I'm in the process of giving my LJ a makeover, so this seems like a good time to do some DEFRIENDING AMNESTY!

Interests change, fandoms change, blah blah blah. I still love Supernatural, but I've really phased out of the fandom at this point. I don't think I'll be posting about it much, and the odds of me writing more SPN fic are slim. Given that at least 80% of my friends-of list is SPN fans, I feel like I'm probably just putting people to sleep with my Jonas-related porn. Which makes me uncomfortable.

So: please feel free to defriend me if Nick Jonas is not relevant to your interests! No hurt feelings or anything. Quite the opposite, actually -- I hate the idea of clogging people's flists with stuff they have no interest in. We'll always have 2007!

Demonic Nick J endorses this message:



LOL FOREVER. I REALLY LOVE THIS. Demon eyes look so natural on him. Thank you for this masterpiece, valiant.

I think it goes without saying that all of this Roman Polanski shit is ridiculous. I tend to exist in a fairly media-free bubble, given that I don't have cable and the only news programs I make time to watch are, uh, fake ones on Comedy Central. But this issue hits pretty close to home and has been virtually unavoidable, and the whole thing makes me sick. Our society's pervasive blame-the-victim mentality has never been quite as obvious as it is right now, and as the former victim of a sex crime I'm really just appalled.

In some ways, though, it's almost refreshing to see the ugly face of the patriarchy exposed. All too often it's taken for granted that we live in a safe, modern world of forward-thinking values, where villains are easily spotted and justice is quickly served. And we DON'T. We don't live in that kind of world at all. We live in an ugly, fucked-up world where people do terrible things and other people excuse their behavior because they don't know how to deal with it. We live in a world where women come forward about their experiences with rape and assault and are shunned within their families, schools and towns. We live in a world where women are still treated as less than men, and it's easier to throw around words like "bitch", "slut", and "hysterical" than it is to to acknowledge the wrong-doings of a man. And, the most bitter pill of all, we live in a reality where human beings are complex, layered creatures capable of doing both very good and very bad things in the same lifetime.

Child molesters often go years without being caught, or never get caught at all, because they have vibrant personalities and charm the people around them. The most common are the people you'd never suspect, not creepers who live alone and drive white vans. They reel in everyone around them -- their victims, their families, their coworkers and friends -- with charisma and wit and generosity. And all too often the communities they dwell in respond the exact way the media has responded to Polanski -- with utter disbelief that quickly gives way to denial. He's such a great guy! He's so nice and friendly! What about all the good stuff he's done! They forgive the person so they can forgive themselves for being tricked. It's an understandable knee-jerk reaction, because it's SCARY to realize that anyone could be the bad guy. What do you even do with that? It requires a lot of soul-searching and reevaluation of everything you know about the world. But what's even scarier is sticking your head in the sand and rejecting the idea, because then you become part of the problem.

My heart really goes out to the woman who has spent her entire life in the middle of this circus. It's horrifying that she had to go through it in the first place, and beyond belief that she's now being chastised by celebrities, politicians and journalists. But the silver lining I'm clinging to is that maybe this will make people stop and think. Maybe women who dismiss feminism as a thing of the past will realize how far we have to go. Maybe the next time a girl comes forward about an attacker who is beloved by many, someone in her life will realize that, yes, it is possible that he did it. Maybe our society will wake up to the deeply ingrained problems that we so often congratulate ourselves on overcoming. If even a handful of people who never gave these issues much thought are horrified by the blatant, almost hyperbolic Polanski apologists, some good has come out of it.

Oh, also? I've been having a good time fantasizing about this guy being thrown in with the general population of a federal prison. We can always count on convicted felons to not let questions of HIGH ART cloud the simple fact that people who diddle children need to get what's coming to them.

Yikes, I accidentally wrote meta. This is rare for me. I feel so... OVER INVESTED! And to top that off, I finally have something to say that is squee-positive. This might be the first time in the history of the universe that I'm the person least likely to harsh your squee. :O

( Spoilers & long-windedness about SPN 5.03. )

Misha Collins, HOW ARE YOU SO EMBARRASSING?

I am like. sldkfjsdljf Mortified. It's as though the moral lesson of Jensen's early twink pictures completely sailed over his head. THAT'S ON THE INTERNET, BUDDY. THAT CANNOT BE RETCONNED. The twitterfame is not worth it.

I can't lie, I totally felt a twinge of sadness when I heard about Panic at the Disco breaking up. I HAVE NO IDEA WHY, EITHER! This is similar to when I recently found out Socks the cat, as in Bill Clinton's presidential pet, died. (Ahaha, apparently he has his own wiki article.) For some inexplicable reason it made me do a little :( on the inside because despite my total non-interest, I used to hear about it a lot! The ~end of an era~ and all that.

While I'm being honest, I completely camped out on the spnanonymous thing ALL AFTERNOON yesterday. I am a huge sucker for anonymous memes, and I mean that in the least wanky way possible. I don't like to sit around and bitch about people (well, any more than anyone else does), but I am always fascinated by how that kind of forum turns into a place to just... talk. I would never normally enter into a Dean/Castiel shipping debate with anyone, but for some reason I found myself doing exactly that over there. And it was fun! I didn't have to feel like I would be branded some kind of squee-harshing wanker or whatever if I said something that people didn't agree with.

