I have been well remiss in terms of drawing. I must get shit accomplished today, but it's been an ER week, and those are like real life AUs I need to wake up from.

I am skimming this fic for unflattering reasons:

• how long can you stretch the repetitive "I'm a slave with no hope" theme
• why is Jo a bad guy (I actually commented to ask, I'm so perplexed by Joanna Harvelle, evil daughter of Crowley Harvelle, no Ellen present yet)
• just off ESL phrasings that make me wish they'd tell us what their first language is so I can set up an algorithm--they use the word "heal" to mean "treat" more times than it actually means "heal"--it's mesmerising
• to see if the worldbuilding gets any more convincing

I am not reading it for the reasons I read this university AU fic, which are

• hot sex
• hot gay crisis
• hot love denial issues
• hot sex
• perfectly cromulent AU characterisations (although sainted angel cancer Mary is a bit OTT)

But then you hit the WIP wall--when you're 85k words in, you kinda feel like it should all be written already, selfishly. You deserve (hot) payoff for all that non-arduous reading you just did, author rights be damned.

Shit, I really should be drawing.

t echoes D/C fic rec: Good Books, Bad Movies, an ongoing series of stories (currently 7th story is a WIP) with tattooedSFauthor!Cas and bookseller!Dean. Both hot and angsty.

t / echoes

t /fanfic

Deanmon Rising--CW SPN Youtube teaser. It qualifies as a sneak peek, I guess? I don't know how to define it, just that it's whitefont-worthy.

And nightmare come true.

I wonder if the JA-directed episode will be any actor light this year? He's good enough at this that it doesn't have to be. Also, does anyone know the number of the MC-directed ep?

eta: Working gag reel and fan perspective links: [link] [link]

Jensen directed the season's first episode, I think. (I watched some of the SDCC panel the other day -- it actually includes more of a teaser, including a different scene).

Not sure if Misha has directed his or not.

I think the JA-directed episode films first but will air third.

I had to rewatch the gag reel and mockumentary, and I have zero¹ recollections of watching them before, so it was all new hyuks.

I'm assuming the links were posted on dilaudid day otherwise I have no explanation for either the amnesia or the typo-ridden posting following it.

¹: literally

The mockumentary is awesome. So Misha.

The promo is making me excited and worried all at once. Boys!

"Deanmon" is incredibly cheesy, but I believe the fandom deserves it for having coined hellatus.

I'm torn between needing to know how long he's in this state (you *are* too sexy) and just wanting to take the ride blind. A good balance would be like S5--at the point where you love the replacement character but are just about to start resenting the missed fraternal time. And I can't tell without watching when that is.

Is there another trailer I'm missing? Sometimes fics seem to consense on a detail and I don't know if Cas saying he's dying is fanon or canon at this point. Kind of like Dean's safeword being Nickelback--why is that in multiple author's fics?

So I'm burbling along in this fic, thinking it's all cute and everything, and then I hit this line:

It was my dad’s, Dean finally signs. He… Dean struggles to find the phrasing for the next bit, lets his hand hang in the air. He wasn’t a good guy.

I'm so fucking frustrated with this I almost commented. He was actually a good guy. He was a hero who risked his life to save strangers without a second thought. Why can't anyone (exaggeration) write him as a good guy even if he's not a good father? Are all good people good parents?

Canonwise we know John's father was a good guy too, and we know that Samuel Campbell was despicable. Yet even in fics where Mary is still alive, John's often still a bad man and is fairly likely to die in a DUI of his own causing.

Does no one remember how he actually died? Deciding that there was something more important than his quest for vengeance--his family? Fanon has him an abuser and sometimes a murderer (drunk driving), but so rarely as an ethical self-sacrificing (it's not like all his hunts were Mary-related--he could totally have *only* pursued that path) man who may or may not be a good father in the absence of the canon stimuli.

Maybe that fight was Mary's fault, you know. We don't actually have any evidence.

Maybe that fight was Mary's fault, you know. We don't actually have any evidence.

I had an idea that I played with in a (now Jossed) John backstory fic. That fight happened shortly after Sam was born - and also right around the time Mary's 10 years were coming due. So, from John's perspective, she was probably on edge and acting strangely for no reason at all. If one partner is having major stress and can't/won't open up to the other partner that anything is even wrong, that would create a fertile breeding ground for a nasty marital fight.

He was actually a good guy. He was a hero who risked his life to save strangers without a second thought. Why can't anyone (exaggeration) write him as a good guy even if he's not a good father?

That drives me nuts, and not just with John. I feel with a lot of writers that characters either need to be 100% in the right, with complete justification for even their worst-seeming actions, or they need to be total assholes.

I did actually end up commenting on that fic, and got this in response:

yes hello in this universe as they are not hunters, john winchester's main job was to be a father.
and dont every try to defend him as dean's father because nO
if u are looking for nice!john i've written that too. in au i sort of switch back and forth depending on the 'verse - i agree with you that he could have been a good guy. but he wasn't. and he wasn't in this fic.

Clearly it was a dumb idea for me to comment to start out with, and there will be no conversation, since I called John a shitty parent twice in my comment. It's almost like she's admitting she can't write complexity, so she has to go for the 100% characterisation. Not that I'm going to read her other fics--I've written her off even more with that reply.