lunabee34

Y'all I am sick. Bad sick. I have been using AN INHALER!!! My mouth tastes like Aqua Net. I have been drinking cough syrup (that is BANANA FLAVORED WTF?) into which my pharmacist has clearly ground seventy million Lortab. Poorly. Yum, crunchy.

And yet, I must post, as sickly and weak and *cough cough* miserable as I am because

WTF, SPN FANDOM?

It has come to my attention (although I have not yet gone to read the primary texts, as it were) that the latest episode of SPN, "The Monster at the End of the Book," has made a certain segment of SPN fandom very, very upset.

I do not understand this. At all. Although perhaps it is because I am drunk on codeine. *shrugs*

This is the episode about US, people. And I'm not talking about Sam and Dean acknowledging fanfiction and reader-response to their lives and slash and Wincest (although, dude? Pretty fricking sweet. And if Dean saying ew to Wincest has your panties in a twist, grow up, sweetpea. What did you expect him to say on network TV? He didn't say, "Ew, fanfic," or "Ew, same sex." He said, "Ew to do the Dew with you, Sammy." If we cannot work around this one utterance by Dean about the potential of having sex with his brother, then WE HAVE FAILED, OH FANDOM. FAILED IN OUR VERY MISSION. WHICH IS TAKING SHOW, WHATEVER IT MAY BE, AND GIVING THE WORLD MORE OF OR MORE FROM (thank you, Democratic Genre). I think that pretty much every single piece of SPN fanfic I've ever written can survive intact no matter what Dean said in this episode. It took him three seconds to say. And then it was done. It wasn't belabored and I don't think it was dismissive either. I think it was the only real avenue for the show to publicly acknowledge what a preponderance of its internet fans are doing without ending up a segment on Fox News. "We know what you kids are doing" *wink wink* "and we can't say it's cool because, dude, incest, but soldier on fans. Soldier on."

So yes. Not that.

This episode is about Chuck, the writer. He doesn't make things happen. No. ~~Kripke~~ God does that. But Chuck gets the words. The beautiful, heartrending, funny, scary words. What's happened (canon) has happened, but he chooses the words that describe it. He gets to take the bare bones of Sam and Dean's lives and he gets to build that animal, sentence by sentence, until it is whole.

He also speaks very cogently to the damage we put the characters we love through. "The beatings alone," Chuck says. And YES! It's worth a moment's pause to consider what we as writers inflict on the bodies and the psyches of the characters we write. This is layered, really fricking layered, meta-commentary, the kind I expect to see

executrix writing.

And for forty minutes, y'all, *we* were written into the story. We were characters, right alongside Chuck. Like him, we are helpless to stop what is coming, what Kripke or Gamble or whoever will write. We're just along for the ride and trying our best to fix (or elaborate or merely extend) whatever the PTB may throw our boys' way.

I think this was one of the most loving episodes I have ever seen directed towards fans. That publisher that Sam and Dean press for Edlund's real identity? She put her finger right on the pulse of it, my friend. What gets us in the gut about this show, about *our boys* (and has any television character ever spoken truer?)--their self-sacrifice, their loss, their bravery, the WAY THEY LOVE EACH OTHER SO FUCKING MUCH!!!!!!!!!! She is us, with our dogeared copies of the SPN comics and all of

destina's fic saved to our hard drives and the little Impala we've been knitting in the empty hours when SGA would have aired. This woman is not poking fun at us. She is grinning at us and crooking her finger and saying, "So what song do you think they should use next? I'm leaning towards 'Killer Queen.'"

So, finally, for my subject line. This episode reminded me so much of what Remix is all about. The way we as remixers take what's there (whether it's canon or fanfic) and we rail against it in a multiplicity of ways. We park the Impala and we take Sammy's laptop and we order the tofu burger and in the end, it's a Hail Mary. We close our eyes and we take it on faith and we write ourselves a new goddamned ending (*totally kissing Castiel right now*) and it *works*. We circumvent TPTB. We have the power. (There is even a Remix fic written by

wisdomeagle with the same title as this episode, all about the complicity of fandom with the pain of the characters it adores and the power we have (or don't) to control their fates. It is, frankly, awesome.)

But like Chuck, we're a closed circuit. We can't affect canon. We can't save Sam and Dean, not for real, no matter how hard we try. The metaphor is excellent, my friends and it is love. I am so damned surprised that anyone has read it as anything other than such.

Long. Long. Those deer you see are hmmmmmmmmmmmm....... teal?

*hack hack*

Was that a double entendre?