It's really quite sad to me that fandom has reached a point where being honest and direct seem to go hand in hand with alienating people and being That Guy. I remember back in Ye Olden Days, when fandom was structured around impersonal forums of communication rather than FOLLOWING EACH OTHER'S LIVES, that kind of thing was totally par for the course. You rarely ever saw a mentality of, "Oh, god, not another Person/Person shipper, STFU! Get out of my fandom!" unless the people involved were particularly crazy. I would actively engage in shipping arguments and character-defending arguments with people on eGroups (HAHA that's going back) without ever feeling like those sometimes violent differences of opinion meant we... couldn't agree on anything at all. But I'm constantly seeing people (uh, sometimes on said anonymous memes) getting griped about and sometimes called out for their vocal/vehement standpoints on things.

None of that is SPN-specific, obviously, it's just kind of a general theme in today's LJ-centric fandom universe. As someone with a laundry list of unpopular opinions that's about a MILE LONG, I usually feel like I should can it rather than open up. It's my journal and I can cry if I want to, but there's always that feeling like if I post saying "DEAN/CASTIEL IS A BREATH OF FRESH AIR, PLS STOP WHINING ABOUT HOW THESE SHIPPERS ARE RUINING YOUR FANDOM" people are going to huff and defriend me and I will be left only with Dean/Castiel fans to talk to.

Is this my imagination?? It might be, but I feel like I see this kind of thing all the time. It's the nature of Doing Fandom in such a way that your "friends" are a list of people tuned into every passing thought or fancy that you might want to share. The argument or justification would appear to be, "Well, if you are a Dean/Castiel fan and I am revolted by that pairing, why would I want to read your LJ and hear you squee about it and post picspams and stories that will make me sad?" Which makes sense, but seems like epic fail on some kind of basic we-are-social-human-beings level. I mean, see above: even though I never read those particular posts in detail, I saw so much Panic at the Disco related stuff on my flist a few years ago that their passing makes me empathize with friends who REALLY DO care about them. And it's okay that I had to scroll a bunch.

I feel like I should add a disclaimer here that I actually have never read Dean/Castiel and probably never will. HAHA, this is my point.



ETA: I think another important factor at work in this is the popularity thing. In days prior to LJ I don't think anyone was worried about rocking the boat because there wasn't this ~consequence~ of seeing its ramifications in actual numbers. This makes it more understandable, I guess, because everyone just wants to be liked. AND BE A BNF.

Things I Have Learned About SPN Fandom From blindfold_spn:

1.) This fandom has a SERIOUS hard-on for noncon. Who would have guessed?? The amount of fluffy love in this fandom could make your teeth ache, and yet every page of the blindfold comm has, like, five different prompts for someone getting raped. Often GANG raped.

2.) This fandom also has a SERIOUS hard-on for weecest. This delights me in ways I cannot describe, as weecest is my favorite ever. Where ARE all these people? This genre, which is so rich with possibilities and interesting things to mine, is such a dirty little secret of the fandom.

3.) Sam/Dean/Audrey: the new Dean/Castiel? slkdfjlsdf WHAT IS EVEN UP WITH THIS. Audrey here is the little girl from "Wishful Thinking". I'm not gong to lie, I thought the first S/D/A ficlet was really cute, and the end of it neatly explained why it was happening. What is hilarious is that it has become a THING now over there. Multiple Sam/Dean/Audrey prompts! And they're getting really intense, too. Felching? Double penetration? What would Teddy say? I'm kind of dying of curiosity to know who originally prompted this and kicked off the fad.

4.) Cannibalism? Really?

5.) This is more of a broader issue, and leads me to my real point: damn, this fandom is repressed.

I got my start in the Harry Potter fandom. If you're unaware, being from the HP fandom and moving to any other fandom is something like being a native New Yorker who moves to a small town in rural Kansas. It's a given that things are just going to be smaller, more conservative, etc etc etc. But it gives you a lot of perspective on the nature of fandom and what's being written in it.

The way I see it, you're always going to have a divide: the more serious, plot/character-oriented fics, and the straight-up porn. Porn in fandom is a delightful thing, because it can flip our emotional switches in a way that sexual stories or video pornography can't. We know the characters involved, we know the subtleties of their relationships, and we have our own ideas about how they interact and see each other. It's far more personalized than any other kind of erotica.

Yet in a fandom like SPN -- which has definitely grown in recent years and gained some diversity -- there's still a lot of self-imposed limitations on this category. When I was in HP, my flist would offer me a daily stream of bestiality, cross-generation underage (a thirtysomething Sirius Black deflowering a thirteen-year-old Harry? why not?), same-generation underage, watersports, necro, cross-dressing, D/s, comeplay... I could go on. There was definitely a huge, healthy contingent of the fandom that didn't go anywhere near that kind of thing, but the point is that those who liked it, REALLY LIKED IT, and it wasn't a big deal. Sure, occasionally someone would make a post somewhere being like, "underage fic is groce!" and it would lead to a debate in that particular person's LJ, but this kind of thing never rocked the boat of fandom at large.

