memprime asked: What is wrong with mint and mint relatives? Thank you.
I am really curious as to where @elodieunderglass is from. Because, well, the thing about invasive species is that they are only invasive in some areas.They’re lovely, but they MUST be kept in a pot, or a raised bed, or on a good-quality leash with a chest harness, because mint and its cousins spread like… IDEK, like a rash. Like dandelions. They’re tough, hardy and highly motivated. Even a tiny root fragment will suddenly turn into a Mint Tree if you don’t tear it up. I swear I’ve seen new plants popping up from BURIED SCRAPS OF LEAF. Once they’re in the ground they establish a beachhead and spawn secretly, possibly through osmosis. I cannot advise you to stick a mint plant in the ground unless you are a bold and unconventional disciplinarian.
The joke is that after running around after the mint like a spaniel chasing a whack-a-mole for a year, Dr Glass then planted a plant that would do the same thing.
Great plants, hard to kill, keep them in a pot (ESPECIALLY where invasive)I would really recommend against planting mint in raised beds, and also, if in a pot, DO NOT PUT THE POT ON SOIL. The pot needs to be on rock or concrete. Otherwise the roots will head straight for freedom through the drainage holes, and you will Never Be Free.
of course, on the other hand, if you’re at all inclined to pettiness expressed via herbology, mint makes a GREAT vehicle for plant-based vengeance.
i have absolutely thrown mint roots into the perfectly manicured lawns of people i hate.
An ever growing mint plant appearing in my lawn would seem like the opposite of a problem to me?
They’re invasive, which means if they’re anywhere in your garden or manicured areas they could ruin the other plants, I think? But yeah I’d love to have a damn mint plant in my yard sounds ideal.
Has anyone ever thought of just having a lawn of mint instead of grass? Like how you have moss lawns?
… I am not judging!! but I don’t think the people in the notes who are like “oh a mint lawn would be lovely!” have met mint!
You know what would be a lovely herbal lawn? Chamomile. Because it’s a damn compact, densely-growing, hardy, winter-green perennial that’s springy underfoot, smells nice when you walk on it, and has some basic manners. Lawn chamomile is plushy and soft and produces tiny pretty daisy-looking flowers. It naturally stays at pretty much the height you would want grass to be, and then you can cut it and it goes “fair enough.”
Mint is not any of those things. Mint is leggy, patchy, muddy and rampageous. It grows randomly and fitfully. It bullies other plants. It sends runners into the neighbor’s houses and across the street and it barks at the postman. Your mint lawn would look like a poorly tended graveyard AND THEN IN THE WINTER IT WOULD DIE, DRAMATICALLY, and ROT
THERE. It would outcompete native plants and eat your vegetable garden alive. It is so wet and stalky that it would be dreadful to trim, and when you trimmed it, it would scab over and sulk. It would refuse to grow where it was put (the lawn) and would instead show up in places you don’t want it (the patio, the sidewalk, your intrusive thoughts.) IT IS AN INVASIVE PLANT, WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO YOUR FAMILYIt’s like asking why people don’t make lawns out of cabbages, or hyenas, or the cold virus. BECAUSE THEN IT WOULDN’T BE A LAWN OR A GARDEN
Things are heating up in the herb fandom.
Reblogging because this conversation deserves to be shared with tumblr; Chris Pike would totally give mint as a gift to someone he hated as revenge.
And I can attest to being able to *kill* mint plants where I live. Ones out in the yard and everything, and they certainly aren’t on my areas list.
I’m from New England, USA. I live in Old England, Europe.
The thing with mint is that it’s not necessarily a lot of Invasive Species watch lists, it’s *an* invasive - an unscientific and loose term for things whose natural history and reproductive habits mean they can quickly outcompete native organisms. It isn’t An Invasive Plant ™ in its native soils, which are around Europe and the MENA region. Instead, it behaves invasively, like bindweed.
Mint’s brilliant, admirable secret is its long runners, or horizontal water-seeking roots. A tiny sprig will produce extremely long underground runners that can be many feet long. If a runner encounters a water source, it can suck it up and feed the host plant (so a mint plant growing in the middle of barren concrete may be slurping up water from a garden across the street, or a leaking pipe under the sidewalk, or possibly Neptune.) and each runner can also pop up a stalk in a new location, creating a new plant. A section of runner or other root is perfectly capable of making a new plant, so a fragment of buried root in a neighbor’s garden could result in a mint popping up in your patio. Mint also spreads by seed, so it disperses very efficiently.
Why is this a problem? Eh, it’s not really. It’s simply doing what’s in its nature. I always advocate for that. But it will outcompete your garden in most conditions - I.e if your other herbs want water, mint will steal it out from under them. It’s a water hog, as simple as that. In dry conditions or climates it will politely limit itself to places where it is given water, but if you start watering another part of the garden - maybe you want to cultivate a rose, or an olive tree - the mint will magically show up there, banging its water dish and looking expectant. And it will say “I had a secret runner that went here, Just In Case.” And you’ll say “fair enough, you mad bastard.”
But you’re right, my terminology was unclear. It’s a confusing way to use it and I won’t do it again
This Mint Discourse is the karmic price I must pay, since two years ago my husband chucked a mint plant into the field of a farmer he didn’t like, and I… Reader, I let him do it
Thank you all for warning me not to plant “a little mint” around the side of the house because it would be “nice to have around”.
Thank you all again for letting me know that this is a credible form of botanical terrorism.
CHOICE EXCERPTS:
- they establish a beachhead and spawn secretly, possibly through osmosis
- like a spaniel chasing a whack-a-mole for a year
- pettiness expressed via herbology,
- plant-based vengeance
- i have absolutely thrown mint roots into the perfectly manicured lawns of people i hate.
- [Chamomile] has some basic manners
- Mint is… rampageous. It bullies other plants…. It barks at the postman
- like a poorly tended graveyard
- It’s like asking why people don’t make lawns out of cabbages, or hyenas, or the cold virus
- so a mint plant growing in the middle of barren concrete may be slurping up water from a garden across the street, or a leaking pipe under the sidewalk, or possibly Neptune.
