#apologizes to dean cus hes about to get tagged so hard | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

chiisana-sukima · 7 years

Text

I made a new post to continue this one, about Gadreel, because the old one is getting so unwieldy, and when I tried to edit it down to size, x-kit failed me somehow and wouldn’t let me post.

And I’m also only dealing with one tiny portion of all the awesome stuff on the chain, so I apologize, and also might have to go back and follow up on other things in a separate post. But I wanted to say right off the bat that this is the best chain of meta I’ve seen on Gadreel ever. Really A+ effort from everybody involved. @zpublicizes, I cut your whole meta chain out, but I agree with so much of what you wrote in it, and I feel all warm and fuzzy about the super-high-quality discussion. (´∀｀)♡

@idontneedasymbol wrote:

and also Gadreel stuff yeah okay i cannot shut up about this

Heh, welcome to the hell pit, we’re having tea and cookies at noon. More company is *always* welcome.

I think the concern about Dean’s culpability is about more than assigning blame. It’s largely (at least in my case) about understanding the character.

Yeah, I agree that’s completely valid. And the extensive discussion about blame is even totally valid and important too. I think this is kind of an area where sociological forces are so powerful that there’s a limited amount of free will in how any individual person or group of people even approaches the topic. This is what we have to talk about, because this is what is here.

Even for Carver et al, to a certain extent, they had to structure the narrative the way they did because that’s just how narrative is written [by middle-to-upper class modernist/post-modernist white dudes, and hence by all of us, in the West]. I guess that’s why fic is (imo) such a radical act- it’s the one place we can talk and think about and absorb into ourselves what isn’t there in the same depth we do with what is.

I do think the argument could be made that we don’t get much focusing on the recovery is that Sam, as the injured party, didn’t require that much – that the Gadreel experience wasn’t anything new for Sam, and wasn’t worse than a lot of what else he’s gone through.

I won’t argue this at all as a matter of canon. I think indeed that’s the intended reading- that it was a bad experience, but not (comparatively, for Sam) all that bad. Sam got angry, vented, and then they moved on. There was an awful unintended consequence (the MoC), but it didn’t have anything to do with Sam’s original injury, which was small enough that it resolved on its own with Dean’s semi-apology and a little push from ghost!Kevin.

I think a big piece of how hard it is for some of us to let it go is that we have a really uncomfortable visceral counter-textual reaction to the implications of some of the information presented, that the writers probably didn't think through, or possibly did but decided to ignore and pretend it never happened. Which is that Gadreel appeared from the storyline to have accomplished something even Lucifer didn’t with Sam: make him unable to know what’s real and what isn’t about his life, implicitly (but never acknowledged textually) forever.

In Sam’s post-Hell storyline, Sam has what amounts to partial amnesia about a discrete time period (during the Wall part of the story), and then hallucinations and time-limited flashbacks (during the Hallucifer part), neither of which are a walk in the park. But the longest he goes without being able to distinguish external reality from internal mental states is fairly short. His hallucinations follow him around for (iirc) about 1-2 months and bother him and look and act entirely real, but he knows they’re not (with two exceptions, each for a fairly brief period, and each of which he copes with in a definitive way). Maybe in the Cage, Lucifer played those kinds of tricks in a more global and lasting fashion, but if so, it’s entirely extra-textual.

But Gadreel takes away Sam’s memories and inserts new ones, and at least once, puts Sam in an entirely manufactured situation that is apparently convincing enough for Sam to believe, and Sam never gets out of any of it on his own. Yeah, he ejects Gadreel, but only because another force is inside his head disputing Gadreel’s version. Gadreel has near-complete control of Sam’s grasp of reality for an extended period (~ 6 weeks), and unlike the “stone one” thing in S7, we’re never given any method by which we know that going forward, Sam can determine for himself what’s real and what isn’t. How does Sam know Gadreel is gone? Gadreel could have manufactured that memory. How does Sam know anything? What, logically, he would know from the experience is that he can’t be sure.

And I think that on balance, even though an extended period of horrible pain and cruelty (Hell) would probably irl be worse than losing one’s ability to understand the narrative of one’s own life (Gadreel), the truth is I’m not sure. I think it’s a close call. Narrative integrity is the thing that allows people to come through pain relatively intact. Torture (Hell) after all is, sure, partially about cruelty for it’s own sake, but mostly what it’s actually for is the destruction of narrative integrity. In a way, Gadreel is a better torturer than Lucifer. He causes less unnecessary discomfort and gets more thorough results.

I think for me, the thing that is most troubling about how the denouement of the Gadreel arc is written, is that in the SPN long haul, the audience is reassured that what Sam went through with Lucifer was not only evil, it was like, the ultimate evil. But with Gadreel, we the audience are just supposed to not look too closely at it and go on as if it never happened.... which, it turns out, is exactly what Gadreel wanted from Sam too. And that- having the audience go through an encapsulated version of what the character did- is a really powerful narrative technique, that I assume the writers’ don’t realize they’ve employed.

I do want to emphasize that I think the “correct” reading of the Gadreel storyline is yours. Not only is it (imo) the intended reading, but it’s also the reading that lets one continue to enjoy the story in a positive way and like... get on to other parts? I guess, in medical terms, it’s a more functional reading? At least for me, and I think largely for some other fans too, if you can’t get past the problem of Gadreel having long(ish)-term control of Sam’s understanding of his own narrative, it kind of destroys the integrity of SPN entirely. If you can’t help letting that situation bother you, then it’s such a fundamental fracture that the failure to address it infects everything that comes afterwards.

But there’s a serious negative to reading the narrative “correctly” too, which is that I think it’s- ugh, “corrupting” is not the right word, but it’s as close as I can think of. It’s a demand by the text for a partially willful ignoring of a non-value-neutral disjuncture. Its 1984ish in a way that makes me really uncomfortable. (I absolutely dont mean this part as a judgement about the act of reading the text as intended- that’s like, the natural way to take text, and reading things counter-textually is a giant drain on mental health that people just cant manage all the time, so we have to pick our battles. I mean it as a judgement on the text for demanding that people do it in order to continue to engage with it without substantial anger.)

I think I have kinda lost my train of thought here, which is probably just as well considering the length, lol, so I’ll just stop without any real conclusion or anything. ¯\(°_o)/¯

(@ameliacareful, I am tagging you, because I know you’ve thought a lot about this issue too. And shoutouts to @ameliacareful‘s The Paper Asks Nothing which also deals with this issue [but it might be a hard/unfulfilling read for you, @idontneedasymbol, because even though much of it is Dean’s POV, it’s pretty critical of Dean too, so take that under advisement]

@ameliacareful, I’m also curious to know have you read Wake? If so, what did you think? What about you, @zpublicizes, have you read Wake?

@idontneedasymbol, when I recced Wake before, you weren’t reading wincest, so allow me to rec it again, because it has some light wincest in it, but it’s my favorite story about fixing the Gadreel mess. It’s Dean’s POV, and I think is fair to the bleakness of the situation as I see it while still also allowing the relationship to be a healthy one that ends okay).

#gadreel #critical textual readings #long post is long #for filtering purposes- wank #fic recs at the end

53 notes · View notes