also i have never thought of dean allowing gadreel to possess sam as a violation of sam’s autonomy. dean was acting basically as a healthcare proxy for his brother who was in a coma, making medical decisions for sam because sam was not able to do so himself. it’s not like sam was sitting there actively saying “do not under any circumstances let a strange angel possess me” and dean went ahead and did it anyway, directly violating sam’s vocal wishes. multiple times over the course of s8, whenever dean and sam had talked about it, sam had said that he didn’t want to die, he wanted to live. based off the information he had, dean made yes an admittedly drastic decision, but not one that’s totally out of left field for the in-universe world? when dean was dying in season three, sam wanted him to harvest organs and keep himself alive like frankenstein’s monster. so. let’s have some perspective

#also sam still had to say yes#he had to choose to live#because an angel yes is not transitive#dean could not say yes for sam and sam coukd not say yes to dean and then have dean say yes to gadreel#which means gadreel decided to show up as dean inside Sam's mind and trick him#also see s14 for an example of cas not being able to take sam into Dean's mind#they had to use the bmol machine

@swordofsun yep you nailed it. The show makes it explicitly clear that Dean cannot say yes on Sam's behalf— the angel "yes" isn't transitive, otherwise Dean's "I don't know what I'm agreeing to but I'm saying yes to doing whatever you want" to Cas in 04.21 would have led to Michael immediately possessing him the second it was convenient.

Dean makes it explicitly clear two or three separate times in 09.01 that this is ultimately Sam's choice and he cannot make it for him. The fact that Gadreel subsequently uses deception and assuming a false identity to coerce an uninformed yes from Sam is, to be clear, something Gadreel did. Not Dean. Gadreel. Something which Dean immediately follows up by trying to tell Sam the truth right away, only to be himself coerced into keeping quiet by a threat to Sam's safety.

Dean's only real involvement in the choices that got made were 1) his initial call for help to any and all angels after Cas didn't (couldn't) respond and 2) the vetting of "Ezekiel" as someone he could trust not to screw them over, the failure of which is not his fault since he did in fact get information from a trusted source and it is very much not his fault that Gadreel was lying about his identity. Everything from that point on is Dean repeatedly stating that it's Sam's choice and ultimately agreeing that "Ezekiel" can go ahead with the possession... if Sam agrees to it.

Being a deancrit is calling Dean an abuser for things Sam and Cas also did and for things that didn’t happen or have been so grossly misrepresented that a normal viewer can barely connect the deancrit’s argument to the show.

All it takes to be a samcrit is pointing out things Sam canonically did in Supernatural.

The Info-Dumpers who Love Characters Website is totally sleeping on the best Info-Dumping Character of All Time:

Jade Daniels, the 17 year-old half-indigenous girl from Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart is a Chainsaw.

In everyone’s defense, character-driven slow-burn literary fiction that is also a slasher (stab stab 🔪🔪🩸) is a hard genre to sell. Many of us who love one part of this equation don’t love the other.

But Jade has captured my whole chainsaw ♥️, and I CANNOT be normal about it. Jade has never met a person at whom she wasn’t willing to spout random facts that they have exhibited no interest in. She can bring ANYTHING back around to connect to her hyperfixation which is, coincidentally, slasher movies. And she is the most vivid, alive, real-to-me protagonist I have ever encountered. Because of the way she hyperfixates and info dumps, not in spite of it. (Which surely says something about me but again, I am among friends on this webbed site!)

Jade makes completely normal, totally hinged choices like:

Of course, the core of this novel is: What is going on with Jade? After all, she actually wants a slasher cycle to start in her town. (She also wants the slasher cycle to be stopped at the proper moment, to ensure that the vengeance of the slasher is balanced by the justice of the Final Girl.) She does not see herself as a possible Final Girl, but she is willing to help the richer, prettier, more appropriate classmate who she thinks is that girl. Why, why, why?

To be clear, the novel does not posit that something must be wrong with a person to be intensely, obsessively interested in something or for that thing to be horror- even slashers! But Jade’s behavior is, like I said, not entirely hinged, even for a slasher fan. Something must be up.

The novel gives us all the clues we need to peel back the layers of what’s really happening, and when truths are revealed, everything just *clicks.* Themes are introduced and then reinforced on multiple levels. There is a bear. 🐻 (The bear is the not the slasher.)

And throughout, Jade gets to be fully-human and fully seven-fucking-teen. Even though she is on the cusp of adulthood, she is still a child, and a wounded one at that. (Her wounds in no way fucking diminish her.)  Her judgment is often impaired. Her actions are often questionable. Her hair-dye jobs gets so bad, even she thinks its gross. She is so alive, and so deserving of love. 🥹 

I love her.

I would fight for her.

I desperately want to make soup for her, and let her tell me about the Scream franchise (I do not care about the Scream franchise), and give her a safe place to sleep. Even if doing so makes it way more likely that I’m about to get murdered.

Jade Fucking Daniels. My chainsaw-hearted, info-dumping hero protagonist. I salute you, my final girl.

has anyone else read stephen graham jones don't fear the reaper yet

If we’re being totally honest the person Kevin most deserved to kill is Crowley.

In honor of our very first sneak peek of the movie Wicked, my nostalgia kicked into high gear and I'm honoring one of my earliest fandom crazes with a silly little comic I'm calling "Fiyero Doesn't Get Enough Recognition For All The Shit He's Been Through."

Enjoy Fiyero having the weirdest 72 hours of his life.

Sequel comic here.

And here he meets the Lion.

friendly reminder that metatron wanted kevin dead because he was worried a prophet could translate something off of the tablets that would help the winchesters and castiel take him down. gadreel possessing sam just meant he had easier access but is not the motive for the murder and had gadreel not been there kevin still would have died, just at some other angel’s hand

what sam doesn't know is that by the end of the season dean and crowley will literally elope

DEAN WINCHESTER / MILLIE WINCHESTER

why does no one remember how homophobic the 00s were? this totally checks for 2003

I’M DECEASED

The movie Dodgeball (2004) just straight up uses the word fag in a scene to be derogatory. Re watched that a few months ago and was caught off guard.

Dean, Cas

Just adding an example of my own experience with this is frequently seeing Dean referred to as a mama or mother. I'm specifically not talking about posts where people are playing with the idea of Dean and gender being an essay question or even people talking about how his experience is so frequently one pressed upon women (though I think parentification is not only a "girl" thing and much prefer a discussion that recognizes that).

Instead I mean the posts that treat him as the woman parent and partner because he's a caregiver. Because he's loving and nurturing. And frequently it's associated with headcanons that cast him as mother because he is doing household chores or parenting.

It's something that bothers me in part because of the pervasive narrative that women should be "natural" parents and men shouldn't. It's a very straight, heteronormative way of looking at the world. He must be a mother because a father can't be those things. I mean one of the beautiful themes underlying Dean’s story is that he goes from obligation to something softer, and he is at his heart love. That he is fighting the specter of his father who wasn't those things.

But also it's invalidating as a mother who traditionally falls into a more masculine role with a cis male spouse who does the cooking and was a stay at home parent. I'm genderqueer af but I'm also mama. And I have fought a lot of pressure to let others define that specifically as the role that they are pushing onto Dean. Not to mention the fact that Jack has a mother who died and who is often erased from the narrative.

All of that to say that one of the really amazing things I love about this show is the queering of gender and family. Families are found. Women can be tough and queer. Men can be the most loving person in the world. So when the discussion moves from "this character has been placed into a trope usually reserved for a female lead" to "this character is like a woman because they aren't meeting certain cisheteronormative ideals" you start to lose something important to me and you replace it with something fairly invalidating.