- In dry conditions or climates it will politely limit itself to places where it is given water, but if you start watering another part of the garden - maybe you want to cultivate a rose, or an olive tree - the mint will magically show up there,
- banging its water dish and looking expectant
- “fair enough, you mad bastard.”
- This Mint Discourse is the karmic price I must pay, since two years ago my husband chucked a mint plant into the field of a farmer he didn’t like, and I… Reader, I let him do it
- credible form of botanical terrorism.
@memprime @elodieunderglass @semianonymity @nehirose @voidbat @hello-hayati @eminenceofiyanola @elodieunderglass @dirtycorzaharkness @naamahdarling I want to thank each and every one of you. The talent and the bright minds behind this post, incredible. We wouldn’t be standing here today without you. This was a group effort, a team play. Y’all came together and gave it your A game and that really shows through in the final product. Good job team, you really did it.
You thanked me twice and I’m grateful
aethersea asked: you know what also pissed me off about supernatural, though? the inability to commit to their own worldbuilding. even while clinging to a static paradigm, where The Masquerade is in full effect, they couldn't be consistent about what sort of underground magic communities do and don't exist. I know this can be blamed on multiple writers and all, but it drives me up the wall. f.ex. witches are All Evil and tend to work alone, until that episode with the familiars when you find a bunch of nice(r)
witches who go to witch bars and hardly ever poison each other’s drinks, oh and also familiars are a thing. a while later spike and cordelia are witches who’ve had a tempestuous relationship for… centuries I think, aka witches can live for a really long time, so there’s no way the bigger/older ones don’t all know each other. there ought to be SOME sort of witch ‘society’, even if it’s just loose communication. but no, after this you never hear of witches ever again, much less familiars or witch
bars. then you’ve got Bela, who caters to rich people who know magical artifacts exist, but there’s no exploration of what that could MEAN – if Bela can hold down a job, then enough of the country’s elite own and exploit magic stuff that it could – SHOULD – have at least some effect on US politics, as in who gets power. there’s never a whisper of that, but okay, this isn’t exactly the winchester boys’ social scene. but failing that, some of these magic-obsessed rich people should turn up for a
few episodes, either haunted or else guilty of inflicting a monster-of-the-week on someone. heck, one of them could be a recurring vaguely-helpful character that the boys stop by and menace a bit whenever they need access to some excessively obscure artifact. you already mentioned the mess of all those Alpha Monsters who were powerful and unkillable and stuff, and had their own dread agendas with potentially far-reaching consequences for their respective species, and then just… vanished. I don’t
even remember how. and then there’s the hunter community, which is the most inconsistent of all. first it’s just these two and their dad, and then they start finding out their dad’s old friends were all actually hunters or oracles or whatever. so far so good; these are just Mysteries Of Our Father’s Past, and valid character/plot development stuff. but there’s Bobby, who Knows Everyone, and Ellen, whose bar every hunter in the country frequents sooner or later, and this means hunters know each
other, know about each other, they have a network of communication and they share intel, gossip, trade secrets. but the moment the bar blows up there’s just no network, no connection, nothing at all binding hunters together, even though Bobby still knows everyone and Ellen and Jo are still around and plenty able to found a new bar if they wanted to, or at least keep in touch with at least half of the people who used to swing by their bar. oh and also the demons! they talk about complex politics
happening in Hell, they have some sort of prophesied demon queen who takes the body of a young girl and has glowing white eyes (I don’t even remember what happened to her), they have demon religion and spirituality to the point where Lucifer is basically Demon Jesus – I’m pretty sure this is explicitly stated, Lucifer is to the demons what Jesus is to really devout Christians, semi-mythical status and prophesied second coming and everything – and the show makes an effort to flesh out its demonic
characters, give them personality and desires and drives, and it shows distinct differences in how different demons feel about humanity, and about what they do, and all that. yet despite all this, the only demon we meet who doesn’t immediately try to murder the boys is Ruby. no one tries to bargain honestly with the boys, no one but Crowley tries to aim the boys at their own enemies, no one begs for mercy or lies about repentance. nothing. can you imagine if those demons who told Sam to take up
his antichrist mantle and lead a demon army decided that, since their Chosen One was unwilling, they ought to convince him? what if a bunch of demons had started discreetly tailing the boys, showing up sometimes to rescue them from really bad fights or offer up dead monsters like housecats offering dead birds? ‘hey chosen one, we caught you this demon who’s high up in Crowley’s hierarchy, do you want to torture him for information yourself or do you want us to do it?’ they solemnly swear that
that they’ve stopped killing humans, they keep quietly growing in number, and they always scram before the boys are conscious enough to kill them properly. sam and dean have many arguments about whether they were REALLY too concussed to stab their latest demonic rescuer and get absurdly angsty and argumentative about it. I know my rant has gotten pretty thoroughly disorganized and this is moving back into must-have-a-static-paradigm territory, but I am a little bitter.
THIS IS ALSO SUCH A GOOD POINT there is just so much to be bitter about with this show, like, good god, you’d think that sooner or later they’d run out of basic narrative rules to fuck up.
