building bomb shelters under your skin
I can't stop listening to Daylight by Matt & Kim. It's a little gem of pure pop perfection and I can't get enough. Thank you to whoever it was I snagged it from (I feel like it was probably hackthis, since so much of the music I end up loving comes from her).
As a bonus, since I uploaded it for my niece, If I Can't Change Your Mind by Sugar, which is one of my all-time favorite songs. Also a gem of pure pop perfection.
***
Man, they should not let Kripke do commentaries by himself. My eyes glazed over about ten minutes in (on the upside, better than Joss's commentaries, which make me want to stab him in the face for being a smug bastard about ten minutes in). Also, maybe it's me, but they almost never say anything about the things I'm interested in, but if there's two of 'em, at least they can bounce off each other, get a little humorous dialogue going.
I was happy to hear Sera talk about giving Dean Trek references, but those go all the way back to season 1, where it's clear, a few episodes in, that both Sam and Dean are huge geeks. Dean just camouflages it better. Until he opens his mouth. But dammit, I really wanted an explanation of why Dean knows "The Suite Life of Zach and Cody," but Kripke was too busy yammering on about something else (okay, that may have been the spot where he was all, "Kurt Fuller is very tall! And it's not like Jensen is short! But Kurt is tall. though not as tall as Jared, our resident giant, who is so tall it boggles the mind!" Which I thought was adorable, even though I wanted the Zach and Cody explanation.) [Note: I only know who they are because I have nieces in the Disney demographic.]
I did do some rewatching over the weekend, and I've been reading other people's s4 rewatch posts, and trying to formulate some coherent thoughts of my own as NEW EPISODES APPROACH (47 hours!), and I've been meaning to talk to my brother - as some of you may know, he was for many years a substance abuse counselor, working with heroin addicts (he's in hospital administration now, so he no longer works hands on with clients, but still! fantastic resource!) - about how to articulate my feelings about Sam's character arc (and how to write this story I want to write), because they are exceptionally complicated, and I keep getting tangled up in my head about it, because, well, the addiction thing muddies the waters terribly.
I posted this in esorlehcar's comments earlier today, and well, I'm exhausted, so it's very rambly, and could probably be more articulate and coherent, and I've added stuff that wasn't in the original comment, so uh, I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense:
I found Sam's head really hard to get into this past season. I rewatched Mystery Spot, Jus in Bello and No Rest for the Wicked last night, and it's SO CLEAR that from MS on that he's just BATSHIT INSANE. He's completely willing to go drain some random person of blood to save Dean in MS, and that's before he figures out Bobby is actually the Trickster. (I'm pretty sure it wasn't intentional, but nice foreshadowing of poor Cindy McClellan's sacrifice there.)
I think there are a number of reasons why I had such a hard time getting my head around his storyline:
1. the addiction thing is rarely handled well on television and it brings with it such a mess of complications that there's no real way the show can address them in the detail they require;
2. this is a Doylist problem, but coming at the show using a different moral framework where Sam's powers "shouldn't" be evil, because power is a tool and how you use it is what's important (e.g., the Jossian view of being unwillingly infected by demon blood) and so fighting the text on that point until it can't be fought, but until that point, there was no real clear indication as to WHY the powers were problematic (clearly, Sam is off the deep end - referring to Adam as "meat" was certainly an eyeopener - but we don't know how much of that hardness was grief/desperation, how much it was the addiction, and how much the exercise of the powers themselves - the waters are really muddy there and I get all tangled up and confused every time I try to sort it out, because part of me is very much sympathetic to Dean's inability to trust Sam in WtLB - because he's an addict and he's basically high right there, though if the demon blood acts more like a steroid than a narcotic - what are the differences between those sorts of addictions? I'm pretty sure I've discussed that at some point, but you can see how easily I spin off into tangents when I start talking about this);
3. if the angels turned out to be evil, which, well, they did, then how much of what we've been told about Sam's powers is actually true? Is it the exercise of the powers that made his eyes turn black, or the surfeit of demon blood he drank? (For comparison, Jake's eyes spark yellow in AHBL2 when he uses the telecoercion on Ellen; as far as we know, Azazel never fed him any more demon blood than the first few drops as a baby, and per Ruby, there was no need [which we knew from Ava and Jake's first hand testimony - it really *was* like flipping a switch for them, which is in direct contradiction to what Ruby tells Sam in NRftW]) How can we believe anything any of the angels told Dean? Castiel was being fed the company line for a long time before he was clued into the truth (and even then, he toed it nearly to the end) - the only one who might have been shooting straight was Anna, and now she's been sent to angel camp, so who knows? (I mean, I'm sure Zachariah said some things that were true, but aside from admitting to wanting the apocalypse to start and for Dean to fight for the angels, we can't believe anything he's said [except for the part about how Dean will always find hunting Sam in the dark - that was true, but I'm sure he didn't care one way or the other whether it was or not]).
and now I am completely turned around because Lucifer Rising really did put a whole new spin on so much of season 4, and previous seasons as well (in terms of Ruby especially).
