#you would hand your own bodily autonomy over on a silver platter and let the world BURN just for her? just for your mother? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hellerism · 3 years

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(Regarding your jewelry post earlier) in secret good supernatural demon dean gets an ear piercing and dean gets it redone after Michael lets it close

im sorry this took so long to answer but i was inspired and ended up writing 1.2k about deans bodily autonomy as related to his earrings

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Jimmy Novak had once described angel possession as like being chained to a comet.

With all due respect to Jimmy, Dean disagreed.

Maybe it had been like that with Castiel, who—incredible as he was—had only been a regular angel at that point. But being possessed by Michael, first and most powerful of the archangels, the leader of the Host of Heaven, was like being at the center of a perpetual supernova. Dean was exhausted from the strain, weary down to his bones. Deeper than that, even; his very atoms burned with exhaustion.

Worse than that, though, was the way he’d been trapped in his own body. Michael had kept Dean as a prisoner in his own mind, filling out his limbs with a strange presence, dressing him in clothes he hated, torturing with Dean’s hands. Killing with Dean’s hands. He’d thrashed against Michael in his head, clawed at his prison until his metaphorical fingers bled, but he was powerless against him. All he could do was watch.

Now, even with Michael gone, Dean still felt the ghost of his grace running through him, angry and burning and utterly wrong, nothing like the gentle warmth of Cas’ grace he felt whenever Cas healed him.

He stood at the mirror in the bunker’s bathroom. He’d taken a long shower and changed into familiar clothes, but the feeling of Michael still lingered. He examined his appearance in the mirror, ran his finger over the tiny scars on his earlobes where Michael had let his earring holes close. Earrings were, apparently, not Michael’s style; one of the first things he’d done after he escaped that church with Dean’s body was yank them out and throw them away.

It was a tiny thing, really, in the scheme of things, but right now, looking at his bare ears, something in his chest curled inward.

See, he’d wanted earrings growing up, wanted to look like the pretty boys in the magazines scattered around motel lobbies. But John, of course, would allow no such thing. As he got older, Dean reasoned to himself that earrings would just get in the way of hunting. Some monster would rip them out during a fight, and then he’d have to deal with injured ears on top of everything else. So he told himself.

When he’d been turned into a demon, on the other hand, free of those pesky human inhibitions, he’d walked into the nearest tattoo parlor the day after Crowley whisked him away from the bunker and left an hour later with his ears pierced. It wasn’t anything fancy, just a simple black stud in either ear.

Months later, when he was back in the bunker and once again human, after he’d shaved his face and trimmed his hair and started to feel like himself again, he couldn’t bring himself to take out the earrings. When was the last time he’d done something like this for himself? He liked how he looked with them in. They looked good. He looked good. Throwing them away would be a waste of a perfectly good pair of earrings, anyway. Honestly, it just made sense to keep them in.

The next morning, he’d walked into the kitchen to find Sam and Cas at the table eating breakfast. Well, Sam was eating, at least; Cas was absorbed in some book Dean didn’t recognize. They both looked up as he walked in.

“Morning. I made pancakes,” Sam said, gesturing to the platter in the middle of the table. “You feeling okay?”

“Never better,” Dean said. He almost hoped that Sam wouldn’t mention the earrings and just let him get his pancakes in peace, but then Sam’s eyes flicked to his ears.

“Those are new. You keeping them?” There was no judgment in his voice, just genuine curiosity.

Still, Dean had flooded with self-consciousness, struggling not to think of John. His hand went to his ear, his finger playing with the backing. “I mean. I don’t hate ‘em. Just seemed easier to leave ‘em in. For now.”

“They look good,” Sam assured him, and gave him a little smile, then returned to his pancakes.

Dean grabbed a plate and slid into the seat next to Cas at the table, piling pancakes onto it. As he reached for the syrup, he caught Cas staring at him.

“What?” Dean asked after a few seconds, his face growing hot, but neither of them looked away.

“Piercings suit you,” Cas had said finally, and then returned to his book.