Speaking of rules, I think this is a manifestation of one of Supernatural’s wider problems, which is that they just DO NOT SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THE RULES OF THEIR OWN UNIVERSE. Like, all they’ve REALLY nailed down is that demons can be exorcised, but anything that isn’t a demon is pretty much at the mercy of the plot for A) how powerful it is, B) how hard to kill it is, and C) how ‘human’ it’s considered. Like, everything from werewolves to wendigos are stated to be at least PART human, but basically their ‘humanness’ and subsequently the amount of sympathy accorded to them is predicated on how benign (or how attractive) they look in their human form. The magic of this universe is wildly unpredictable–the Winchesters sometimes do/dabble in magic themselves, but we never really learn how magic works. Does it require a focus? Does it require badly-pronounced Latin? Is it an expression of the user’s willpower? Is it similar to what demons do (implied when All Witches Are Wicked for the first few seasons) or not? Does it require natural talent or can anyone learn it? THERE ARE SO MANY QUESTIONS THAT ARE TOTALLY IGNORED. THEN there’s the question of societies in this supernatural underworld. Like, I think I’ve expressed in my John Wick comments how much I like functional underworld societies with rules and systems, but honestly it’s CRITICALLY necessary if you’re doing what SPN does and having the society Matter. I cringe every time I think about how clumsy and slapdash the hunting community was in Supernatural, because it had SO MUCH POTENTIAL, don’t talk to me about it, I made it work better when I wrote my spite novel. I’m sure I can think of fifty million more incomplete universe rules, but I can honestly feel my blood pressure rising right now so I’m going to stop.
OH MY GOD GUYS, please, if you’re a writer, let me beg you right now in person to figure out the rules of your universe and then commit. Here are some pointers.
Magic should work in a conceptually similar way to gravity: its rules should be consistent and should be able to be broadly extrapolated from the general effect, and if you’re going to BREAK those rules you’ve got to have a damn fine reason.
The sliding scale of ‘humannness’ should…slide less, to be completely honest, work your shit the fuck out EARLY or make working your shit the fuck out a plot point (please see Stormdancer for a good example).
If you’re dealing with questions of what makes someone human (@SPN FOR LIKE FOUR FUCKING SEASONS) then you should actively question like “Hey, my dude, can we morally kill this person for something they have no control over” unless your character took the trait ‘Callous’ somewhere in their history (which is also fine).
If you have an underworld society–or any society tbh???–WORK YOUR SHIT OUT. How do they work together (ex: hunters pretending to be ‘the boss’ when someone calls the number on that fake business card)? How do they support each other (ex: safehouses? maybe? this is never discussed in SPN? and I hate it?)? What are the things people differ on (ex: whether or not to murder the Winchesters, which, like, I know you’re supposed to be against that because they’re the protagonists, but by the time I bailed I def wanted someone to shoot them)? Is there an assumption of free exchange of favors or is there a strict financial/bargaining system? How much does one person vouching for another matter in the community? ANSWER SOME BASIC QUESTIONS FFS
Finally, most crucially, for the love of all that is good, Pick A Plot. One plot. It can have subplots (example: an overarching plot broken up by smaller missions, a la your average TV show) or multiple acts (as in a play, where you’ve got a couple major pieces that assemble into the main plot, like Much Ado where you’ve got (roughly) the matchmaking, the wedding, the vengeance, and the resolution), but it should be One Plot and you need to tie up those motherfucking loose ends.
This has been “Hey look turns out that 6K later I have Even More Complaints about Supernatural” with Moran.
honestly though. this show is, as you said, a fantasy/horror murder mystery show with overarching apocalypse plots. if all we, as viewers, were interested in was the violence and brotherly angst, we’d be watching sons of anarchy. we’re here for the monsters, guys. we are absolutely here for the monsters. invest in your monsters.
the sliding scale of humanness in particular is really frustrating, at least when it’s coupled with such lazy writing. Think about it – they focus so much on What Is Humanity when it comes to Sam, but the show hardly ever asks that same question about the monsters, many of whom are ex-humans. When it does, it asks about a single character, not about whether, say, all werewolves should be given a second chance because they don’t actually know they’re killing people.
Like Buffy before them, the Winchesters draw a hard line between “killing monsters” and “killing humans,” but even while the writers are waffling back and forth on Sam’s humanity, they never explore why that difference matters. The debate on Sam’s humanity focuses a tiny bit on his capacity for empathy and ethics and mostly just on whether he’s got demon-based superpowers. It’s a fixation on the superficial, like what makes a monster is the scales and sharp teeth, not the rampant homicide. Dean is freaked out because Sam can kill demons by glaring really hard, and does, but killing demons has been their express goal for the whole show, it’s not like he’s done anything other than level-up his skill set.
Meanwhile, the debate on whether he’s Going Too Far centers on his demon blood addiction (and what a cop-out it is, making the power-enhancing substance so destructively addictive that your OP character has to quit cold-turkey and never have powers again) and on how trigger-happy he’s gotten with demons specifically. Who, again, are Universally Bad and have been their avowed enemies since episode three. It’s not like the writers have any space to suddenly get high-and-mighty about how you’re not supposed to kill monsters all willy-nilly, not this far into the game.
If the question of Is Sam Human can be answered by what ratio of hemoglobin to sulfur is in his veins, your setup is flawed. If having special abilities from questionable origins is monstrous, then they should throw away that demon-killing knife they get off a demon, and the demon-killing gun that Ruby fixes up special for them. If sympathetic monsters are occasionally introduced, but the show never explores whether that means some monsters can be relied upon to act morally in the long run, or what the consequences are of granting or denying them the ability to do that, then what is the point?
I’m surprisingly bitter about the werewolves it turns out I feel like there should be werewolf support groups they can all rent an abandoned warehouse or smth every full moon and chain themselves up for a night in the morning one of their relatives comes by with a key and some donuts also it pisses me off when characters who are in it for the Saving Humanity schtick seem more into killing monsters than saving people and that’s never addressed at one point sam meets a childhood friend who’s killing rapists so she can nurse her sick child back to health with their hearts sam lets her go but it’s at least halfway due to nostalgia from when they were kids dean swings by later and straight murders her and not her kid which is just stupid really and I mean at least buffy goes ‘I’m the Slayer not the sheriff so I’m gonna do the job I was assigned at birth and not apply my-stake-is-law rules to a criminal-justice-system society’ and there are episodes where that frustrates her or where she comes really close to crossing that line and it’s a big deal here they just kind of pretend human crimes don’t exist and ignore them
I TOO AM SURPRISINGLY BITTER ABOUT THE WEREWOLVES.
