[art] Art for Made of Earth by breebree16 for dc_dystopia
Title: Art for Made of Earth
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters/Pairings: Dean, Lisa; gen
Genres: art
Media: Traditional: pencil, watercolor
Rating: PG
Fic Masterpost: here @ in_the_tree
Notes: This post contains spoilers for the fic. Also, it’s like 3AM and I’m super tired, so please excuse my commentary if it’s a little lackluster.
“Angels?” Mary had told Dean all about angels and God. Told him that the angels were watching over him, over Sam. But then she died and Dean didn’t think the angels had ever been there.
“They talk to me. Not all the time, but enough.” He spoke like it was nothing. It was possible, Dean supposed, that Castiel was a prophet or something like that, someone chosen to hear angels and the messages of God. He was named after an angel, his brothers and sister too. “They say that it’s okay, Dean.” He turned his head.
“What is?” Dean knew, but couldn’t say it.
“That I love you.”
Dean’s face threw hot and his cheeks pink. No one outside of Mom and Sam said that they loved him. All he got from his father was, I’m proud of you, watch out for Sam. It was hard to say it too, with his mother gone. It didn’t feel the same, dry in his mouth.
“It’s okay if you don’t love me back,” Cas continued.
“No.” Dean scratched at his head. “It’s just that…you know that we can’t.” Not with the new decency laws. With the ads that said men were men, women were women and men and women married each other, had kids and anything outside of that was deviant, unnatural. Wrong. Not like when they were kids and it was okay, when Mary had Dean and Sam out for the afternoon, pushing Sammy in a stroller and they saw two women holding hands on a park bench. They kissed and looked at each other the way John and Mary did. No one said anything, not a word. But now, now they would be arrested and ‘fixed’.
Cas nodded and swallowed. “I know. But, I thought you should know that the angels say it’s fine.”
What first struck me about this fic was the nature of the dystopic society: there’s a sense that the government constructs utopia as a “normal” society, one in which everyone is heterosexual, cisgender, and neurotypical. Anything outside of that is criminalized and “fixed”, but the tragedy is that the attempts to fix these perceived problems end up being oppressive and end up generating even more problems.
This particular scene struck me with the way Cas and Dean contrast with each other: Cas is open about his sexuality, about the beginnings of what appears to be a struggle with hallucinations, whereas Dean struggles constantly throughout the entire story to accept both his feelings for Cas and Lisa’s loss. There’s also the contrast between the openness and what feels like the true utopia that’s in Dean’s past, which is an idea that’s revisited when Dean and Cas go back to Cas’s old home and sort of act out this life that they once, in the past, could have had, but now can’t have.
So with this piece of art, I wanted to capture the openness that marked Dean’s youth with the transition into the more hardened vantage point that he’s at in his teens/in the present timeline of the story.
This illustration isn’t an illustration of one scene per se, but rather a composite of a number of scenes: the scene describing Lisa in her yellow dress on the mortuary table; the image of Lisa drowned in the river; the image at the end of Dean and Cas on the snowy banks of the river as Cas forces Dean to confront Lisa’s suicide. The reference to Ophelia is intentional and pretty obvious. :P
A common storyline running through Made of Earth was the way the female characters suffer as a result of the way this dystopic society is structured. In the beginning, we have Mrs. Milton; the news of Michael’s death flung her into grief, which was then “cured”-except the “cure” left her hollow and empty, and this foreshadowed what would eventually happen to Lisa and set out this dark mood that persists through the rest of the story.
You also have the story of Lisa and Dean’s relationship as an undercurrent to Dean and Cas’s relationship: Dean did truly love Lisa, and he struggles with his lasting grief over her even while his relationship with Cas deepens. breebree16 does a great job of showing Lisa’s bright personality, and the slow build of Dean and Lisa’s relationship makes Lisa’s struggle with post-partum depression that much more heartbreaking, and the eventual “fix” that leads to her suicide more tragic.
And then there’s Anna. Marriages in this society are arranged. Anna is stuck in a functional but unhappy marriage with Crowley; she sacrifices her own feelings to maintain an image that exudes class and luxury, but, ultimately, it’s for Crowley’s benefit and to save face for him, and she feels like little more than a trophy or an accessory. We get that tension when we see Anna’s concern over Cas-her worry and emotion-in contrast with the way she interacts with Crowley.
In the end, the only female character who has any sort of happy storyline is Jess, who gradually develops a relationship with Sam. But, since marriages are arranged in this society, I was left wondering if this was really a relationship that would have a happy ending, or whether the mechanics of the laws meant that Sam and Jess likely would not be married.
Ultimately, what I wanted to capture with the Lisa illustration was one of the broader themes that I pulled from Made of Earth: that a society that adheres to strict gender roles disenfranchises and is especially harmful to women, and that, more broadly, this attempt to regulate and police normality ends up harming more than it heals. So, in a sense, Lisa in this image isn’t meant to be just Lisa, but a representation of all the victims throughout the story of the dystopia.
Initial experimentation with watercolor/a sort of thumbnail sketch before I did the second piece.
Thanks for looking ♥ I highly recommend the fic; I just love the slow build of all the relationships in the story and the exploration of the various themes that breebree16 delves into. Ultimately-and this is probably just my own interpretation-I felt like the fic stuck with me because it felt like a commentary on our own society as it is right now: What would present-day American society look like if taken to the extreme? So I felt like the whole story was a subtle criticism of certain prevailing trains of thought that run through American politics.
