocalypse for good was to destroy Lucifer’s vessel and scatter its atoms across the universe.
A harsh choice, and a foolish struggle for her to take on alone, but otherwise at least somewhat reasonable. For people who hate her for that choice—I ask only that you consider this. Someone out there probably has stats on Sam and Dean’s total human body count, and it’s probably insane. Try to remember that they kill innocent people for the greater good all. the. time. (I’m talking the demons’ meatsuits, btw.) The way Anna saw it, she could kill one guy, and save the entire world. A desperate choice, but Supernatural takes place in an awfully desperate universe. On top of the Winchesters’ actions, Castiel committed genocide that one time. And whether or not you think Godstiel and Castiel were entirely the same person (I do think that one’s a bit ambiguous, too) there’s still the fact that Cas murdered Rachel and Balthazar, both friends of his, while in full control of his own actions, because he…believed it was the only way to prevent the Apocalypse.
(Aryachesters has already done a thing about the disparity in the way Cas’ and Anna’s respective downfalls were written, so I won’t get into that here, except to say ^^^what she said.)
Option number 2! This is the one where Castiel was right, kind of. Option 1 would be the only option I’d consider, if it weren’t for that troubling line of Cas’ where he says, If you're out of prison, it's because they let you out. And they sent you here to do their dirty work. […] No one escapes. Though I love Anna’s response, and want it to be true (All these centuries, and you’re underestimating me now?), Cas’s skepticism casts reasonable doubt on her agency here.
If this is the case, then what dirty work is Anna really doing? Heaven could not have wanted her to succeed. Michael supposedly needed Lucifer for the Apocalypse, if I recall correctly, and he did resurrect Sam at the end of this episode. I’ve seen lots of interesting speculation on the subject, but my interpretation is that the whole thing was a setup, designed by Michael, entirely so he could have that conversation with Dean.
That whole business about Anna killing their parents seems pretty odd, when you think about it. How much easier would it have been to kill Sam when he was just a little kid, on any of the many occasions that John left the boys on their own? But to speak to Dean, Michael needed a substitute vessel, which meant going back in time so he could take John’s body instead. Michael surely knew that if John was going to say yes for anything, it would be Mary. Furthermore, he knew that if anything would rattle Dean, it would be seeing his “father” tell him how powerless he is. So Anna was sent to lure Castiel and the Winchesters back to 1978, where she would fight and die for no greater purpose than to get Dean and Michael-as-John into the same room.
I hate this option, because it so completely strips Anna of the agency she struggled all her life to hang on to. However, it’s kind of perfectly horrible in a way well-suited to the Supernatural universe, particularly Kripke’s version. This whole season (possibly the whole series) is a set up to place Sam and Dean in the utmost depths of despair, as Heaven and Hell each try to persuade the brothers that they have no choice, no agency. You can’t fight City Hall, Michael says. Whatever you do, you will always end up here, says Lucifer in “The End.” Gabriel, too, in “Changing Channels”: from the moment Dad flipped on the lights around here, we knew it was all gonna end with you. Always.
This stunt that brought Anna, Castiel, and all four Winchesters together is Michael’s way of peacocking for Dean, giving him a brutal lesson in the omnipotence of fate.
Think of a million random acts of chance that let John and Mary be born, to meet, to fall in love, to have the two of you. Think of the million random choices that you make, and yet how each and every one of them brings you closer to your destiny. Do you know why that is? Because it's not random. It's not chance. It's a plan that is playing itself out perfectly. Free will's an illusion, Dean. That's why you're going to say yes.
Using Anna as the bait to get Dean there wasn’t random, either. Yes, it’s hard to see the strong-willed Anna reduced to a mere “tool” in this way, but it’s supposed to be hard. It should be the most awful betrayal we can imagine, second only to the same thing happening to Cas. It’s all part of Michael’s message that no one who attempts to escape their fate will ever succeed. Even the angel who most hated Michael’s Heaven—every bit, and possibly more, than Dean himself hates Michael—is forced, in the end, to serve it. It was a plan that played itself out perfectly.
The chick who wants to gank Sam
Alrighty then, what is it that I hate about this episode? If you guessed “the alarming and horribly out-of-character lack of compassion shown for Anna by Team Free Will,” then you’re right!
The big misstep of this ep was reducing her character to “the chick who wants to gank Sam.” There’s no sympathy, no pity, not one single attempt to talk her down. No acknowledgment that this Anna behaves so differently from the funny, kind, interesting character they knew before. TFW? Bit more like TWTF.