Like? Just fucking chain them up? Rather than doing murder? AND OH MY GOD THAT EPISODE WITH THE WOMAN AND HER KID MADE ME FUCKING F U R I O U S. The sliding scale of humanity is the most aggravating thing about this phenomenon of not knowing their own rules, because it means that they talk a really big game about protecting humanity but then they do shit like killing werewolves who ARE ONLY DANGEROUS FOR MAYBE FORTY-EIGHT HOURS A MONTH. And like the whole thing about killing the woman and not her kid–like, if Dean was really trying to prove committment to the ‘monsters aren’t people and they ALL have to die,’ which would at least be a consistent character trait, he should have also killed the kid, who is implied to inevitably have to do the same thing as her mother. As it is, it just comes off as petty and vengeful because it’s someone that Sam cares about and Dean can’t handle that (see also: PLEASE AT LEAST PRETEND THAT THESE TWO BROTHERS LIKE EACH OTHER WTF).
I’m so fucking aggravated about this y’all you don’t even know, I hate this show. It was not an amicable breakup. You know how with some shows or book series or whatever you can AT LEAST still watch the earlier seasons before things were COMPLETE trash? Nope, noPE, NOPE, can’t even watch the first couple seasons that I genuinely enjoyed, I divorced this show with fucking prejudice.
I’m sorry for stirring such terrible memories. I hope you’ve found new and better shows, that treat you right, and don’t act all wishy-washy about their dramatic moral quandaries.
I TOO HAVE FOUND WYNONNA EARP, AND DAMN THAT IS MY SHIT.
Honestly, let this be an open letter to anyone as aggravated with SPN as I got to be. Wynonna Earp is wonderful and I have tentatively high hopes for the second season. It’s on Netflix. Finx explains it really well.
I was trying to think of a show to recommend that would not do this
the only truly safe show I could think of was leverage
I’m tempted to rec wynonna earp but that could hypothetically devolve into terribleness in further seasons
the first season was solid though
it felt kind of like watching supernatural but good and starring women
it’s got great monsters w/ diverse characterizations
within consistent framework/rules for what they are and how they work
the main characters are all really cool and an absolute delight to watch
and all pretty different
wynonna likes drinking and motorcycles and sex and being an utter goddamn mess
she is not shamed for this (except a little bit the mess part bc getting your life together is a thing you should aim for doing)
waverly likes pretty dresses and having a boyfriend and making friends and doing history research
she is not shamed for this
(also she’s badass and gets seduced by someone WAY better than her loser boyfriend and it’s cute and great)
dolls the too-serious special forces guy ends up a really well-rounded character with fears and flaws
(he even smiles a couple times)
doc holliday is in it and starts off morally dubious before picking a side
it’s great
there’s a love triangle which is unfortunate but in season one at least it doesn’t implode
there’s an episode with a cool blacksmith who is totally underutilized and it’s downright tragic how much potential they squander with her
but other than that it’s a pretty great show
and it doesn’t take itself too seriously
it knows it’s got a bit of campy horror going on and it runs with it
Anonymous asked: tell me... the most loopholey bit of alleirai law
You, my dear anon, are a gift and a godsend.
Right, so, the absolute MOST loopholey bit of law in Alleirat is based on the ongoing detente between the two criminal organizations in most major cities and the lathan, the city guards. The way the major cities (there are four) and some of the smaller cities (to a lesser degree) operate is that there’s an undercity (Kal [city name], as in Kal Dase) in sewer tunnels or foundations and an overcity (Lai [city name], as in Lai Dase) on rooftops and abandoned balconies/etc. There’s generally a boss of Kal and Lai sub-cities, with ‘Below’ criminals specializing in more rough-and-tumble crimes and ‘Above’ criminals having a more cat burgler rep. Now, in order to prevent any gang-vs-law wars that might risk the Streets (the civilians between Kal and Lai), the lathan have a deal, and the deal goes something like this.
Any criminal from Above or Below is at jeopardy for the crimes they have committed for a given amount of time, and during that time capture by the lathan can result in trial and sentencing, which can range from labor to execution. However, the lathan cannot trespass onto Kal or Lai subcities without a writ for the arrest of a criminal and proof of their identity. If one of the lathan does enter the subcities without a writ, no crime committed against them in that location can be charged against any individual. On the other hand, the latha cannot be charged for any actions they take in self-defense.
The balance is extremely delicate and largely predicated on the fact that Kal and Lai operate on a certain code of honor. Other situations, like the ongoing bandit problem in the most rural areas and the White Touch, do not so much have that code, although the Touch has their own rules.
