when we’re done with our overwhelming grief we’ll eat i guess

As the one who can't stop sending you long-winded overly poetic asks, I personally love your long responses back. STORIES WITH THEMES, SYMBOLISMS EVEN!! WHEN THE ANALYSIS?? Y'KNOW?

I'll read over the post again a bit later and try to come up with a more thoughtful response, but, ough. So ready to die honorably, just like everyone else, you've already dug your grave beside your family's. And then, by your joints and limbs, you're unearthed again. Some poor, bedraggled marrionette. Fuck.

HAHA thank you! THE THEMES.. THE MOTIFS.. its all right there and free for the picking! And ive got all your other asks in my inbox and i want to answer them as timely as possible, i do, but alas---i'm slow. thanks for ur patience <3

and im jumping on this too. we're like a tag team, you and i.

being put to rest (however violently) and being pulled back into being alive has to be horrific for anyone. But because im the #1 jewish peter parker fan, i kinda want to comment on this with a bit of a jewish lens as well.

In Judaism, there isn't really a heaven/hell/etc. It's described as a type of oblivion that is as far from heaven as possible. The dead exist there without knowledge or feeling. There is a total disconnect and inability to communicate with god. I wanted to mention this because imagine the surprise of not being disconnected from god at death, but instead being forcibly man-handled into resurrection. Peter very well could have thought he'd be free of his curse once he died. Sorry pete but life has more in store for you.

In jewish tradition, it is customary for someone to be buried within 24 hours of dying. Today, this concept is translated to 'as soon as possible' and is a bit more lenient. It is the family's job to bury their dead, but if they are unable to do so it is up for the community to take up the task. There are no exceptions to the burial rule; "even criminals who have been put to death, the unclaimed slain, suicides, and strangers to the community" would be buried. It is a tradition created from compassion. "To be denied burial was the most humiliating indignity that could be inflicted on the deceased, for it meant 'to become food for beasts of prey.'" Prior to burial, it is also customary to have someone, typically family, accompany the body of the deceased out of respect, as they are seen as defenseless, and as a comfort to the soul that rests within it.

I wonder if he would have ever thought about that aspect of dying alone. Was there any kind of debate, whether it'd be worth it to die as Peter Parker, a boy with a name to his face and an aunt at home, or to die as The Spider-Man, fighting for whats right, but a stranger to everyone, alone? And what of when he wakes up again, after death, knowing he was unburied, left to rot. If that isn't a signifier of just how alone he is, I don't know what is.

There are two ways he could have been honored, i suppose. The traditional sense, through his family's and community's customs. Being laid to rest beneath the ground with others at his side. Or on the streets of the city, alone but dying for everything his family believed in. Finding solace in following in their footsteps. He gets neither, of course.

I’ve witnessed an awful lot of drama caused by the claim going around that the Strilondes are canonically Jewish and therefore it’s okay to harass people who do things like draw them celebrating Christmas. It not being okay to harass people over drawings and Dave canonically helping Jade set up Christmas decorations (in April) aside, I can categorically state that no, I am pretty sure they are not. Cut for length, anti-Semitism, and general anti-religionism (on Hussie’s part, hopefully not on mine); please read whole post before commenting.

The evidence which gets cited as proof here is the fact that Dave and Rose came up with elaborate metaphors involving “ethnic weddings”. I’ve seen at least one person claim that Dave must be Jewish because “he knows what happens at Jewish weddings”. This baffles me completely. I know what happens at Jewish weddings and I’m certainly not Jewish, and by that argument, Hussie must be Jewish because he’s the one who wrote it. I’ve also seen a claim that Dave is “obsessed with Jewish weddings”. He mentioned them exactly one time. By that logic, he’s also obsessed with meteors - he discussed those more than once, even!

That aside, let’s look at what he and Rose actually said, starting with Rose’s because it came first chronologically.

Removing the lid signals the moment your life becomes a great whirling batshit pandemonium, somewhat resembling the chaos of an especially ethnic wedding. Somewhere, a soused uncle deliberately shatters china on the floor. Muddy livestock is decorated, and then lost track of. The question “Who’s mule is this?” at times can be heard over the din.