Dean started out alright. In his dream, he asks her if she’s okay, and he offers to help. Why he drops that attitude in the next scene may have to remain a mystery. Both he and Cas know something about torture turning you into something you’re not. And Castiel knows specifically what Anna went through, having experienced it himself, and it’s his fault that she ended up in Heaven’s prison in the first place. Or rather, it isn’t his fault because he’d recently been rebooted and wasn’t entirely himself…kind of like Anna in 5.13. When Anna points that out, however, Cas brushes it off with a terse It was a mistake, and goes back to grilling her. The characterization here seems so violently off. Wouldn’t Too-Much-Heart Castiel have at least apologized? I think he would.
And Dean, who accepts Castiel’s assertion that Anna won’t give up until Sam is dead. So [they have to] kill her first, without argument. Dean, who had that beautiful conversation with her only months ago about loneliness and forgiveness, who has been reminded more than once of how terrifying it is for a rebel angel to be sent back to Heaven. (We’re killed if we don’t have [faith]. That’s a very bad thing. Painfully, awfully bad. All the torture, twice the self-righteousness.) I just have a hard time justifying their collective insensitivity, not only because it seems so out of character, but because if they had believed in Anna, and made even the slightest attempt to save her, it would have made her death 10x worse. Which in this case, for storytelling purposes, would have been a good thing. It would have had the same or greater emotional impact on Dean and the audience that Sarah Blake’s death in "Clip Show" had on Sam, with all the despair and frustration and anguish that brought. Instead, it just sort of happened. No one really tried to save Anna, and no one mourned her when she died.
After killing Sam, Anna approaches Mary to say, I’m really sorry. There’s no reason to think she isn’t. She doesn’t need anything from Mary. Mary’s not a threat. Maybe it’s a token, polite “sorry” like the one Cas gave to her back in “Heaven and Hell,” and just like him, this Anna doesn’t know the feeling. But the emphasis Julie McNiven gives to the “really” suggests another possibility. I speculate (tentatively) that having fulfilled this task of killing Sam, or perhaps the very action of killing Sam, broke her a tiny bit free from whatever trap her mind was in. (For what it’s worth, it’s similar to when Cas, in a similar position, says I’m so sorry, Dean, in “Goodbye Stranger.”) The fear in Anna’s eyes and the tone with which she says “Michael” when the archangel shows up is the most she’s looked like her old self the whole episode. There was hope. They could have fixed this. But then Michael set her on fire.
Anna’s great tragedy is that she rebelled for love and forgiveness, and loved and forgave people left and right (even those who didn’t quite deserve it, like Ruby), but when she was the one in trouble, when love and forgiveness might have saved her, there was no one to offer it to her. butterflydm wrote an excellent meta on Dean and the Power of Love, and she makes a great point about the curious absence of the PoL technique when Lisa was possessed by a demon. I think Anna’s got a place in this mix, too. Not that she had a relationship with Dean that was as close as the ones he had with any of those characters, including Lisa. While Dean seemed to like Anna, I don’t think he ever loved her. Coming from Dean, an attempt at PoL may not have even moved her. Cas, actually, is the one she had the more important relationship with. I imagine he could have PoL’d her, if he’d tried. But then again—angels. Maybe Cas just didn’t have the capacity to PoL anyone, not yet. Point being, what’s sad is that there was no one who could have filled that role for Anna. Her human parents were long dead, her friends thought she was crazy, or dead, and knew nothing of her secret identity anyway. Anna fell for love, and in the end, she still died alone.
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This marks the end of my analysis of Anna's actions within the text. Part 3 (when it happens, which could be ages from now, idk) will focus a bit on what Anna contributes to Supernatural, theme-wise, but particularly with regard to her gender. It's possibly going to end up just a self-indulgent mess of feminist and literary theory, so. Be warned.
P.S. I've been tagging asks related to the meta "anna meta extras," so you can also look there for more of my blathering on the subject.
aryachesters replied to your post: greatwallofsam replied to your post: Read More...
NOOO IVE BEEN FOLLOWING THAT FIC AND IT MAKES ME FEEL SO SAD AND ANGRY AT THE WORLD
the worst thing is that jensen isn't really sympathetic like he wants to help jared but he just makes it worse and hurts jared and every time i think everything is going well, something bad happens and everything bad happens to jared :(