if supernatural doesn’t end soon i’m going to kill the winchesters myself
(via windbladess)
aethersea asked: you know what also pissed me off about supernatural, though? the inability to commit to their own worldbuilding. even while clinging to a static paradigm, where The Masquerade is in full effect, they couldn't be consistent about what sort of underground magic communities do and don't exist. I know this can be blamed on multiple writers and all, but it drives me up the wall. f.ex. witches are All Evil and tend to work alone, until that episode with the familiars when you find a bunch of nice(r)
witches who go to witch bars and hardly ever poison each other’s drinks, oh and also familiars are a thing. a while later spike and cordelia are witches who’ve had a tempestuous relationship for… centuries I think, aka witches can live for a really long time, so there’s no way the bigger/older ones don’t all know each other. there ought to be SOME sort of witch ‘society’, even if it’s just loose communication. but no, after this you never hear of witches ever again, much less familiars or witch
bars. then you’ve got Bela, who caters to rich people who know magical artifacts exist, but there’s no exploration of what that could MEAN – if Bela can hold down a job, then enough of the country’s elite own and exploit magic stuff that it could – SHOULD – have at least some effect on US politics, as in who gets power. there’s never a whisper of that, but okay, this isn’t exactly the winchester boys’ social scene. but failing that, some of these magic-obsessed rich people should turn up for a
few episodes, either haunted or else guilty of inflicting a monster-of-the-week on someone. heck, one of them could be a recurring vaguely-helpful character that the boys stop by and menace a bit whenever they need access to some excessively obscure artifact. you already mentioned the mess of all those Alpha Monsters who were powerful and unkillable and stuff, and had their own dread agendas with potentially far-reaching consequences for their respective species, and then just… vanished. I don’t
even remember how. and then there’s the hunter community, which is the most inconsistent of all. first it’s just these two and their dad, and then they start finding out their dad’s old friends were all actually hunters or oracles or whatever. so far so good; these are just Mysteries Of Our Father’s Past, and valid character/plot development stuff. but there’s Bobby, who Knows Everyone, and Ellen, whose bar every hunter in the country frequents sooner or later, and this means hunters know each
other, know about each other, they have a network of communication and they share intel, gossip, trade secrets. but the moment the bar blows up there’s just no network, no connection, nothing at all binding hunters together, even though Bobby still knows everyone and Ellen and Jo are still around and plenty able to found a new bar if they wanted to, or at least keep in touch with at least half of the people who used to swing by their bar. oh and also the demons! they talk about complex politics
happening in Hell, they have some sort of prophesied demon queen who takes the body of a young girl and has glowing white eyes (I don’t even remember what happened to her), they have demon religion and spirituality to the point where Lucifer is basically Demon Jesus – I’m pretty sure this is explicitly stated, Lucifer is to the demons what Jesus is to really devout Christians, semi-mythical status and prophesied second coming and everything – and the show makes an effort to flesh out its demonic
characters, give them personality and desires and drives, and it shows distinct differences in how different demons feel about humanity, and about what they do, and all that. yet despite all this, the only demon we meet who doesn’t immediately try to murder the boys is Ruby. no one tries to bargain honestly with the boys, no one but Crowley tries to aim the boys at their own enemies, no one begs for mercy or lies about repentance. nothing. can you imagine if those demons who told Sam to take up
his antichrist mantle and lead a demon army decided that, since their Chosen One was unwilling, they ought to convince him? what if a bunch of demons had started discreetly tailing the boys, showing up sometimes to rescue them from really bad fights or offer up dead monsters like housecats offering dead birds? ‘hey chosen one, we caught you this demon who’s high up in Crowley’s hierarchy, do you want to torture him for information yourself or do you want us to do it?’ they solemnly swear that
that they’ve stopped killing humans, they keep quietly growing in number, and they always scram before the boys are conscious enough to kill them properly. sam and dean have many arguments about whether they were REALLY too concussed to stab their latest demonic rescuer and get absurdly angsty and argumentative about it. I know my rant has gotten pretty thoroughly disorganized and this is moving back into must-have-a-static-paradigm territory, but I am a little bitter.
THIS IS ALSO SUCH A GOOD POINT there is just so much to be bitter about with this show, like, good god, you’d think that sooner or later they’d run out of basic narrative rules to fuck up.
Speaking of rules, I think this is a manifestation of one of Supernatural’s wider problems, which is that they just DO NOT SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THE RULES OF THEIR OWN UNIVERSE. Like, all they’ve REALLY nailed down is that demons can be exorcised, but anything that isn’t a demon is pretty much at the mercy of the plot for A) how powerful it is, B) how hard to kill it is, and C) how ‘human’ it’s considered. Like, everything from werewolves to wendigos are stated to be at least PART human, but basically their ‘humanness’ and subsequently the amount of sympathy accorded to them is predicated on how benign (or how attractive) they look in their human form. The magic of this universe is wildly unpredictable–the Winchesters sometimes do/dabble in magic themselves, but we never really learn how magic works. Does it require a focus? Does it require badly-pronounced Latin? Is it an expression of the user’s willpower? Is it similar to what demons do (implied when All Witches Are Wicked for the first few seasons) or not? Does it require natural talent or can anyone learn it? THERE ARE SO MANY QUESTIONS THAT ARE TOTALLY IGNORED. THEN there’s the question of societies in this supernatural underworld. Like, I think I’ve expressed in my John Wick comments how much I like functional underworld societies with rules and systems, but honestly it’s CRITICALLY necessary if you’re doing what SPN does and having the society Matter. I cringe every time I think about how clumsy and slapdash the hunting community was in Supernatural, because it had SO MUCH POTENTIAL, don’t talk to me about it, I made it work better when I wrote my spite novel. I’m sure I can think of fifty million more incomplete universe rules, but I can honestly feel my blood pressure rising right now so I’m going to stop.
OH MY GOD GUYS, please, if you’re a writer, let me beg you right now in person to figure out the rules of your universe and then commit. Here are some pointers.
Magic should work in a conceptually similar way to gravity: its rules should be consistent and should be able to be broadly extrapolated from the general effect, and if you’re going to BREAK those rules you’ve got to have a damn fine reason.
The sliding scale of ‘humannness’ should…slide less, to be completely honest, work your shit the fuck out EARLY or make working your shit the fuck out a plot point (please see Stormdancer for a good example).
If you’re dealing with questions of what makes someone human (@SPN FOR LIKE FOUR FUCKING SEASONS) then you should actively question like “Hey, my dude, can we morally kill this person for something they have no control over” unless your character took the trait ‘Callous’ somewhere in their history (which is also fine).
If you have an underworld society–or any society tbh???–WORK YOUR SHIT OUT. How do they work together (ex: hunters pretending to be ‘the boss’ when someone calls the number on that fake business card)? How do they support each other (ex: safehouses? maybe? this is never discussed in SPN? and I hate it?)? What are the things people differ on (ex: whether or not to murder the Winchesters, which, like, I know you’re supposed to be against that because they’re the protagonists, but by the time I bailed I def wanted someone to shoot them)? Is there an assumption of free exchange of favors or is there a strict financial/bargaining system? How much does one person vouching for another matter in the community? ANSWER SOME BASIC QUESTIONS FFS
Finally, most crucially, for the love of all that is good, Pick A Plot. One plot. It can have subplots (example: an overarching plot broken up by smaller missions, a la your average TV show) or multiple acts (as in a play, where you’ve got a couple major pieces that assemble into the main plot, like Much Ado where you’ve got (roughly) the matchmaking, the wedding, the vengeance, and the resolution), but it should be One Plot and you need to tie up those motherfucking loose ends.
