my collected wit and wisdom, or something!

[pocochina]

I realized last night that while I've mostly stuck to my designation of Tumblr as being for bookmarking and sassy tagging of graphics while journaling is for thoughts. But sometimes those posts turn into short but substantive discussions, and I'd rather have them here.

one about why I hate the concept and the other about the Dove campaign

"It’s the

Comments

[percysowner]

Oh Lilith and the treatment of all demons on this show makes me crazy! They take people and torture them into insanity to the point where (in the early seasons) they didn't even remember being human, then that changed. AND these tortured, traumatized souls then get to be killed and tortured with impunity because they are "evil". I know it was a "cool" idea when they decided that demons had once been people, but I will forever be uncomfortable about it. If they had ever come up with a plan to fix the demons, I would have been okay, but right now, they are just the scapegoats of the show. The really sad thing is, we have never seen a human go to Hell because they had done evil things on earth. In a conversation between Raphael and Castiel it was pretty stated that as long as bad people were "devoted" heaven took them. The only ones who go to Hell are ones who made a deal. The deals we have seen made are 1) John to save Dean 2) Dean to save Sam 3) Robert Johnson for talent 4) The Doctor in Cross Road Blues again for talent and probably success 5) The unseen architect in CRB for talent and success 6) The painter in CRB for talent 7) Evan in CRB to save his wife's life 8) Bella to save herself from sexual abuse and 9) Crowley for "a few extra inches". Basically close to half of the people who made deals did so to save someone's life or in total self protection. So most of the deals we have seen are not things people would be condemned to torture for. Heck even the selfish deals were not anything that really warrant the punishment.

So not only is Lucifer not held responsible for what he did to Lilith, the angels do nothing to stop Lucifer from getting power, and harming human souls and in spite of Dean going through the exact same torture the show demonstrates no compassion for the people the demons once were.

[pocochina]

So most of the deals we have seen are not things people would be condemned to torture for. Heck even the selfish deals were not anything that really warrant the punishment.

I actually was fascinated at and pretty okay with how demons were handled in S3 because it was so unfair and amoral. You know? Shit just happens, and sometimes people think that shit makes them a bad person and so they start doing bad things until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I think that is a story that can have a lot of nuance - when someone becomes a danger because of events that weren't their fault, how do you deal with them?

Except I feel like that happens from so deep in the Winchester perspective, where It's All About Me and Must Not Admit Weakness and blah blah blah, so that we don't ever get anyone pointing out that whatever else the victim responded with afterwards, the crossroads demons were going around making people OFFERS THEY CAN'T REFUSE. To me, it's just entirely too close to how nobody in S5 points out that the angels' version of "consent" does not actually resemble consent in any meaningful sense. There's just this unspoken acceptance of victim-blaming which is seriously, seriously disturbing. Bad shit happens around demons, they're associated with badness, so if we care at all about what kind of people they were we assume they were bad.

But then S4 hits and the angels start in with the "righteous man" thing, which I do think is terrible, because it implicitly accepts that everyone else in there was NOT righteous - tainted, evil, they deserved to be there. With the whole picture, I can kind of handwave it by saying the angels made that up because they knew weak praise like "Chosen One" wasn't going to satiate Dean's ego enough to get him to cooperate, so the highly normative "righteous man" language it was. But that..was not resolved to my satisfaction in S5. (S5 is narratively okay but philosophically APPALLING.)

So not only is Lucifer not held responsible for what he did to Lilith, the angels do nothing to stop Lucifer from getting power, and harming human souls and in spite of Dean going through the exact same torture the show demonstrates no compassion for the people the demons once were.

Yeah. Lucifer's not the only one trying to dodge some of his responsibility for the shit hitting the fan. He's the only one who takes any ownership of it at all, however complicit they all were.