Coming from a Jewish writer, I could accept this as a bit of self-deprecating humour. Hussie is not Jewish, and has a track record of at best tone-deafness and at worst actively cruel mockery of minorities. To my non-Jewish eyes, this doesn’t even look like the correct offensive stereotype. Intentional shattering of crockery is a Greek stereotype, not a Jewish one. As for Dave...

TG: im feeling pretty friggin MATRIMONIAL all a sudden TG: take a look down by your foot see that little bottle TG: stomp on that shit like its on fire TG: noisy ethnic dudes are flipping the fuck out and waving us around on chairs til someone gets hurt TG: im your 300 pound matronly freight-train TG: and my gaping furnace is hungry for coal so get goddamn shoveling

This is at least vaguely like a Jewish stereotype, but again, this comes off like an outsider mocking others’ traditions. He didn’t even get them right - in every case I’ve seen it’s been a drinking glass that gets stomped on, not a bottle, and Googling doesn’t turn up anything about bottles being used. I also note neither of them used the word “Jewish” at any point, but used “ethnic” - a word which implies, at least to me, an out-group that the speaker is not in.

This aside, human religion of any kind is never discussed again except idiomatically, until Rose compares the story of Adam and Eve to splitting the atom, in a scene where she’s supposed to come off as a rambling drunk. Then, we get the other scene usually cited for the Strilondes’ Judaism, the wedding.

This is a much stronger point, but when you look at this there’s a level of nastiness beneath the surface. Rose and Kanaya both look discomfited and surprised, not happy, implying they either didn’t suggest this or are nervous about being picked up and shaken around or both. There’s a Jake face in the background looking shocked and appalled, and he’s just copy-pasted from the Trickster pages but this implies we’re supposed to think this is weird. Worse, the characters doing so are in Trickster Mode. Trickster Mode’s entire deal was the characters acting irrationally and impulsively, had a whole long spiel from the author insert about how it’s a horrible idea, and is portrayed as more or less analogous to drug usage. This is not giving me the impression that we’re supposed to think the chair-lifting is anything but something to be mocked.

Finally, they set up a planet-wide society in which no human religions exist anymore, including Judaism. I can’t find the quote anymore but Dave in the epilogue specifically states dismissively that only troll religions exist on Earth C and even those aren’t popular. If it was so important to them, why didn’t they keep it and tell others about it?

This ties into a general pattern of how religion in general only comes up in the comic to be made fun of or portrayed as a disaster. The kids make idiomatic references to God, but never display any signs that faith means anything to them. John refers to Jesus as “an adult bearded human who was magic”, which is more like how an alien would describe Jesus than anything that comes out of the actual aliens’ mouths/keyboards. Rose specifically brings up Adam and Eve when she’s drunk and babbling. No one celebrates any religious holidays except for Jade and Dave setting up Christmas-in-April with the shittily drawn decorations which is supposed to be them fucking around and pretending to get the presents Jade never got before, not actually finding meaning in a Christian holiday. Gamzee’s religion veers between a reason to mock him and a reason he’s dangerous, and it hasn’t escaped my notice that his theme song of a sort is “Miracles”, by a rap duo who are very spiritual with a Christian influence in their personal lives, and it’s used to make Gamzee look like even more of a dumb stoner. Karkat and Sollux have an exchange about how “MIRACLES ARE POOP STAINS ON GOD’S UNDERWEAR” and “makiing fun of people’2 reliigiion i2 the be2t thiing two do”. And the kids don’t have any qualms about themselves being worshipped as gods in the new world. I am not personally very religious (best I can say is I don’t disbelieve) but I’m familiar with how religious people think, and if the kids were religious in any way, they would not simply throw out their views when something supernatural happened. People who believe in God would be more likely to, from my experience, consider themselves tools of the “real” God behind the scenes and spread the word about the God they worship, not want to be worshipped themselves. They’d consider themselves extremely powerful tools, yes, but still tools, not the ultimate wielders. Not all religions or subsects of Judaism believe in a literal god, just in codes of behaviour and historical connections, but if it was at all important to them, they would at least think about how their faiths connected to what happened to them. The fact that they seem so blase about supernatural happenings in general is probably a sign of clumsy genre switching - it went from “parody of adventure games with characters as stand-ins for the player” to “philosophical rambling with characters in their own right” - but there sure as hell isn’t any canonical support for them practising religion of any kind either way, or even being aware it exists except when they want to make a weird metaphor.