It is a fact of life both in fandom and in RL that you are never the kinkiest person, or the most perverse. Ever. If you and your significant other are into spanking and bondage, someone you come in contact with on a day to day basis is into pony-play and piss-drinking. It's okay! People are sexual creatures! This goes far, far beyond the constraints of fandom. Read Savage Love and realize how many people engage in weird sexual shit all the time. Read some stories on nifty.org and realize that people are jerking off to way, way weirder stories than you could ever dream up about Sam and Dean and the SPN cast.

It's a little baffling to me that SPN fandom is so uptight about these kinds of things, to the extent that so many people over on the Blindfold comm are genuinely astonished that others share their fantasies and kinks. Why do we feel like we'll receive censure from our fandom friends if we admit to enjoying this stuff? For a fandom whose fanbase is primarily obsessed with an incestuous relationship, we have awfully irrational suspicions that our friends are pearl-clutching conservatives who will shun us if we admit to enjoying rapefic, or what have you. And if we can all get behind and rec fic where one guy fucks his BROTHER in the ASS, why are we so embarrassed if we want to read about that same scenario happening before they can legally give consent in the US? Or anything else, for that matter? As Dean would say, we are pretty far off the reservation, here! No one who reads Sam/Dean can pretend to be all vanilla.

Perhaps it comes down to the fact that in SPN we tend to not see incest as a kink. Within these social parameters it's the rule rather than the exception, and that leads to the collective belief that it's somehow not kinky. Certainly the brotherly aspect of Wincest is rarely, if ever, fetishized in and of itself. But at the end of the day, incest is incest is incest, and there's really no getting around it. And if Blindfold's 20+ pages of crazy prompts and ficlets are anything to go by, I'm not wrong in my assertion that most -- if not all -- of us would love to indulge in all kinds of other kinks if we didn't feel it was something to hide.

So what I'm left wondering is: why do we?

I took over modship of spnx today! This is exciting for me because I have loved the idea of the community ever since mcee made it back in April. It's been pretty quiet all these months, and I'm really hoping to breathe some life back into it. Having a place just for PORN can be such an awesome thing in fandom, and I think there are way more smut writers running around than there were then.

The idea of kink is somewhat intimidating, and I think that might have stopped more people from utilizing the community before. Kinks are awesome and heartily encouraged, but so is just... your basic DIRTY GRAPHIC PORN. Stuff that makes you squirmy, stuff that's hot and nasty and pushes your buttons. If your rimming and blowjobs and straight-up anal are full of filthy, drippy detail, that's something to post there. The kind of PWP stories you read with your pants unbuttoned. And if that does involve kink, all the better - be it rough sex, dirty talk, cream pies, watersports, underage, WHATEVER. We are all-inclusive. Het and J2 are also welcome!

I do believe valiant and I are going to be putting together a challenge of some sort for the community in January, but in the meantime, I encourage you to join if you aren't already a member! The only way to make it a lively, smutty place is to join and write filth and share the love. If you feel like pimping it, too, that would be awesome. It would be really nice to get a fresh wave of people up in there.

Go! Join! Write me nasty porn!

Motor oil and shaving cream WOULD NOT WORK as lube.

You know, SPN fandom should really count its blessings when it comes to wank. It's never fun to see drama in your community, but you would think by now that everyone would stop being... surprised by it. Fandom is wanky! Planes crash! Clowns kill!

People liking or disliking porn where Jensen is fat =/= stalkers, using fannish involvement to get people fired from RL jobs, pseuicide, sockpuppets, plagiarism, ripping people off for fake cons, hate memes, astral wives, and everything else to ever make it to fandom_wank. Y'all are getting your panties in a wad over what's tantamount to a slapfight in the ladies room, while other fandoms are covered in shrapnel and have malaria from their time in 'Nam. And the majority of people in those fandoms aren't OMGing around about how fandom has become a mean and unfriendly place.

A little perspective goes a looooooong way toward keeping your head from exploding.

So, word to the wise: there's a big honking uncut SPN 3.10 spoiler at ohnotheydidnt today. (It's at the top of the second page right now.) Someone also posted a bunch of uncut promo pictures of upcoming eps there earlier this week, so it's not looking like the most friendly place for SPN spoilerphobes this season. (Why the Sex & the City movie gets spoiler cuts and we don't, I don't even begin to understand.)

At any rate, if you're like me and surf there when you're bored, ~*~beware~*~.

So I finally got my DVDs today, and I had to go OUT OF TOWN to do it. All four places I called here (Target, both our major regional department stores, and a DVD store) were sold out. Did SPN get huge when I wasn't looking? I mean, it's awesome, but still. Widdle CW show! Not exactly Heroes!

Anyway. ( Some spoilerly bitchin' about the Kripke commentaries. )

Warning: squee-harshing material lies beneath the cut.

( Hollywood Babylon blah blah blah. )