This has been “Hey look turns out that 6K later I have Even More Complaints about Supernatural” with Moran.
honestly though. this show is, as you said, a fantasy/horror murder mystery show with overarching apocalypse plots. if all we, as viewers, were interested in was the violence and brotherly angst, we’d be watching sons of anarchy. we’re here for the monsters, guys. we are absolutely here for the monsters. invest in your monsters.
the sliding scale of humanness in particular is really frustrating, at least when it’s coupled with such lazy writing. Think about it – they focus so much on What Is Humanity when it comes to Sam, but the show hardly ever asks that same question about the monsters, many of whom are ex-humans. When it does, it asks about a single character, not about whether, say, all werewolves should be given a second chance because they don’t actually know they’re killing people.
Like Buffy before them, the Winchesters draw a hard line between “killing monsters” and “killing humans,” but even while the writers are waffling back and forth on Sam’s humanity, they never explore why that difference matters. The debate on Sam’s humanity focuses a tiny bit on his capacity for empathy and ethics and mostly just on whether he’s got demon-based superpowers. It’s a fixation on the superficial, like what makes a monster is the scales and sharp teeth, not the rampant homicide. Dean is freaked out because Sam can kill demons by glaring really hard, and does, but killing demons has been their express goal for the whole show, it’s not like he’s done anything other than level-up his skill set.
Meanwhile, the debate on whether he’s Going Too Far centers on his demon blood addiction (and what a cop-out it is, making the power-enhancing substance so destructively addictive that your OP character has to quit cold-turkey and never have powers again) and on how trigger-happy he’s gotten with demons specifically. Who, again, are Universally Bad and have been their avowed enemies since episode three. It’s not like the writers have any space to suddenly get high-and-mighty about how you’re not supposed to kill monsters all willy-nilly, not this far into the game.
If the question of Is Sam Human can be answered by what ratio of hemoglobin to sulfur is in his veins, your setup is flawed. If having special abilities from questionable origins is monstrous, then they should throw away that demon-killing knife they get off a demon, and the demon-killing gun that Ruby fixes up special for them. If sympathetic monsters are occasionally introduced, but the show never explores whether that means some monsters can be relied upon to act morally in the long run, or what the consequences are of granting or denying them the ability to do that, then what is the point?
I’m surprisingly bitter about the werewolves it turns out I feel like there should be werewolf support groups they can all rent an abandoned warehouse or smth every full moon and chain themselves up for a night in the morning one of their relatives comes by with a key and some donuts also it pisses me off when characters who are in it for the Saving Humanity schtick seem more into killing monsters than saving people and that’s never addressed at one point sam meets a childhood friend who’s killing rapists so she can nurse her sick child back to health with their hearts sam lets her go but it’s at least halfway due to nostalgia from when they were kids dean swings by later and straight murders her and not her kid which is just stupid really and I mean at least buffy goes ‘I’m the Slayer not the sheriff so I’m gonna do the job I was assigned at birth and not apply my-stake-is-law rules to a criminal-justice-system society’ and there are episodes where that frustrates her or where she comes really close to crossing that line and it’s a big deal here they just kind of pretend human crimes don’t exist and ignore them
I TOO AM SURPRISINGLY BITTER ABOUT THE WEREWOLVES.
Like? Just fucking chain them up? Rather than doing murder? AND OH MY GOD THAT EPISODE WITH THE WOMAN AND HER KID MADE ME FUCKING F U R I O U S. The sliding scale of humanity is the most aggravating thing about this phenomenon of not knowing their own rules, because it means that they talk a really big game about protecting humanity but then they do shit like killing werewolves who ARE ONLY DANGEROUS FOR MAYBE FORTY-EIGHT HOURS A MONTH. And like the whole thing about killing the woman and not her kid–like, if Dean was really trying to prove committment to the ‘monsters aren’t people and they ALL have to die,’ which would at least be a consistent character trait, he should have also killed the kid, who is implied to inevitably have to do the same thing as her mother. As it is, it just comes off as petty and vengeful because it’s someone that Sam cares about and Dean can’t handle that (see also: PLEASE AT LEAST PRETEND THAT THESE TWO BROTHERS LIKE EACH OTHER WTF).
I’m so fucking aggravated about this y’all you don’t even know, I hate this show. It was not an amicable breakup. You know how with some shows or book series or whatever you can AT LEAST still watch the earlier seasons before things were COMPLETE trash? Nope, noPE, NOPE, can’t even watch the first couple seasons that I genuinely enjoyed, I divorced this show with fucking prejudice.
