#restlesshush

[autisticandroids]

7 and 38 for the fanfic author asks

7. What fic are you the proudest of?

so almost certainly every relationship has its stuff!! that was a huge amount of labor doing something that i'm not used to. it took me months! and is also the longest fic i've ever posted to ao3.

38. Fic idea you’re most excited to get to?

oh i have transfem dean cooking in my head rn... that's what i'm on. no idea when the fics will begin to actually appear. watch this space for transfem dean in 2027 probably.

[spntoxicfemslashevent]

Just saw this post which obviously leads to the very crucial conclusion of Naomi should lobotomise Rowena. Naomi gets to have a very powerful witch as a tool in heaven’s arsenal, and Rowena gets to not think. Maybe also Rowena could be kind of knowledgable about angel lobotomies beforehand in the same way Crowley is as sort of just part of being a powerful knowledgeable magic user, but it always carried with it a degree of fascination re what it would be like to experience. And now she gets to find out.

HELLO!!!!!!!!!!!! give rowena a wire mother 2024. obsessed. when rowena finally gets released into oblivion and it feels oh so good. maybe naomi could even possess her sometimes too. rowena held michael for a bit, and naomi remade her into an empty vessel already…

[angelinthefire]

The thing with s4 deancas is that Dean and Cas have these scenes that are intimate and vulnerable. But they're not necessarily as personal or as much about their relationship as a lot of fanon makes them out to be. Dean and Cas' interactions in s4 are all about the mission and what's going on in the plot, and this developing trust and recognition that they can relate to each other is happening along with that. But the relationship is not what's driving their interactions.

Like, the scene with Dean and Cas in the hospital in 4x16 OtHoaP is the main example of this. Dean is incredibly vulnerable in that scene. And Cas absolves him of blame, and tells him that he knows that their fate rests with Dean. And sometimes you see people interpret that as Cas stating a belief in Dean's goodness. But it's not. It's just Cas stating the facts as he understands them. Which isn't to say that it's not a great scene and a great step in their relationship, it is. Again, Dean is being very vulnerable with Cas. And that Cas is just hanging our at his bedside is a telling thing, imo.

The tension between Dean and Cas in s4 is not about Cas being super into Dean. It's about Dean and Cas testing each other's boundaries, learning who the other is, and slowly building a careful kind of trust and care, that's ultimately put to the test.

They spend the season doing plot stuff while sussing each other out, and then in 4x22 their relationship is what everything suddenly hinges on. Dean's belief that he can convince Cas to do the right thing, Cas' trust in Dean. That's when their relationship bursts out from being the steady undercurrent into being The Important Thing.

And I think that caution, that gradual opening up, that tentative building of trust between Dean and Cas is what makes s4 compelling and what makes their relationship what it is. Moreso than popular fanon interpretations.

[haveyouseenthisseries-poll]

Hi, not super important but just for the sake of your tagging system, fawlty towers is tagged as US instead of British by mistake. Thanks for the fun blog – I have been enjoying!

thank you so much! and i'm glad you enjoy the blog ^^

[deancas-stabfest]

By your hand

Author: @restlesshush Artist: @free-to-be-impaled Rating: M Word Count: 5,899

Tags: Alternate Moriah, Not really an episode fix-it but it does end more happily?, Attempted murder, Apologies for said attempted murder, Intricate rituals

Summary

This isn’t how he had imagined it. He’d imagined it lots of ways, but most vividly, he’d imagined it as something intimate – his vessel’s blood indelibly on Dean’s hands. Dean – an angrier crueller Dean, in theory, though the difference doesn’t seem to mean much – being brought back to himself by the shock of it. The Mark’s effect lessened – countless people protected – by the reality of Dean landing a killing blow against Cas. And maybe Dean wouldn’t quite be aware how willingly the gift had been given, but it would stay with him all the same. Cas’s devotion would be immortalised by the effect it had on Dean, and even if Cas knew he wouldn’t be around to see it, he would feel it in that final moment, as in Dean’s hand his own angel blade went home, the confirmation… Only now Cas’s son is standing behind him. Cas can’t tell which of them is shaking.

Link to Fic | Link to Art

Stickers:

[herinsectreflection]

@restlesshush Right! I would go further and say that the Buffy/Holden scene is necessary to understand Buffy Summers as a character. It's the most explicit expression of the insecurities that drive her throughout the series; stuff we've been seeing as far back as Nightmares.

[coraniaid]

Top five Buffy episodes for you too :)

Thanks for the ask!

Went back and forth on this a bit, but I'm going to go with these five, I think (in no particular order):

Bad Girls

Innocence

Prophecy Girl

The Body

Who Are You?

On reflection this is much more of a personal top five than an attempt at a dispassionate ranking.

(For example, I'm not sure I'd want to argue that Prophecy Girl was objectively in the top five season finales, let alone top five overall episodes. But it was the first episode of Buffy I remember really being impressed by and probably the main reason I stuck with the show into the second season, and it will always be a bit special to me because of that. I also think it's possibly the episode I've rewatched the most times.)