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters/Pairings: Dean, Lisa; gen
Genres: art
Media: Traditional: pencil, watercolor
Rating: PG
Fic Masterpost: here @ in_the_tree
Notes: This post contains spoilers for the fic. Also, it’s like 3AM and I’m super tired, so please excuse my commentary if it’s a little lackluster.
“Angels?” Mary had told Dean all about angels and God. Told him that the angels were watching over him, over Sam. But then she died and Dean didn’t think the angels had ever been there.
“They talk to me. Not all the time, but enough.” He spoke like it was nothing. It was possible, Dean supposed, that Castiel was a prophet or something like that, someone chosen to hear angels and the messages of God. He was named after an angel, his brothers and sister too. “They say that it’s okay, Dean.” He turned his head.
“What is?” Dean knew, but couldn’t say it.
“That I love you.”
Dean’s face threw hot and his cheeks pink. No one outside of Mom and Sam said that they loved him. All he got from his father was, I’m proud of you, watch out for Sam. It was hard to say it too, with his mother gone. It didn’t feel the same, dry in his mouth.
“It’s okay if you don’t love me back,” Cas continued.
“No.” Dean scratched at his head. “It’s just that…you know that we can’t.” Not with the new decency laws. With the ads that said men were men, women were women and men and women married each other, had kids and anything outside of that was deviant, unnatural. Wrong. Not like when they were kids and it was okay, when Mary had Dean and Sam out for the afternoon, pushing Sammy in a stroller and they saw two women holding hands on a park bench. They kissed and looked at each other the way John and Mary did. No one said anything, not a word. But now, now they would be arrested and ‘fixed’.
Cas nodded and swallowed. “I know. But, I thought you should know that the angels say it’s fine.”
What first struck me about this fic was the nature of the dystopic society: there’s a sense that the government constructs utopia as a “normal” society, one in which everyone is heterosexual, cisgender, and neurotypical. Anything outside of that is criminalized and “fixed”, but the tragedy is that the attempts to fix these perceived problems end up being oppressive and end up generating even more problems.
This particular scene struck me with the way Cas and Dean contrast with each other: Cas is open about his sexuality, about the beginnings of what appears to be a struggle with hallucinations, whereas Dean struggles constantly throughout the entire story to accept both his feelings for Cas and Lisa’s loss. There’s also the contrast between the openness and what feels like the true utopia that’s in Dean’s past, which is an idea that’s revisited when Dean and Cas go back to Cas’s old home and sort of act out this life that they once, in the past, could have had, but now can’t have.
So with this piece of art, I wanted to capture the openness that marked Dean’s youth with the transition into the more hardened vantage point that he’s at in his teens/in the present timeline of the story.
This illustration isn’t an illustration of one scene per se, but rather a composite of a number of scenes: the scene describing Lisa in her yellow dress on the mortuary table; the image of Lisa drowned in the river; the image at the end of Dean and Cas on the snowy banks of the river as Cas forces Dean to confront Lisa’s suicide. The reference to Ophelia is intentional and pretty obvious. :P
A common storyline running through Made of Earth was the way the female characters suffer as a result of the way this dystopic society is structured. In the beginning, we have Mrs. Milton; the news of Michael’s death flung her into grief, which was then “cured”-except the “cure” left her hollow and empty, and this foreshadowed what would eventually happen to Lisa and set out this dark mood that persists through the rest of the story.
You also have the story of Lisa and Dean’s relationship as an undercurrent to Dean and Cas’s relationship: Dean did truly love Lisa, and he struggles with his lasting grief over her even while his relationship with Cas deepens. breebree16 does a great job of showing Lisa’s bright personality, and the slow build of Dean and Lisa’s relationship makes Lisa’s struggle with post-partum depression that much more heartbreaking, and the eventual “fix” that leads to her suicide more tragic.
And then there’s Anna. Marriages in this society are arranged. Anna is stuck in a functional but unhappy marriage with Crowley; she sacrifices her own feelings to maintain an image that exudes class and luxury, but, ultimately, it’s for Crowley’s benefit and to save face for him, and she feels like little more than a trophy or an accessory. We get that tension when we see Anna’s concern over Cas-her worry and emotion-in contrast with the way she interacts with Crowley.
In the end, the only female character who has any sort of happy storyline is Jess, who gradually develops a relationship with Sam. But, since marriages are arranged in this society, I was left wondering if this was really a relationship that would have a happy ending, or whether the mechanics of the laws meant that Sam and Jess likely would not be married.
Ultimately, what I wanted to capture with the Lisa illustration was one of the broader themes that I pulled from Made of Earth: that a society that adheres to strict gender roles disenfranchises and is especially harmful to women, and that, more broadly, this attempt to regulate and police normality ends up harming more than it heals. So, in a sense, Lisa in this image isn’t meant to be just Lisa, but a representation of all the victims throughout the story of the dystopia.
Initial experimentation with watercolor/a sort of thumbnail sketch before I did the second piece.
Thanks for looking ♥ I highly recommend the fic; I just love the slow build of all the relationships in the story and the exploration of the various themes that breebree16 delves into. Ultimately-and this is probably just my own interpretation-I felt like the fic stuck with me because it felt like a commentary on our own society as it is right now: What would present-day American society look like if taken to the extreme? So I felt like the whole story was a subtle criticism of certain prevailing trains of thought that run through American politics.