my kids used to burst into tears whenever they saw Steve Van Zandt

( One line, pretty much contextless, from tonight's SPN. )

As far as I'm concerned, my crossover OTP is pretty much canon.

ETA: AND ( spoiler ) So I am pretty pleased by this episode on the whole. Not pleased enough to start watching again, but pretty pleased.

ETA2: Apparently they changed the title to this episode at the last minute; speculation is that they couldn't get the rights to whatever it was originally supposed to be. If they couldn't get the rights to that, then they definitely couldn't have gotten the rights to this, but I still maintain that "Man, That Was All She Wrote" would've been the best possible title for this episode, especially given that the last person we see is ( spoiler )

Haha, it's storming? What? IDEK. There is definitely thunder and lightning, though. Excellent.

I haven't watched SPN tonight, and I'm spoiled for a couple of things but not for everything, so please do not spoil me further. Except for one question -- does ( character ) survive? I'd heard spoilers for deaths that made me guess no, then I heard something that made me assume yes, and then I heard more rumors that made me wonder again. I want to know just how much I'm going to need to drink before I watch.

I don't know why I'm even asking, because let's face it, there is only ever one answer to the question "does this episode of SPN feature misogyny?", it's just a question of whether the women involved are going to be brutally killed, sexually objectified, infantilized and in need of rescue, or some combination of the three.

Oh, fuck you, FlashForward, ( spoilers for that and SPN )

Seriously, though, ten bucks says the show ends with ( spec, but maybe spoilery? )

I'm kind of loving the casefile. I miss those.

( 5.05 liveblogging )

Also, ( speculation; general spoilers for this entire season ) I'd sort of thought this was just a joke me and inlovewithnight were making, about ( purely spec, but I guess it's spoilery in context ), but now I've seen other people -- who take the show a lot more seriously than I do, and aren't overinvested in that character -- speculating on something similar so I don't even know.

And then there was a commercial for the gubernatorial candidate who's made a career of voting down equal pay for women, making it harder to get abortions in Virginia, and advocating against birth control. I am morbidly amused by how well the VA Republican party has chosen the timeslot for these ads.

i. So when Sam and Ruby have sex, fandom screams about how it's rape (and all the blame is only on her), but when ( spoilery for last night's episode ), no one bats an eyelash? Oh, wait, right, ( spoiler )

ii. My polybigbang story seems to have grown another 3.5k in the course of yesterday alone. What. On the bright side, watching a bunch of BtVS S7 has helped me get a better grasp on what Buffy's role in the story is, and how she should be talking/acting, and what makes her special (as compared to John and Castiel, whom, being from the show I've been mainlining the past couple of months, I have a better handle on in terms of where they're going and what they fear/want). I also yammered with inlovewithnight about it a lot, which probably helped.

iii. I seem to be one of the few people in SPN fandom who liked Cassie (and liked her with Dean, shock and horror), so I was really excited to find a rec for Cassie fic on my flist yesterday: Crazy Circles, gen about what she does after "Route 666".

(That also reminds me -- I'm sure anyone who's interested in Cassie will have read this already, but just in case someone hasn't, Lacuna is just stunning. I was skeptical when I saw that it was in second person, but stuck with it, and I'm so glad I did.)

iv. Okay, fine, I'm going to go work out now, stop yelling at me, flist. Geez.

Wait, did -- did Supernatural just go an episode without ( spoilers )

It really is the apocalypse, clearly.

As for the ending, I would be a lot more worried if this were not REALLY CLEARLY going to be fixed by, idk, the end of the next episode. Seriously, people, chill; I will be shocked if ( spoiler ) lasts until November sweeps. Sign up here and if it's not fixed by Thanksgiving I will make you an icon of any subject you choose.

i. I'm not dead! I just don't have a whole lot to say, or didn't until today. I think the only entry I'd started prior to today was complaining about how much I hate Twittinesis, LoudTwitter, and anything else that crossposts tweets to LJ. I HATE THEM SO MUCH YOU GUYS. If I wanted to read tweets I would use my Twitter account more than once every six weeks or so. There was a CSS tweak that allowed me to collapse LT posts to just empty posts, but then LT went down for a bit and people started using Twittinesis and I haven't been able to figure out how to remove or collapse those posts from my flist yet.

ii. Mom and I finally got S4 of SPN! This means that (after this month, which is crazy-busy with writing and new-job-background-check stuff) I can make that "Thunder Road" vid about John and Mary at long last, and explain the show I am watching, which is a mini-series entitled The Tragedy of John and Mary, and sometimes I tune in with mild interest for the spin-off about their kids.

First of all, Dean Winchester and I have the same cell phone. Given that the first two ringtones I got with it were the intros to "Rosalita" and "Back In Black", this troubles me.

I'm so proud of my mother, dudes. In the first episode, ( is this still stuff that needs to be spoiler-cut? IDK. ) :D? :D?

:(

iii. On that note, over the course of the past few months, there've been a few *Fail-reaction-posts along the lines of how all of us folks who want to talk about problematic aspects of our entertainment are ruining the fun of fandom. I have a few thoughts on that:

1. I have said this so many times and apparently fandom does not get it, which I guess is fair because I didn't get it for a long time, either: it is entirely possible to enjoy something and still find it, or aspects of it, problematic and worth criticizing. I dislike a lot of aspects of shows I watch, or books I read, or movies I see, but I enjoy a lot of other aspects of them, and that's why I keep watching/reading/seeing them.
   
   
2. No one is forcing anyone to talk about anything that they don't want to in their journals. I do not judge anyone for just being here for the lulz/sparkly ponies/whatever, and thus for not getting involved in a lot of srs bzns discussion. I certainly don't think anyone's stupid for not getting involved in whatever srs bzns discussion fandom is having now; lord knows I don't think of myself as an aca-fen if only because I am terrible at being an academic anything. But...
   