im curious why people are saying supernatural is jewish like idk if jewish writers makes an inherently jewish story especially when things like following out the christian apocalypse from revelations and showing a real physical g-d who is just some guy i think is super jarring since though christians claim to be against idolatry they seem totally fine showing depictions of gd or whatever i dont get jesus honestly but jews are far more strict and the idea of showing gds appearance is pretty wrong

WOOF okay um. Maybe this is one of those Tone Doesn’t Come Thru Well Online things but to me this is soo fucking rude… I’m half way between John Mulaney we don't have time to unpack all of that & Ben Wyatt wait it’s gonna bother me if I don’t explain why you’re wrong. 

This turned into all my thoughts. 

So like. First off, it’s all fun and games. We’re all just joking and joshing and projecting here on destiel dot tumblr dot com and Jupernatural is not an exception in a lot of ways. And so when someone shits on what we’re doing here (yes, even unintentionally) what you get is what happened: oh you think you’re funny well I’m about to be hilarious!!! aka I’m gonna do it even more now out of spite specifically because you said not to. Like it really is all jokes but also you know what’s not a joke? Antisemitism in all its forms, even the casual shit! It’s really draining and it builds up in your veins!! Just. Yeah. You saw a lot of people talking about it today in particular because much like other topics of the day, one thing kicks off a whole other turn of events. So like. one misguided comment that’s playfully antisemitic and then one more little one, and then one big/obvious one launched us (Jewish spn fans) into a whole bigger discussion about antisemitism and erasure of Jews in the spn fandom writ large. It’s one thing to be descriptive, offer a headcanon/what if, or employ a certain mode of analysis. It’s another thing to definitively say This Is The Truth, specifically when to do so overrides something else, especially in this case when what’s being overridden is Jews, an ethnoreligious minority. It’s also another thing to talk over Jews. And mind this has been building for days. Not in a bad way just like, it’s been topical for days and then today one big thing pushed it over the edge to us actually posting abt it (partially bc at that point it’s a pattern, which feels like it needs to be addressed). Like, destiel tumblr is small we pretty much all see all the same posts, and then Jewish spn fans… we’re friends, we chat about life? We joke around together, y’know? If you’re being antisemitic (yes, even unintentionally) we’re all gonna hear abt it. It’s how we stay safe or in this case, curate the online exp.

That being said tho projecting on fiction is like fun and even a good thing at times, and def opens up new modes of analysis. But! the other big thing here is that there IS a LOT of evidence for a Jewish reading of spn, in a lot of ways, and particularly if you know what to look for. Like there’s lots of niche Jewish slang (non-Jews just don’t know these things, and that is a reflection primarily of the writers but once you put it in the script it implies things about the characters too of course), the theology of the early seasons (I’ll get to that in a second), main character motivations (hold on), “Moishe Campbell” implying Mary is (and therefore Sam and Dean are) Jewish, etc. 

