i caught myself thinking, earlier, about john’s truck.
so. trucks are awesome. i own one and i love her to bits. but a truck is a solitary vehicle, a pragmatic and functional vehicle, a machine. it’s made for a purpose, and john’s truck is made for hunting, killing, hauling bodies and weapons and himself. no one else. a truck feels kind of cramped with even one passenger, even a large truck.
we never really see inside john’s truck, don’t know (to my knowledge) if he keeps it as clean as dean does the impala or if maybe, on his own, he lets fast food wrappers accumulate on the passenger side floorboard. for a show in which a car is definitively a character, a girl, the impala, baby—it’s significant, i think, that john’s truck is a blank, soulless object, with no name and no history.
we don’t know when the impala becomes dean’s instead of john’s, or really why. why pass it on to dean when he could keep it for himself? flutiebear describes dean as a magpie of memories, and i think that’s just the most accurate, beautiful way to put it. he holds on. he cherishes items which represent the people he loves and looks up to. so of course he would cherish the impala, he would want it for himself—but not just because of the powerful memories it preserves. because even if sam is away at college, he might someday need a home again, and that’s why he has to have it. it’s always been dean and the impala who make home for sam. even if he doesn’t want it, or appreciate it, or know how hard dean works to hold it together.
kripke chose the impala for the muscle, for the intimidation factor, for the body-sized trunk. and no fucking doubt, that impala is a bad ass vehicle, but she’s made for more than just hunting; unlike john’s truck, she’s no one-trick pony. once in that car, once you’ve made it past her hulking, growling exterior, you’re family. (maybe unless you’re crowley.) she’ll host your pranks, your car sex, your painful confessions, your tears, your rocking out to bon jovi when you need it. those wide bucket seats can hold a lot of contradictions, demons and angels all crammed into the same space, and she doesn’t complain a bit. but she looks unbalanced when it’s just dean or sam behind the wheel, when the passenger seat is empty, when she’s not carrying the whole family winging toward the next goal.
anyway.
(i’m not as awesome as awesome meta writers like flutiebear so please forgive me for any misinterpretations i make. and i’m sure someone else has already made these basic observations, so i apologize for saying less-well what others have already said i just have vehicle feels tonight)
Ooh stop driving me crazy with this Impala meta
Plus, I just… it’ meta about cars. What is this fandom?
(Also, is it just me or discussions about the Impala are a little sexy?)This is amazing. Love, love, love.
Just to add onto this: Like cowboys and their horses, in Supernatural, vehicles reflect the soul of their Hunters who drive them. Thus, Dean’s Impala is a handmade home on four wheels, a perfect contradiction of power and comfort, of beauty and durability, a confusing, wonderful marvel of masculine and feminine aesthetics. Gordon’s two-door coupe is a hot little thing, in a bold red color with no room for passengers; inside there is no clutter or trash, only tools so well-organized that it borders on obsessive-compulsiveness. Garth’s succession of junkers look goofy and rusted and on the whole ill-kept, until you realize the cars are actually so old they shouldn’t run, but Garth has somehow gotten them going again. Sam Campbell drives a van without windows, and who knows how many dark secrets lurk behind those doors? Kubrick drives a Winnebago, because of course he drives a fucking Winnebago. Dick Roman takes a corporate limousine, driven around by a lackey. And Sammy? Well, he steals a yellow Mustang, because of Yellow-Eyes and yellow hearts, and sunshine for the first time in his life, and a man too big for the horse he rides on, and let’s be real, what young boy hasn’t wanted to drive a Mustang?
And then there’s John, and his soulless, nameless truck. A vehicle created for function, not pleasure, with a cab situated so high off the road you can see the entire road, and yet feel disconnected from it at the same time. In a truck, there’s distance between the man and the road he takes, but not perspective. And that is John: All mission, no humanity; all distance and no perspective.
Okay, one last thing, I swear: the only other pick-up truck I can recall seeing on this show was the Racist Truck from “Route 666”. So. Yeah. Good company there, John.
(Source: abominationadoresangel)
Each character in a scene needs a goal. Obviously the main character’s goal is the most important, but every character should be aiming for something, and those goals should be acted on and in doing so affect one another.
This doesn’t just refer to the protagonist/antagonist relationship, it should be true of all characters in a scene.