But really, I think it comes down to perception - Dean sold his soul and so all in one go he died and went to hell, and we can't really comprehend that. 30 years of torture and then 10 more as a torturer - that just doesn't process, so it's really easy to be like, "oh, Dean! how he suffered!" (and I am as guilty of this as anyone), whereas Sam - Sam sold his soul piece by painful piece, out of the same exact grief and desperation as Dean, but because his was extended over the course of 16 months (longer, if you count the three months of Tuesdays and six months post-Wednesday in Mystery Spot), and we actually SAW HIM drinking blood and sneaking around with Ruby and incurring a human cost, etc., it's a lot harder to forgive.
Sam was in hell as much as Dean was, but because he wasn't literally in hell, it's a lot easier for us to hold him accountable, but he was already broken and being without Dean completely shattered him and he held himself together the only way he could - like John, he was fueled by anger and vengeance, but unlike his father, he didn't have two little boys to hold him back from some of the darker, uglier places anger and vengeance can take a man.
They were both lying to each other almost from the moment Dean got back, it's just that Sam's lies seemed to have more direct impact on what was actually happening in the narrative present, so they feel like a bigger betrayal, even though they're really not. After some early attempts to reconnect with Dean, who was still shut down tighter than a drum due to his post-hell trauma, Sam stops trying, mostly because he's got Dean telling him GOD wants him to stop using his powers, which he only started using in order to HELP DEAN (and AVENGE him when helping seemed impossible). So I totally understand why Sam's not real receptive to Dean's eventual attempts at reconnecting.
There's also so much about how Ruby played Sam, how she knew exactly which weaknesses to exploit, that his pride and his need to forge his identity as different/separate/better, in combination with his guilt over being the reason Dean ended up in hell, and his complete inability to stop that from happening, and his anger, because while Dean's anger is almost always inner-directed (at himself), Sam's is lashing out and spraying everyone in the vicinity (himself included) with shrapnel. They're very much the same, but different. (If I could do it without degenerating into pointless vituperative fuming, I would compare how both Ruby and Castiel knew exactly which points to apply pressure to to make Sam and Dean more receptive to their various blandishments, and how Castiel screwed Dean over nearly as much as Ruby screwed Sam, but uh, that way lies madness.)
Compounding the problem, we were very rarely in Sam's head this season, so we were mostly seeing things from Dean's POV and Dean was scared and hurt and angry and in completely over his head and not ready to cut Sam any of the slack he needed.
Like I said, I don't even know if this makes sense. I am still trying to get my brain wrapped around it.
But I am really hoping they do something interesting with all this stuff they've got build up for Sam.
***
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/66095.html.
people have commented there.
As a bonus, since I uploaded it for my niece, If I Can't Change Your Mind by Sugar, which is one of my all-time favorite songs. Also a gem of pure pop perfection.
***
Man, they should not let Kripke do commentaries by himself. My eyes glazed over about ten minutes in (on the upside, better than Joss's commentaries, which make me want to stab him in the face for being a smug bastard about ten minutes in). Also, maybe it's me, but they almost never say anything about the things I'm interested in, but if there's two of 'em, at least they can bounce off each other, get a little humorous dialogue going.
I was happy to hear Sera talk about giving Dean Trek references, but those go all the way back to season 1, where it's clear, a few episodes in, that both Sam and Dean are huge geeks. Dean just camouflages it better. Until he opens his mouth. But dammit, I really wanted an explanation of why Dean knows "The Suite Life of Zach and Cody," but Kripke was too busy yammering on about something else (okay, that may have been the spot where he was all, "Kurt Fuller is very tall! And it's not like Jensen is short! But Kurt is tall. though not as tall as Jared, our resident giant, who is so tall it boggles the mind!" Which I thought was adorable, even though I wanted the Zach and Cody explanation.) [Note: I only know who they are because I have nieces in the Disney demographic.]
I did do some rewatching over the weekend, and I've been reading other people's s4 rewatch posts, and trying to formulate some coherent thoughts of my own as NEW EPISODES APPROACH (47 hours!), and I've been meaning to talk to my brother - as some of you may know, he was for many years a substance abuse counselor, working with heroin addicts (he's in hospital administration now, so he no longer works hands on with clients, but still! fantastic resource!) - about how to articulate my feelings about Sam's character arc (and how to write this story I want to write), because they are exceptionally complicated, and I keep getting tangled up in my head about it, because, well, the addiction thing muddies the waters terribly.
I posted this in esorlehcar's comments earlier today, and well, I'm exhausted, so it's very rambly, and could probably be more articulate and coherent, and I've added stuff that wasn't in the original comment, so uh, I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense:
I found Sam's head really hard to get into this past season. I rewatched Mystery Spot, Jus in Bello and No Rest for the Wicked last night, and it's SO CLEAR that from MS on that he's just BATSHIT INSANE. He's completely willing to go drain some random person of blood to save Dean in MS, and that's before he figures out Bobby is actually the Trickster. (I'm pretty sure it wasn't intentional, but nice foreshadowing of poor Cindy McClellan's sacrifice there.)
