::sigh::

It's so magic, that AU.

Weirdly, I don't know if I ever finished the one where Dean and Cas have a mystery kid or anything. The one that starts in a diner. I just couldn't get into it, though it seems to have been her highest profile long story before this (mindbendingly brilliant) HS AU.

Maybe I'll try again...

Ha! I bailed on that one too, just not my cup of tea. Of course I am contrary, and frequently turn out to dislike my favorite authors' most popular stories in favor of their more fringe stuff.

There turned out to be a fair amount of meme fills among her work that I hadn't read, so I got some new stuff (and some pretty dirty new stuff) read this morning. I think I'm going to stop now on her specifically and save the rest for Monday morning in the ER.

Man, I heard that story touted as "No, don't let your MPREG feels drie you away! It's not what it's about!" But something else, I dunno, made me stop.

However, the sheer amount of drek I've read by people since then...her worst is so much better than shit I've read just yesterday. So I'll try again.

For some reason I feel like if I messaged her about typos in her work, she wouldn't be miffed. But there's random weird stuff (choked up when it should have been chalked up) that's just sitting there screaming "otherwise brilliant!" in quite old fics, and no one else has thought to correct them...

I formed the theory that while the Impala was in hiding, Dean stuck to stealing old cars, but that wasn't something Sam paid attention to.

Can anyone remember anything that contradicts that fanon? I'm at the point where I am distracted by stories where Dean's driving Japanese.

They were all old, I'm pretty sure.

That jibes with my memory. The scene where Sam has a car of his own (before he nods off) he's driving something recent (a pickup of some sort?), and of course he had a new car when he lost his soul, but Dean seemed to be really consistently driving cars not as cool as his Baby, but of a similar vintage.

So, author, I know you're making him bitter that he's driving a Camry in late S7, but I don't care. He'd rather drive that Pacer thingy.

You're writing as you go, and you have to scripts ready to shoot, so at some point, the question of "Is this character a good idea?" becomes moot, and you just have to finish a script and film it. (Kristen could say way more about this than I can, since I'm doing a lot of assuming.)

Late to the party. Writing for TV is like trying to hit a moving target. (I'm pretty sure someone else said that first but it's true.) And, as the season goes on, the target moves faster and faster.

My first episode of last season, I spent six weeks on the story and the outline and I think I had almost three weeks to write my script. End of the season? From initial concept to script in less than two weeks. The draft was written in six days. (There were other episodes where multiple writers had to pitch in because there were only 3 or 4 days to write the script.)

So that's the first part. The second part is this:

You don't have the luxury of looking at the finished season and saying, "You know what, this isn't really going where we wanted it to, so let's scrap it."

So much this. We start out every season with a plan. We know our endpoint and some of the big tent pole stops along the way. But then you start production and shit happens. You have a great character but you can't get the actor you want or you get the actor you want and they suck or you get the actor you want and they're great but when you try to bring them back, they're not available. Stories that seemed great in the room turn out to be a giant yawn on screen. Etc.

So you're forced to improvise along the way. But that's not always a bad thing. One of our best episodes of this past season was an improvisation. As we were breaking the episode, we found out we weren't going to be able to do the story we had planned. So we threw it out and, in two days, came up with a new story.

There are so many times you wish you could go back and fix things but it's the way of television. You have to keep the plates spinning. With all that said, there are many reasons why a certain storyline or character wouldn't be included in the recap. The most obvious reason is time. You get 42 minutes -- including your recap. Every second you use for that recap is one less second you get in your actual episode. So you cut anything you consider non-essential to the story you're about to tell. You cut and splice (and sometimes even revoice dialogue) to make your recaps as short and to the point as you can.

There's also the reality that, if you hated the way a story turned out, you just want to cut your losses and move on. I have personally taken that position once or twice.

Oh, I don't begrudge the absence of Amy in the finale recap so much as her lingering presence in what seemed like about 45 episodes after the one in which she was killed. At least Bobby being talked about long after his death felt reasonable to me given how big a part of the brothers' lives he became.

If my sister killed a friend of mine that I didn't want to kill, in fact was pretty deliberately protecting, you can bet it's going to be an issue between us for a couple of months.

As betrayals go, that's pretty high up on my list of possibles. She's free to hit the foxhole with any of my exes she wants, but don't kill the guy I had a crush on in high school, please?

If my sister killed a friend of mine that I didn't want to kill, in fact was pretty deliberately protecting, you can bet it's going to be an issue between us for a couple of months.

I think it was compounded by Sam feeling like Dean was being the all-knowing older brother again, and not trusting Sam to make the right decision. And Sammy don't like that.

I did think that Dean's motivation for killing her was really weak -- he didn't even work the case. And there's precedent for not killing, going back to Lenore. So in the end, I think it was a storyline that got shoehorned in to provide some brotherly conflict in a season where there wasn't much.