Dean had flushed red to the tips of his ears. He finally turned away to see Sam smirking, and he had to resist the urge to tell him to shut up, grateful at least that neither of them were making a big deal of it.

So it became a normal thing, Dean wearing earrings. He bought a few different pairs of studs over the years—a gold set, a silver one, ones inlaid with tiny blue gems, but mostly he stuck to the black ones.

He loved how he looked in them. He loved the compliments he got, from both men and women. And every day that he wore them, the voice of his father in his head, the source of his shame, grew smaller and quieter.

But Michael hadn’t cared about that. Michael cared about how useful he could be as his vessel, as his sword. The Michael Sword.

Dean couldn’t stand his reflection anymore. He stormed out of the bathroom and down the hall to his room and rummaged around until he found his first aid kit, a brand-new sewing needle, and a lighter. He yanked open his nightstand drawer and paused as he looked over his few pairs of earrings. His favorites—the first pair of black studs—were long gone, thanks to Michael. So instead, he settled on a pair of small gold hoops that Claire had given him last Christmas.

She’d tried to pass it off like it was no big deal, tossing him the wrapped package and muttering something about how he couldn’t keep wearing those lame studs forever, but Dean invented that move. He knew what it had meant to her to give him something, and he treasured the earrings for that. Still, he hadn’t worn them yet. Hoops were less practical than studs; with his luck, they were bound to snag on something during a hunt, and he didn’t want to risk losing them.

But caution be damned. He was going to do this for himself. The monsters would simply have to work around him this time.

Back in the bathroom, he flicked open his lighter and held the needle over the flame to sterilize it, then wiped it clean with rubbing alcohol from the first aid kit. It occurred vaguely to him that he might want to go to a professional for this, like the first time, but he couldn’t wait that long. Besides, he could do this. He’d seen movies.

He braced his ear with an unused bar of soap, took a deep breath, and stuck the needle through his earlobe, wincing slightly at the pinch. He removed it and quickly stuck in one gold hoop, then repeated the process on the other side.

It was done in less than two minutes. Dean studied his reflection in the mirror and poked gently at the hoops, and for the first time since Michael had inexplicably left him, a real smile spread over his face.

It felt right. He looked right. He looked like Dean again. He could still feel the remnants of Michael’s grace in his veins, but it was Dean’s body. He was taking it back again, starting with a pair of gold hoop earrings.

#my first spn fic since the renaissance and im proud of it tbh #supernatural #spn #dean winchester #ive never pierced my own ears i got that from wikihow i hope its accurate #ask

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hope-and-soap · 6 years

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“Cover it up”: Ragnarok and the scars of history (2/2)

Find part 1 here

“It is I! Your saviour!”

So: hands up, those of us who were shocked/thrilled/horrifically excited etc when we were first presented with the prospect of seeing Loki on Asgard’s throne.

And now: hands up, those of us who were expecting what he actually did with it.

Loki’s a difficult character to deal with, largely because his motivations seem to be all over the place. In The Avengers he wants world domination and to not be killed by Thanos. In The Dark World he wants revenge for his mother and, in some small way, to get on a little better with Thor. These things, they don’t really line up, do they? And that leaves us, after all these films, still asking that question: what does Loki want?

When Loki took over Asgard, he didn’t take its armies on a campaign of conquest through the galaxy. He didn’t hunt down his enemies or murder his brother or invade Earth. He sat on a sofa and ate grapes and commissioned art in honour of himself – in honour of Loki, hero of Asgard, beloved of his father, forgiven of his crimes. Loki took over his country and then he took what he wanted: the love of Asgard’s people, his place in its history. Given the chance to have anything he wanted, this is what he chose. To be loved. To be accepted. To be remembered as one of them.

This, then, is what Loki wants: to be a hero of Asgard, rather than an outcast from it. To be someone they accept, not out of force, but out of love. This is, really, what he’s wanted ever since his first appearance – his villainous turn in Thor, after all, began as an attempt to win his father’s approval, and a large part of his snarling bitterness at his country and his family comes from the trauma of realising that neither is really his. Loki is haunted by the feeling of being other; what he wants, more than anything, is to be rid of that feeling.