aethersea asked: you know what also pissed me off about supernatural, though? the inability to commit to their own worldbuilding. even while clinging to a static paradigm, where The Masquerade is in full effect, they couldn't be consistent about what sort of underground magic communities do and don't exist. I know this can be blamed on multiple writers and all, but it drives me up the wall. f.ex. witches are All Evil and tend to work alone, until that episode with the familiars when you find a bunch of nice(r)
witches who go to witch bars and hardly ever poison each other’s drinks, oh and also familiars are a thing. a while later spike and cordelia are witches who’ve had a tempestuous relationship for… centuries I think, aka witches can live for a really long time, so there’s no way the bigger/older ones don’t all know each other. there ought to be SOME sort of witch ‘society’, even if it’s just loose communication. but no, after this you never hear of witches ever again, much less familiars or witch
bars. then you’ve got Bela, who caters to rich people who know magical artifacts exist, but there’s no exploration of what that could MEAN – if Bela can hold down a job, then enough of the country’s elite own and exploit magic stuff that it could – SHOULD – have at least some effect on US politics, as in who gets power. there’s never a whisper of that, but okay, this isn’t exactly the winchester boys’ social scene. but failing that, some of these magic-obsessed rich people should turn up for a
few episodes, either haunted or else guilty of inflicting a monster-of-the-week on someone. heck, one of them could be a recurring vaguely-helpful character that the boys stop by and menace a bit whenever they need access to some excessively obscure artifact. you already mentioned the mess of all those Alpha Monsters who were powerful and unkillable and stuff, and had their own dread agendas with potentially far-reaching consequences for their respective species, and then just… vanished. I don’t
even remember how. and then there’s the hunter community, which is the most inconsistent of all. first it’s just these two and their dad, and then they start finding out their dad’s old friends were all actually hunters or oracles or whatever. so far so good; these are just Mysteries Of Our Father’s Past, and valid character/plot development stuff. but there’s Bobby, who Knows Everyone, and Ellen, whose bar every hunter in the country frequents sooner or later, and this means hunters know each
other, know about each other, they have a network of communication and they share intel, gossip, trade secrets. but the moment the bar blows up there’s just no network, no connection, nothing at all binding hunters together, even though Bobby still knows everyone and Ellen and Jo are still around and plenty able to found a new bar if they wanted to, or at least keep in touch with at least half of the people who used to swing by their bar. oh and also the demons! they talk about complex politics
happening in Hell, they have some sort of prophesied demon queen who takes the body of a young girl and has glowing white eyes (I don’t even remember what happened to her), they have demon religion and spirituality to the point where Lucifer is basically Demon Jesus – I’m pretty sure this is explicitly stated, Lucifer is to the demons what Jesus is to really devout Christians, semi-mythical status and prophesied second coming and everything – and the show makes an effort to flesh out its demonic
characters, give them personality and desires and drives, and it shows distinct differences in how different demons feel about humanity, and about what they do, and all that. yet despite all this, the only demon we meet who doesn’t immediately try to murder the boys is Ruby. no one tries to bargain honestly with the boys, no one but Crowley tries to aim the boys at their own enemies, no one begs for mercy or lies about repentance. nothing. can you imagine if those demons who told Sam to take up
his antichrist mantle and lead a demon army decided that, since their Chosen One was unwilling, they ought to convince him? what if a bunch of demons had started discreetly tailing the boys, showing up sometimes to rescue them from really bad fights or offer up dead monsters like housecats offering dead birds? ‘hey chosen one, we caught you this demon who’s high up in Crowley’s hierarchy, do you want to torture him for information yourself or do you want us to do it?’ they solemnly swear that
that they’ve stopped killing humans, they keep quietly growing in number, and they always scram before the boys are conscious enough to kill them properly. sam and dean have many arguments about whether they were REALLY too concussed to stab their latest demonic rescuer and get absurdly angsty and argumentative about it. I know my rant has gotten pretty thoroughly disorganized and this is moving back into must-have-a-static-paradigm territory, but I am a little bitter.
THIS IS ALSO SUCH A GOOD POINT there is just so much to be bitter about with this show, like, good god, you’d think that sooner or later they’d run out of basic narrative rules to fuck up.
Speaking of rules, I think this is a manifestation of one of Supernatural’s wider problems, which is that they just DO NOT SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THE RULES OF THEIR OWN UNIVERSE. Like, all they’ve REALLY nailed down is that demons can be exorcised, but anything that isn’t a demon is pretty much at the mercy of the plot for A) how powerful it is, B) how hard to kill it is, and C) how ‘human’ it’s considered. Like, everything from werewolves to wendigos are stated to be at least PART human, but basically their ‘humanness’ and subsequently the amount of sympathy accorded to them is predicated on how benign (or how attractive) they look in their human form. The magic of this universe is wildly unpredictable–the Winchesters sometimes do/dabble in magic themselves, but we never really learn how magic works. Does it require a focus? Does it require badly-pronounced Latin? Is it an expression of the user’s willpower? Is it similar to what demons do (implied when All Witches Are Wicked for the first few seasons) or not? Does it require natural talent or can anyone learn it? THERE ARE SO MANY QUESTIONS THAT ARE TOTALLY IGNORED. THEN there’s the question of societies in this supernatural underworld. Like, I think I’ve expressed in my John Wick comments how much I like functional underworld societies with rules and systems, but honestly it’s CRITICALLY necessary if you’re doing what SPN does and having the society Matter. I cringe every time I think about how clumsy and slapdash the hunting community was in Supernatural, because it had SO MUCH POTENTIAL, don’t talk to me about it, I made it work better when I wrote my spite novel. I’m sure I can think of fifty million more incomplete universe rules, but I can honestly feel my blood pressure rising right now so I’m going to stop.
OH MY GOD GUYS, please, if you’re a writer, let me beg you right now in person to figure out the rules of your universe and then commit. Here are some pointers.
Magic should work in a conceptually similar way to gravity: its rules should be consistent and should be able to be broadly extrapolated from the general effect, and if you’re going to BREAK those rules you’ve got to have a damn fine reason.
The sliding scale of ‘humannness’ should…slide less, to be completely honest, work your shit the fuck out EARLY or make working your shit the fuck out a plot point (please see Stormdancer for a good example).
If you’re dealing with questions of what makes someone human (@SPN FOR LIKE FOUR FUCKING SEASONS) then you should actively question like “Hey, my dude, can we morally kill this person for something they have no control over” unless your character took the trait ‘Callous’ somewhere in their history (which is also fine).
