Unless the blade is Stormbringer.

I don't really see anything to support the soulless theory--he has too many emotions and isn't displaying lack of ethics or a moral compass.

Becoming ruthless (and they still had to have the "Oh, we kill Crowley too" conversation, so he's not KILL ALL THE THINGS) doesn't feel like enough--it's their job to prove he's different from Sam in season 4 + Dean in late season 5, but Sam in season 6 I just don't get.

They've made it difficult by further muddying the waters of what having a soul means, but he's not all id (did I get that right? I usually get that wrong) and is very thoughtful.

I did like a lot, muddy as it was, the difference between Soulless Sam and soulless everyone else (thanks to John and Dean, I suppose).

If I had to pick, he's more like Famine!Dean with one motive. I still don't know if the kill in #Thinman was supposed to be mark-related or getting-business-done-related. Haven't made my mind up on it yet.

As much as some Sam stans complain that everything is through a Dean prism, we're a lot in the dark about his internals right now.

I don't necessarily buy the soulless theory -- in fact, I hope they don't go that way. I don't think giving Dean a rerun of one of Sam's issues is really worthy plot or character development.

Not that I think that they are, but I don't mind them re-using crises if the responses are different. There are only so many crises to go around.

"I have been shaped into an paranormal weapon" is something I'm good with so far. I'll worry about the rest when it happens. It's more interesting in the present and past tense to me.

Excellent fic that addresses S9 and makes me happy: [link]

Roque has a delight in permanently maimed Dean that puts me off her stories.

Is it the sort of story that someone who's enjoying the season would like, she asks theoretically.

I don't know? I've enjoyed a lot of the season, and disliked some particular episodes/plot twists, and I loved it.

I also don't have hangups about Dean maiming, so.

It's not that I have a particular hangup about maiming Dean, it's just that I can tell in her writing it's a kink of hers and it's very oh-no-not-again offputting. Somehow it reads like I've read it before when she writes it.

I started a long resolving-S9-issues fic and abandoned it recently because it felt...didactic. Like it wasn't just a story, but a knuckle rap to the writers. Since her problem was that Dean didn't have his own story, well, pretty much doomed from the git go. I can't remember the last time I read Sam written out of the story so summarily for anything other than porn reasons, and I'm a Dean or Cas oriented reader.

Sometimes stories are just stories, and sometimes they feel like axes being ground.

Can you believe I'm pissed off I didn't put the First in Dean's hand in the picture I just drew? It has over 500 notes, which is well ahead of anything else I've ever drawn, and now I want to fix it.

Ah, well. I will focus on the picture with the duckling or the tiger instead. And work on contentment with the current pic, because that's just a good thing to have.

Fic recommendation of the week: offbeat D/C where Cas is kinda Amish, kinda on his Rumsprigga (they're more hippy, but isolated and modest similarly) and a musical prodigy. The Family Business is classical music--Dean is a cellist riddled with stage fright that caused him to drop out of school, and Sam is a violinist studying at Juilliard.

Cas comes to school near Dean and ends up rooming with him. It's a slow sweet relationship that involves rope suspension and just about as much John-vilification as I can take. No wacky misunderstandings due to lack of communication in this one...hopefully it ends up on the good side of twee.

Appogiatura has been updating daily since I started reading it too--not long chapters, but enough.

Meta Fiction: Holy. Shit.