Read in this light, the appearance of the little blue kid at the end of The Tragedy of Loki of Asgard goes from being just a cute joke to something more significant: a reminder of where Loki comes from, and who he is. Not just an outsider, or an immigrant, but a hostage from a conquered race. If Hela represents the dark, violent imperialism of Asgard’s past, Loki represents the continuing reality of this imperialism in Asgard’s present. The Jotun were not victims of Hela’s violence, but they were victims of an impulse nearly identical to the one which Hela embodies – the impulse to fight, to conquer, to rule.

When I was sixteen I wanted to move to London. I wanted to write for the BBC; I wanted to be the next Steven Moffat. These are all reasonable dreams, when you are sixteen and a Doctor Who fan; to be honest, I still want to be Steven Moffat. But when I was sixteen I wanted more than that – I wanted to move to London and become British, to prove that I spoke English as well as any Englishwoman, to take the accent and the airs and dye my hair and change my passport and get an OBE from the Queen and forget where I came from and have everyone forget about that, too. To be a Singaporean who made good. To go to the people who’d conquered my people and make my place there, as one as good as them, as one of them.

I got older. I got better. I go to university in England now. Now and then I catch myself speaking with my accent from home and I rub it out before anyone else notices. I take the odd slang term and I hide it away. I work hard because I love my degree and I respect my tutors and I never learned how to not work hard when it comes to academia, and I work hard because one day I’m going to get a first and beat all my white brit friends and I’ll prove that I’m as good as them even though I’m Chinese. It kills me that there are cultural jokes my friends share with each other that I will never understand. It kills me that there is a form of humour over there that I was not raised to appreciate. I go to university in England now and I love that land and I love this land, here, where I came from, but it’s hard being home in two places, it’s hard being made in one and living in another, and sometimes that kills me too.

The place where I live during term time has been standing for a thousand years and it has a library with every book in the world in it and it is a beautiful city full of beautiful people who speak the language I love perfectly, it is a place of poetry, and home is a city full of squat practical buildings built in the last fifty years and advertisements on buses which have grammatical errors in and every now and then I think to myself if I had to pick one, if I had to pick one…

I am older, now. I am better. I tell myself I love my country. I tell myself I do not need to prove myself to anyone, especially not because they’re white, especially not because they would have been my masters, in another life. I am aggressively Singaporean now, aggressively Chinese, aggressively myself. I am no longer sixteen. Sometimes I catch myself wishing I had been born English. The very idea disgusts me. It’s still true.

When Loki takes over Asgard, he turns himself into Odin to do it. And if you’re anything like me, you thought that would’ve lasted for about as long as it would’ve taken him to quash all dissent, exile the strong and the loyal, and reveal his true self to the quivering, subjugated masses left with no other option than to submit to him. But here he is, years later, and he’s still Odin. He would, it seems, be happy to stay Odin for the rest of his life. Loki, remember, wants to rule, but more than that he wants to be loved. And if he can’t have both as himself, he’s willing to become a person who can. Odin, the symbol of every Asgardian ideal, the man who crushed Loki’s people, the man whose approval he was willing to destroy a world for – why wouldn’t he want to be him? Why wouldn’t he want to stay that way?

The tragedy of Loki of Asgard is this: that he becomes his own oppressor, just like I have become mine. We are the ones who set standards that we are never going to reach. We are the ones who are ashamed of where we come from, who we were, who we are now. We are the ones who look at a race of people we secretly resent and tell ourselves they are superior, that we will never be anything unless we can gain their approval, be like them, be them; we are the ones who will destroy ourselves trying. This is, you see, our own fault. Our own fault. We do this to ourselves.