If you have an underworld society–or any society tbh???–WORK YOUR SHIT OUT. How do they work together (ex: hunters pretending to be ‘the boss’ when someone calls the number on that fake business card)? How do they support each other (ex: safehouses? maybe? this is never discussed in SPN? and I hate it?)? What are the things people differ on (ex: whether or not to murder the Winchesters, which, like, I know you’re supposed to be against that because they’re the protagonists, but by the time I bailed I def wanted someone to shoot them)? Is there an assumption of free exchange of favors or is there a strict financial/bargaining system? How much does one person vouching for another matter in the community? ANSWER SOME BASIC QUESTIONS FFS
Finally, most crucially, for the love of all that is good, Pick A Plot. One plot. It can have subplots (example: an overarching plot broken up by smaller missions, a la your average TV show) or multiple acts (as in a play, where you’ve got a couple major pieces that assemble into the main plot, like Much Ado where you’ve got (roughly) the matchmaking, the wedding, the vengeance, and the resolution), but it should be One Plot and you need to tie up those motherfucking loose ends.
This has been “Hey look turns out that 6K later I have Even More Complaints about Supernatural” with Moran.
honestly though. this show is, as you said, a fantasy/horror murder mystery show with overarching apocalypse plots. if all we, as viewers, were interested in was the violence and brotherly angst, we’d be watching sons of anarchy. we’re here for the monsters, guys. we are absolutely here for the monsters. invest in your monsters.
the sliding scale of humanness in particular is really frustrating, at least when it’s coupled with such lazy writing. Think about it – they focus so much on What Is Humanity when it comes to Sam, but the show hardly ever asks that same question about the monsters, many of whom are ex-humans. When it does, it asks about a single character, not about whether, say, all werewolves should be given a second chance because they don’t actually know they’re killing people.
Like Buffy before them, the Winchesters draw a hard line between “killing monsters” and “killing humans,” but even while the writers are waffling back and forth on Sam’s humanity, they never explore why that difference matters. The debate on Sam’s humanity focuses a tiny bit on his capacity for empathy and ethics and mostly just on whether he’s got demon-based superpowers. It’s a fixation on the superficial, like what makes a monster is the scales and sharp teeth, not the rampant homicide. Dean is freaked out because Sam can kill demons by glaring really hard, and does, but killing demons has been their express goal for the whole show, it’s not like he’s done anything other than level-up his skill set.
Meanwhile, the debate on whether he’s Going Too Far centers on his demon blood addiction (and what a cop-out it is, making the power-enhancing substance so destructively addictive that your OP character has to quit cold-turkey and never have powers again) and on how trigger-happy he’s gotten with demons specifically. Who, again, are Universally Bad and have been their avowed enemies since episode three. It’s not like the writers have any space to suddenly get high-and-mighty about how you’re not supposed to kill monsters all willy-nilly, not this far into the game.
If the question of Is Sam Human can be answered by what ratio of hemoglobin to sulfur is in his veins, your setup is flawed. If having special abilities from questionable origins is monstrous, then they should throw away that demon-killing knife they get off a demon, and the demon-killing gun that Ruby fixes up special for them. If sympathetic monsters are occasionally introduced, but the show never explores whether that means some monsters can be relied upon to act morally in the long run, or what the consequences are of granting or denying them the ability to do that, then what is the point?
Gonna reblog two versions of this so I can do some shameless self-promo here.
#anyway I would love you read your spite novel moran #anywhere I can do that?
I’m working on getting that motherfucker published! The tag for the spite novel (actually titled Falls the Shadow) is here, and @lathori might cry tears of genuine joy if any other living human spoke to her about this novel.
#also now I really want a story where someone is followed around by a bunch of demons who keep pledging their unwanted allegiance #or something of that sort anyway
Funny story, the spite novel is actually a spite trilogy and I’m working on the second one and there is a subplot that can be summed up as “Sam is being stalked by loyalist demons who want her to run Hell.”
Anonymous asked: i just watched ww and. goddamn the look in steve's eyes as he closes the door behind him, because she is too good for him, he has blood on his hands, liar murderer smuggler, she is too pure and too perfect for his darkness to taint-- he heard what hippolyta said. they do not deserve her.
Listen, talk to me FOREVER about Steve’s guilt, about the way he dreams, that one night they spend together, that he wakes up and sees Diana’s perfect unmarred skin smudged with fresh wet blood, left there by his own stained hands. About the way that he sees her run toward the man who lost his leg to a mortar shell and he feels something crack in his chest, his heart breaking at her horror. About ‘what kind of weapon kills innocents’ and that ugly moment of silence where Steve wishes he could tell her something else, anything else, before he faces the truth and admits ‘in this war, every kind’. About how it feels like killing something, when he looks away from the crying woman and looks back to Diana and says ‘this is not what we came here to do’, and how it feels like being reborn–bright and painful and awful and new–when he watches her charge No Man’s Land, alone and powerful and pure and divine. About how Steve lost any belief he had in any god the world had to offer a long time ago, torn away in blood and mud and fire and the grey-green waves of gas, and having to acknowledge that he believes in her hurts, not because she doesn’t deserve it, but because she does, she is good and he is the one who will be remembered as bringing her down into this world from her paradise.
About the way his hands shake and he feels his throat close as he struggles to tell her that they’re all to blame, even him, everyone is at fault because people are nor always good and she is innocent of this terrible thing, she is the only innocent left in this war, and it is because of him that she is losing that innocence one day at a time, and forget the war, forget the people Steve has killed and the crimes that he has committed and the things he has allowed to happen, this is the thing that he will never wash from his soul. This is his greatest sin. This is the worst thing he has ever done, taking Diana’s pure and honest faith in humanity and breaking it with his bare hands.
It makes all of this much worse, somehow, to know that she doesn’t blame him at all.
Y'all nothing makes me realize how low my bar for being ‘well-treated’ is as fast as having a conversation with my extended family.
how does “misty mountains” get you sad and amped at the same goddamn time
#i’m crying and ready to fight #is this what dwarf life is
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
I went to an Arab-American comedy night and there was a Muslim guy making a joke about being in high school football.
“I was hit so hard, I saw Jesus. Do you know how hard you have to be hit to see somebody else’s god?”
This is what jokes about religion are supposed to look like.
(via skymurdock)