   
3. You know what ruins my fun? Knowing that, for example, if I were a character on Supernatural the only thing I'd get to do would be to die horribly, because my options on that show, being a lady-type, would be helpless victim or an evil bitch. Srs bzns ruins your fun, fair enough, but being marginalized ruins my fun, and we each have the same right to complain about that in our own journals.
   
   
4. I definitely understand feeling intimidated/alienated by academic language. As far as I can tell, that's part of the point of academese. But if you want to join the discussion anyway, you can do that! You don't have to go super-academic to talk about stuff that you find problematic. You can just say "look, X rubbed me the wrong way". Even following that up with "for Y and Z reasons" is optional; it's your journal. Heck, I tend to feel like that would help a lot, if more people are interested in talking about it without taking it to super-academic levels.

iv. I am so behind on writing this week. Original stuff and fannish; I should probably write more than 2k of the Poly Big Bang story at some point. Especially since I'm 50-50 on whether or not to use that 2k.

v. I'm enjoying Glee pretty well so far! ( Minor spoilers for 1.01 and 1.02 )

vi. I finished S1 of Leverage and that was delightful. Basically I want everyone/everyone at this point. Especially if Sophie is involved. Or Eliot. Or Hardison. Or Parker. Or Maggie, even! But especially Sophie. Basically the only character I don't care about quite as much is Nate, and I don't dislike him, he just doesn't inspire the same levels of seal-clapping as the rest of them.

vii. I read the latest Buffy S8 and...IDK how I feel about this development. Well, these developments, either the ( spoiler/spoiler, or the spoilers spoilering. )

viii. I had a great lunch with cruisedirector yesterday! We had tasty food and then watched Futurama, and I am never going to call any day involving those activities a fail.

I am currently agonizing over the polybigbang story. I know it's going to be an open polygon rather than closed, as in A/B and B/C rather than A/B/C, but there may be a D in there too, which I am currently trying to work out. ( TL;DR, plotting and navel-gazing. ) I think I'm just kind of self-conscious and worried that I'm just doing the crossover because it's me and that's what I do? IDK. If that's what I'm really worried about, I could just do some non-crossover fic and call it a day. The world could always use more Jo Harvelle porn.

Semi-relatedly, I am fighting this ridiculous desire for lots of Dean/Cassie domestic fic. What.

I also found this convo Night and I had about Buffy/John that I saved, because it delighted me. I am trying to figure out why I randomly throw in italics when I'm writing lulzy dialog for Castiel. I think in my head Castiel is basically the raccoons and cephalopods from Dinosaur Comics.

THINK ABOUT IT

Dean Winchester I'm going to watch you sleep tonight

I'll be like

"hello, Dean Winchester"

( Cut because this is more so I have it saved, and let's face it, these convos are never interesting to anyone but the people who have them. )

I explained "TL;DR" to my mother the other day and apparently she's started using it at work. I'm so proud.

Awesome discovery: I can do "Shenandoah" pretty much from memory at this point, after starting to learn it last week and skipping a couple of days' practice. This is excellent, because it means I'm also starting to do well with the body-memory and being able to know what movement will produce what sound. I'm not crazy about the arrangement in my book, but I can mess around with that after I've mastered the basic skeleton of it.

Plus Mom recognized it as "Shenandoah", which I discovered after she complained that she was going to have it stuck in her head all day. I was like "Oh, did I put it on one of the Springsteen CDs I made for you?" and she was like "...you were just playing it" and then I :D'ed because it was recognizable.

Currently I have one of the beers my sister brewed for while I practice, and later I get to go hang out with fangirls. \o/ Tomorrow I work, but whatever, we're not focusing on that right now.

I watched an episode of SPN S1, "Shadow", last night.

1. It was a lot lulzier than the S4 episodes I've seen, and the misogyny, while offensive (two women getting epically beaten on, with one -- the evil one, of course, who you can also tell is evil because she is sexual -- surviving, while all three manly heroes get beaten on but survive), was at a much different level from what came later in the show. It seemed to be just kind of unconscious fail rather than the creepy, malicious, very conscious fail that comes later, after they start listening to the fandom. It's more the same background-radiation level you get on most shows, that it probably wouldn't even register if I wasn't aware of how bad it got later, making it part of a troubling pattern specific to this show rather than just the same fail you get in most stuff produced in a misogynistic society.
   
2. Knowing that people genuinely think Jared and Jensen can act, and that the scene where Dean was crying about wanting them to be a faaaaaamily again was truly moving, just made the episode that much funnier. To be fair, I probably would've found it moving too if the things I hate about Dean weren't things I hate so much that they can't be outweighed by the things I like about him. Instead, I suspect I'm turning into kind of a John!wife.
   
3. I haven't seen that many Manly Tears Of Manfulness since Aragorn.

( Spoilery reaction to SPN. ) Basically Buffy would kick Sam and Dean's asses so fast. And then go off and have milkshakes with Mary and John.

This is why I just need to make my own cut of the show I'm watching, aka The Tragedy Of John And Mary Winchester.

Grey's, wow. ( Thoughts on that, since I was, for the hell of it, flipping between it and SPN. )

Also I was inspired by inkdot, so I went for a run! \o/

ETA: It's lucky I'm not emotionally invested in these characters at all, because the part where ( Grey's spoiler. ) IDK, I have issues with stories where it's shown as a heroic thing when a woman's significant other knows what she should do with her body better than she does. Go figure.

In conclusion, everything needed moar JDM.