It’s not surprising to me or anything that non-Jews don’t catch anything/everything Jewish about spn but that Jews catch both sides of it, because that’s just how being part of a marginalized group works. You learn about your own stuff AND the dominant culture’s stuff because that’s how you survive (socially, psychologically, literally). Members of the dominant culture don’t need to learn the marginalized one, are never confronted with it, and so they just.. don’t. I don’t even mean that in a normative or accusatory way, that’s just an observation on the state of things. Non-Jews who aren’t part of another marginalized religion, aka expressed xtians and cultural xtians, have a ton of misconceptions about Judaism, for example, “Jesus was Jewish” and not, “Jesus was an asshole of an apostate who made life harder for Jews at the time in a myriad of ways and whose movement has had a lasting negative impact on world Jewry (and other peoples) for the ensuing millenia”. I truly Don’t Have Time right now to get into the varied and intense history of antisemitism in all its forms but. the point I’m making here is that I’m not shocked I need to explain that life experience shapes your worldview?? So if you’re Jewish you’re always gonna be living life through that version of the world and it does impact you?? Same as anything else?? As unwell as they may be, spn writers aren’t exempt from that. Jewish people writing about xtianity are doing so thru a primarily Jewish understanding and vice versa. Jews can (and did!) write about xtian lore but in a Jewish way! Some core Jewish themes: wrestling with angels/G-d, questioning G-d, IF there’s a G-d they will have to beg MY forgiveness, the afterlife isn’t really a big thing so all that matters is your time on earth, make amends to others directly and thru your actions rather than seeking absolution with G-d, you are not obligated to complete the work nor may you abandon it, etc… So that’s the other reasoning why we say “spn is Jewish” based solely on it being written by Jews. Rather than Death of The Author, let’s look at what the author has imbued the story with, both intentionally and unintentionally. And re: Chuck and idolatry… I don’t even know where to start with the way you phrased this but. the Jewish Spn Writers of Note are apparently Kripke, Gamble, and Edlund. All of whom stopped writing for the show years before the Chuck Is God plot! 

Like yes it feels very stupid to be writing a thousand words on antisemitism and supernatural but like. this is a spn blog run by a Jew so. This whole thing is also just the same every time. This is very representative of typical casual antisemitism.

Hi! Im a Muslim hijabi but I find the concept of tznius very interesting, and like to look at tzniut outfits etc since I want to wear more skirts, but I recently googled “tzniut jeans” or smthing like that, and came across a forum which is said to be for frum mothers. I was just reading it finding it very interesting, and I was wondering if there were any interfaith-y kinda posts and threads regarding Islam, and a lot of posts I found were well... disappointing. Things about how Muslim men abuse women and how Islam is violent and dangerous etc, also lots of comments about burkas?? I obviously know this is not representative of Jews or Judaism and know that is likely just not knowing any better in those few cases, but I was wondering, how much do Orthodox Jews know about Islam and Muslims in general? Like my family didn’t know a lot about Judaism, we knew basics and things and since my dad is moroccan and had Jewish friends as a child he knows basic stuff but until I started further research we didn’t know much. So I was just wondering, is it the same kinda case for a lot of Orthodox Jews? Like the average one? I’m incredibly sorry if this caused offence in any way, I was just curious as to how much our communities know about each other.

Oh, this ask hurt my heart. I’m so sorry you had to see those comments. Thank you for realizing that the prejudices of individuals don’t speak for groups.

I would say you’re on target there - I would be surprised to find out that the average Orthodox Jew has much real life exposure to Muslims. Heck, I didn’t grow up Orthodox, went to public school, and don’t remember a single practicing Muslim being in my school (definitely no girls wearing a hijab, at the very least). The first time I was aware of meeting Muslims was in college (like probably I saw someone in public somewhere before that, but definitely didn’t have any substantial interactions). Orthodox Jews largely attend private Jewish schools and tend to socialize with other Orthodox Jews because the community is very tight-knit - which has pluses and minuses. In large communities, they may well also work within the Orthodox community as opposed to in the general population. Even in Modern Orthodox communities, that close-knit nature provides limited opportunities for people to interact with people who are different from them.

Add to that lack of real life exposure the fact that Orthodox communities overall skew politically conservative (whereas Jews as a whole skew liberal) and you have a bunch of people who are not immune to the general Islamophobia on the right, who have no meaningful real life interactions with individual Muslims to counter what they’re hearing in that regard. AND THEN throw in the tensions of the I-P conflict, both in the form of, say, antisemitic actions disguised as anti-Zionism in the diaspora, and experiences in Eretz Yisroel. And not everyone has your sensitivity to be able to distinguish between individuals and groups, so they get this feeling that the whole group must hate them, and therefore why should they feel positively towards any members of the group?