It’s no surprise, then, that Loki looks a lot like Hela – Hela, the conqueror, the colonialist, creator of empires. They are both tall, thin, pale-skinned; dark-eyed, dark-haired. Both wear horns. Their hairstyles are even similar, and their colour schemes – black and green, almost the same shade. The similarities don’t end there; both share a love of conquest, a desire for power, even certain turns of phrase – in ordering her brothers to kneel, after all, Hela is clearly stealing Loki’s line.

Loki is not just the victim of a history of violence and oppression. He is the inheritor of that history. He’s internalised it, let it take him over; let it dictate who he wants to be and who he is becoming – a creature of conquest, the embodiment of the very thing that did him damage. He becomes both his own oppressor and a symbol of his own oppression – both the victim and the villain of his own story. He takes on both sides of that history. He is scarred by both.

It is Loki, of all of Odin’s children, who has the best claim to Asgard’s history.

Which is, of course, why he gets to be the one to burn it all down.

“Get up. You’re in my seat.”

I just want to say two things about Thor.

The first is this: that Marvel’s filmmakers have finally found, in Thor’s arc in Ragnarok, the one storyline for which the protagonist needs to be a white man. Because Thor is the ultimate child of privilege – raised as royalty, heir to a throne, physically indestructible, with Aryan looks and a traditionally masculine personality. He is, both in-universe and out of it, the white-masculine ideal – the man’s man who oozes physical strength and (hetero)sexual appeal, a man with rank and status and money, handed power and authority on a silver platter. Thor is the one person who never had to fear all the things that Hela represents, because he is not the sort of person she conquers – he is the sort of person she conquers for.

And in this film, he comes to understand what it’s like being on the other side of that picture. This is not, of course, to say that Thor has never suffered before, or that he has never before been capable of compassion for those who are suffering – but he has never, till this point, been the victim of this particular form of violence. Before, he had always been a person with unquestioned agency, the hero of his own story, sometimes hurt but never at another’s mercy. He has been beaten; he has never been exploited. Until now.

In Ragnarok, Thor is enslaved, subjugated, kept in line by thinly-disguised torture. He has his throne stolen from him, his legitimacy questioned. He is used, abused, imprisoned not because he is recognised – as SHIELD recognised him in his first film – as a threat, but because he is property that must be kept in its proper place. He sees his people attacked. He loses his hammer and his agency and his hair – a loss which, though played for laughs, represents the violation of a body that has to this point been presented as absolutely inviolate and inviolable.

In this film, Thor goes from being a child of privilege to being a slave, a member of a victimised community, a sexualised object, a person without bodily autonomy. And because of this, he finally understands what it is to be these things. To be the victim of a system of power over which you have no control. To be the victim of violence which you are unable to fight. To be beaten and pressed down and thumbed under. To be powerless.

This is, ultimately, what makes his defeat of Hela powerful, and meaningful, and possible. Because Thor, as he was before, would never have been able to fight a system of oppression – he would barely have been able to comprehend it. Thor, the Mighty Thor, has no power in a world like this. We do not need mighty invincible champions who reach down from the heavens to save the oppressed. We do not need the child of privilege, given everything, lacking nothing. We need someone who will fight with us. Who feels this pain too. We need someone who understands.

The second thing I want to say is this: Thor is not the firstborn of Odin. Hela is. Thor is not the heir to Asgard’s throne. Hela is. In nations built on violence and cruelty it is not the children of privilege who inherit. It is history. It is violence. It is cruelty itself.

When Hela tells Thor that he is in her chair, she isn’t lying – she’s correct. The throne is hers, and so is the power, and so is the land. She owns it. It is hers. And none of them may remember, but it has always been hers.

And so Thor tells Loki to burn it down. He burns down his home, his life, everything he has ever known. But in the end, he loses nothing, because none of it was ever his, really. It is not his inheritance that he burns. It is hers.

Who really has your power? Who really owns your land? Can you let it live, knowing it feeds something darker and bloodier than you care to remember? Can you really cling to your gilded thrones, knowing you are usurpers, knowing that one day history will rise up to claim its inheritance?

Do you dare to burn it down?

What will you really lose?

#thor ragnarok #thor #loki #meta #post-colonialism

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