I think there are a number of reasons why I had such a hard time getting my head around his storyline:
1. the addiction thing is rarely handled well on television and it brings with it such a mess of complications that there's no real way the show can address them in the detail they require;
2. this is a Doylist problem, but coming at the show using a different moral framework where Sam's powers "shouldn't" be evil, because power is a tool and how you use it is what's important (e.g., the Jossian view of being unwillingly infected by demon blood) and so fighting the text on that point until it can't be fought, but until that point, there was no real clear indication as to WHY the powers were problematic (clearly, Sam is off the deep end - referring to Adam as "meat" was certainly an eyeopener - but we don't know how much of that hardness was grief/desperation, how much it was the addiction, and how much the exercise of the powers themselves - the waters are really muddy there and I get all tangled up and confused every time I try to sort it out, because part of me is very much sympathetic to Dean's inability to trust Sam in WtLB - because he's an addict and he's basically high right there, though if the demon blood acts more like a steroid than a narcotic - what are the differences between those sorts of addictions? I'm pretty sure I've discussed that at some point, but you can see how easily I spin off into tangents when I start talking about this);
3. if the angels turned out to be evil, which, well, they did, then how much of what we've been told about Sam's powers is actually true? Is it the exercise of the powers that made his eyes turn black, or the surfeit of demon blood he drank? (For comparison, Jake's eyes spark yellow in AHBL2 when he uses the telecoercion on Ellen; as far as we know, Azazel never fed him any more demon blood than the first few drops as a baby, and per Ruby, there was no need [which we knew from Ava and Jake's first hand testimony - it really *was* like flipping a switch for them, which is in direct contradiction to what Ruby tells Sam in NRftW]) How can we believe anything any of the angels told Dean? Castiel was being fed the company line for a long time before he was clued into the truth (and even then, he toed it nearly to the end) - the only one who might have been shooting straight was Anna, and now she's been sent to angel camp, so who knows? (I mean, I'm sure Zachariah said some things that were true, but aside from admitting to wanting the apocalypse to start and for Dean to fight for the angels, we can't believe anything he's said [except for the part about how Dean will always find hunting Sam in the dark - that was true, but I'm sure he didn't care one way or the other whether it was or not]).
and now I am completely turned around because Lucifer Rising really did put a whole new spin on so much of season 4, and previous seasons as well (in terms of Ruby especially).
But really, I think it comes down to perception - Dean sold his soul and so all in one go he died and went to hell, and we can't really comprehend that. 30 years of torture and then 10 more as a torturer - that just doesn't process, so it's really easy to be like, "oh, Dean! how he suffered!" (and I am as guilty of this as anyone), whereas Sam - Sam sold his soul piece by painful piece, out of the same exact grief and desperation as Dean, but because his was extended over the course of 16 months (longer, if you count the three months of Tuesdays and six months post-Wednesday in Mystery Spot), and we actually SAW HIM drinking blood and sneaking around with Ruby and incurring a human cost, etc., it's a lot harder to forgive.
Sam was in hell as much as Dean was, but because he wasn't literally in hell, it's a lot easier for us to hold him accountable, but he was already broken and being without Dean completely shattered him and he held himself together the only way he could - like John, he was fueled by anger and vengeance, but unlike his father, he didn't have two little boys to hold him back from some of the darker, uglier places anger and vengeance can take a man.
They were both lying to each other almost from the moment Dean got back, it's just that Sam's lies seemed to have more direct impact on what was actually happening in the narrative present, so they feel like a bigger betrayal, even though they're really not. After some early attempts to reconnect with Dean, who was still shut down tighter than a drum due to his post-hell trauma, Sam stops trying, mostly because he's got Dean telling him GOD wants him to stop using his powers, which he only started using in order to HELP DEAN (and AVENGE him when helping seemed impossible). So I totally understand why Sam's not real receptive to Dean's eventual attempts at reconnecting.
There's also so much about how Ruby played Sam, how she knew exactly which weaknesses to exploit, that his pride and his need to forge his identity as different/separate/better, in combination with his guilt over being the reason Dean ended up in hell, and his complete inability to stop that from happening, and his anger, because while Dean's anger is almost always inner-directed (at himself), Sam's is lashing out and spraying everyone in the vicinity (himself included) with shrapnel. They're very much the same, but different. (If I could do it without degenerating into pointless vituperative fuming, I would compare how both Ruby and Castiel knew exactly which points to apply pressure to to make Sam and Dean more receptive to their various blandishments, and how Castiel screwed Dean over nearly as much as Ruby screwed Sam, but uh, that way lies madness.)
Compounding the problem, we were very rarely in Sam's head this season, so we were mostly seeing things from Dean's POV and Dean was scared and hurt and angry and in completely over his head and not ready to cut Sam any of the slack he needed.
Like I said, I don't even know if this makes sense. I am still trying to get my brain wrapped around it.
But I am really hoping they do something interesting with all this stuff they've got build up for Sam.
***
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/66095.html.
people have commented there.