Author’s Note: And now I give you, as a brief break from my meta series on Monsters, Humans, and Hunters, the following: This started as a paper for a gender and women’s studies class, and I’ve stripped it down to function more as meta and less as a works-cited academic-esque essay. (Admittedly, I wrote it on this subject because I couldn’t get out of meta mode; there was literally no other way for me to write this paper at this time.) I’m sure this has been examined before—I’ve seen a few posts floating around on the subject, especially in the wake of Samandriel’s torture scene in “Torn and Frayed” and that one tweet that Jim Michaels retracted—but I’m going to throw in my two cents, too. And a warning: I’m not going to include screenshots in this meta, but this is still an incredibly squicky, triggering subject for me, and I can only imagine that it is for a lot of you, too. I’m going to be describing pretty explicitly what goes on in these scenes to get at the core of the thing, so if you get triggered by the concept of sexualized violence, I would suggest not reading this. Chances are you already get my point, anyway.
Periodically—and inevitably, since the world of Supernatural is at a state of near-constant, grueling war between humanity and everything else—torture scenes occur. They seem almost formulaic in how they present: the men under the knife are left upright or at least sitting up, fully clothed, and never gagged, while the women are stripped naked and bound flat on their backs to a table. I’m thinking specifically, here, of Meg 2.0 in “Caged Heat”, and Ruby 2.0 in “Heaven and Hell”, versus Samandriel in “Torn and Frayed”, Alastair in “On the Head of a Pin”, and the Alpha Vamp in “Family Matters”. This isn’t an accident; nothing that formulaic is. And it is formulaic—the same leather straps are used to bind both Meg and Ruby, though Meg isn’t gagged; they’re positioned similarly, on nearly identical tables; if that isn’t formula, well…I don’t know what is.
“The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” - Mark Twain
There’s a lot said between Dean and Castiel in this episode. There’s honesty, and there’s trust. There’s help offered, and help given.
But nothing is more important than what they don’t say.
The bar scene has caught a lot of attention for a number of reasons: the arrow, targeted at Cas and shot right at him and Dean; a slightly different model of bow and arrow then angled at the bartender after Cupid has worked her own arrow magic (emphasizing the potential link); the explicit, surprise pairing of the two male hunters right in front of a watching Cas and Dean (romance number seventeen. our last and final); the romantic crooning in the background, the singer aching for a love that will soon be leaving and her resigned acceptance that there is nothing she can do about it.
This could all very well be relevant; the arrow matching is the most interesting, playing up the potential for foreshadowing in the hunter couple. The scene plays as a joke (not because they’re gay, but because all expectations are subverted, as we see by way of Dean), but the joke need not have been there at all. After all, this is the end of act one, in what we now know is a true three act structure. We’ve established the goal, and now we’re supposed to be seeing the true propulsive moments that will take us to act two—will take us someplace from which we can never go back. Also, it is the finale—we only have so much time.
Personally, though? What brings my attention back to this scene again and again is the way Carver teaches us all a lesson in the rightly timed pause: in listening not to the words, but to the silence, in a move oddly fitting in a finale with no resolutions but many reminders of those things that have gone unresolved.
Including them.
Caught wind of an open-discussion article that’s basically being dominated by casual heterosexists and decided NO SIR, THAT WILL NOT DO and brought some ship-free logic to dump on their heads. NB, it does lean on/reiterate a few other pre-existing meta posts by other fans. Reblarging here because why the hell not.
(Dean Winchester’s sexuality seems to have become a pet issue of mine lately. Pansexual mythology buff excited about the prospect of a lead character in his favourite paranormal show being revealed as canonically bi? Who’d’a thought!)
In discussing Dean’s sexuality you first have to understand that he’s the embodiment of several thematic forces in SPN: the ordinary human hero (vs Sam as the supernatural hero), the fixed underclass (vs Sam’s upward mobility and class-passing), practical/mechanical intelligence (vs Sam’s academic intelligence), the soldier/good son/Michael archetype (vs Sam as the individualist/rebellious son/Lucifer archetype), the nurturer/caregiver (vs Sam as the son/younger brother), and especially relevant to this article, traditionally masculine (vs Sam’s more modern sensitivity).
Now here’s the thing. SPN is extremely subversive when it comes to the examination of class and masculinity, and these two things are deeply intertwined.
Miss Korea 2013 is coming up. Look closely. This isn’t the same woman with different clothes and hair. It’s all the contestants for Miss Korea. Like this epic Reddit thread states, “Korea’s plastic surgery mayhem is finally converging on the same face.” Sure they’re all beautiful, in exactly the same ways though.
no matter what the academy has chosen, this is tonight’s best picture.
STAR TREK: INTO DAT ASS