[wizardissues]

Oh your “Jenny being alive would make Giles WORSE in season 6” sounds Fascinating please expand!! (If you would like)

took me a hot minute but thank you VERY kindly for enabling me <3

so as y'all know, the point i always hammer home on dreadfulcalendarwoman dot tumblr dot com is that giles's character arc starts and ends with jenny. like she is the turning point for him in EVERY way wrt the way he chooses to interact with the world, despite her never being top priority in his life. i actually think it is so deeply interesting that buffy's unwavering love for giles is not enough to pull him out of his determined isolation, simply because she is The Slayer and she's Fated To Die and while she's come to terms on some level with her death, giles doesn't ever completely seem able to come to terms with the concept of losing her. so it's actually not gonna ever be buffy who can spur giles towards growth, partly because of that and partly because of the fact that she cuts him SOOOOO much slack. like that's her dad! she wants him to take care of her! she will forgive SO much of him.

jenny does not do that with giles. jenny draws lines and sticks to them to the best of her abilities and we have seen in canon how badly giles deals with those lines -- like in ted, where she essentially says "you being around me is bad for my recovery right now" and he behaves like she killed his dog or something. but the thing is that he still does register and respect that she's got boundaries, and he does try in his own way (hindered as he is by what some might call an unhealthy obsession with jenny) to adhere to the rules she sets down. there is also a very clear problem here in that jenny is super fucking inconsistent and what she allows giles is completely changeable and arbitrary up until the dark age -- like she is deliberately yanking him around because she wants to see how complete her control over him is, and still doesn't totally believe that it's absolute. and then of course GILES thinks that jenny KNOWS she has absolute control over him and is deliberately USING it, which i think definitely contributes to the resentment and anger of the angelus mess. but that's just canon.

ANYWAY i wanted to talk about that because i think it sets the stage REALLY NICELY for giles and jenny's dynamic in a canon where she lives! jenny represents this sense of normalcy and stability in giles's life -- in a lot of ways, his obsession with her is centered around this idea of her as his future wife and long-term life partner, which is something he never thought he would get to have or even WANT to have with anybody. canonically, in season three, the loss of jenny causes giles to double down real hard in his role as a watcher -- reflected in his suddenly incredibly rigid and starchy wardrobe, but also in the way he's no longer pursuing connections outside the scooby gang at all. losing jenny in canon makes it clear to him that he has nothing but being a watcher, and that he will fail at that as well if he allows himself to love someone the way he loved her (see: acathla). and loving jenny brought giles such profound joy that i don't think he ever wants to really handle the concept of never having that again, so of course he throws himself into watcher stuff instead of confronting that.

but in a canon where jenny lives (even in a canon where they spend the third season continuing to be a fucked up mess, which i think is realistic -- it's gonna take time for them to build something healthy after all the we-are-never-ever-getting-back-togethers of season two), giles no longer has that reason to double down as a watcher! instead he has this enduring and consistent possibility that he is allowed to love somebody without it blowing up in his face, and i think that that would genuinely help him so much. he wouldn't need to adhere so rigidly to Watchery Standards, he wouldn't WANT to do the cruciamentum if it ran the risk of hurting buffy -- he would start letting go of this pessimistic, cynical view of the world and the fact that buffy's doomed to die, and work instead on cultivating a home and a surrogate family with jenny. like at his core giles is a homemaker and he longs for community and family and a sense of belonging, just like the rest of the scoobies! he canonically likes being cast as the patriarch but labels himself as an "uncle" because it still gives him an out. i don't think he'd want to wriggle out of familial attachment if this was a world where he never had to experience losing jenny.

THING IS THOUGH, this is still a world where he loses BUFFY. and while canon giles cultivated this very deliberate distance between himself and buffy in an attempt to prepare for the eventuality of her death, this version of giles is one who has started to genuinely view buffy as a daughter and support her in that way as well. there's no emotional distance that he can fall back on to support himself through his grief. he has lost his daughter. in so many ways that is worlds worse than losing jenny before he ever got the chance to really love her, and i think it would have the potential to wreck him on a level that rivals canon.

so season six giles would be handling his grief in the same way that canon giles did -- he's throwing himself into a role that distances himself from the trauma of losing somebody he loves. this time he is ACTIVELY trying to distance himself from buffy -- not "for her own good," but because he just refuses to handle his grief, and even her coming back wouldn't shake his sudden understanding of the fact that she could die just as horribly and permanently again. and so in THIS version of season six he is very aggressively defining himself as Jenny's Husband and trying to push jenny towards having their own biological children and absolutely ignoring the fact that because of his insistent refusal to acknowledge his loss, his marriage is falling apart. he no longer wants to view himself as a watcher or as connected to buffy in any way, because he never ever wants to lose her like that again. that's his daughter. he cannot love her anymore because losing her destroyed him and he can't go through it a second time.

and jenny is just having A Time because she is a smart cookie! she sees why this is happening and she wants to be able to help giles through it! but she literally can't help giles when he is refusing to admit that there's even a problem. and poor buffy who is still dealing with the trauma of being ripped out of heaven also has to deal with and in some ways cater to giles, whose grief prevents him from being there for her in the way that she was genuinely expecting from him. like i think this is a canon where buffy and giles's relationship could have been at the place for her to tell him the truth, but then she comes back and he is a fucking mess and she does the whole depressed repression thing and tries to take care of him. Which Does Not Go Over Well With Jenny.

i'm not sure how this gets solved. i actually wrote a chapter of this a billion years ago wherein jenny and buffy and spike and dawn start forming this weird and incredibly sad family unit after giles leaves for england, and jenny and buffy kinda mutually struggle with this idea of a mother/daughter relationship after years of weirdness between them. i think that the onus would really be on giles to pull himself out of it, because he would have effectively burned his bridges with his wife HARDCORE by that point -- but it would still be a version of giles who had three more years of emotional stability than in canon. there's always a chance.