Cutting off hair in ancient Asia (Japan, china, Korea & possibly some other Asian cultures) symbolizes being banished or rejected from their home. In the more modern age that is now, cutting long hair into a short cut means to forget the past, leaving the old and starting anew.
There is nothing wrong with Lucy loving Narnia all her life, refusing an adulthood she didn’t want for a braver, brighter one she built herself. But there is also nothing wrong with Susan trying to find something new to fall in love with, something that might love her back.
the last pevensie by dirgewithoutmusic (via lightningstormsandriddles)
http://archiveofourown.org/series/82624
(via ink-splotch)
i can’t concentrate on anything except mary campbell/winchester (because i love her so much i can always concentrate on her), so i’m just going to stop fighting and lean into it. so, thought experiment: if sam inherited john’s personality, let’s work backwards instead of forwards and say that dean inherited mary’s.
which means that mary is viciously loyal, protective, and nurturing. she doesn’t spread her sympathy as widely as john does (must be that suspicious hunter nature), but when she does identify with someone, she identifies fiercely. she’s also judgmental and impulsive (well, making that demon deal to save the man she loves, she can’t live without, her soulmate, certainly qualifies). she tries to protect the ones she loves by keeping secrets, trying to handle everything on her own, which works out terribly, of course.
she idealizes the people she loves (john and his apple pie, white-picket life?). when they can’t live up to her expectations, her disappointment crushes them, threatens to shake them apart. and nobody lives up to her expectations. especially not her. john’s disappointment followed after dean and sam like a deathwish, still does, dogs every step they take. but if mary would have lived, maybe it would’ve been her cutting disapproval that made dean insecure about his ruthlessness, sam ashamed of his inextricable relationship with the darkness of life.
actually, i want to talk more about that, in the context of mary and john. mary tells john, “i love you for exactly who you are,” but that line is a hard one to swallow. when john says it back, after all, the dramatic irony is pointed enough to kill. john’s delivery is hollow. the intended meaning of that line, that i know you better than anyone, even your father, even you, and i love you, is something john cannot possibly know or say while mary lies to him about herself. so when mary says it, even though john isn’t keeping anything from her, what reason do we have to believe it is any less hollow or distorted than john’s version? in both cases, the verbal message of honesty and unconditionality are shattered. john’s isn’t honest; mary’s isn’t unconditional.
(weirdly, though mary’s version is better-informed, john’s may be more true. for the brief moments when john knows that he doesn’t really know mary at all, he still loves her, enough to slit his hand open to paint sigils on her weird friends’ say-so, enough to let an archangel in to save his family; not himself. if mary had lived and john became a hunter anyway, even one like samuel campbell or his own father, one that didn’t leave his sons in motel rooms without enough money to eat, how long would her love for john as a person be able to hold out against the destruction of john as an ideal?)
in fact, so much of mary’s phrasing when she waxes rhapsodic about john is alarming. she likes him because he’s the opposite of a hunter, not for what he positively is; the worst thing she can imagine is not her children’s or john’s death at the hands of the supernatural, but her children becoming hunters. her children growing up to be like her. what she is disgusts her so much – she disgusts herself so much – that it becomes the all-consuming talisman against which she measures what she wants, what she loves. everything she loves she loves because it takes her away from that life. which – how much do you have to hate what you are to make the opposite your north star, to the point of near-apocalyptic self-destruction?
hey, that’s another thing mary and dean have in common: self-loathing deep enough to drown a small town in.
#SUGGESTION: THE FIGHT WE SEE IN ‘DARK SIDE OF THE MOON’ IS MORE MARY’S FAULT THAN JOHN’S#(WELL INASMUCH AS CONFLICTS HAVE FAULT; IT DOES TAKE TWO TO TANGO)#THERE’S NO EVIDENCE EITHER WAY OF COURSE#BUT THIS SCENE IS OFTEN USED AS PROOF THAT JOHN WINCHESTER WAS ALWAYS AN IRREEDEMABLE ASSHOLE#BUT THE LINE 'IT WASN’T PERFECT UNTIL SHE DIED’ SUGGESTS SOMETHING ELSE TO ME#THAT JOHN WALLPAPERED OVER /MARY’S/ FAULTS INSTEAD OF HIS OWN IN THE WINCHESTER MYTHOS HE PASSED ON TO HIS SONS#FLAWED AND FUCKED-UP MARY CAMPBELL/WINCHESTER IS SO INTERESTING#JOHN AND MARY’S TOTAL AND CONSUMING AND DEEPLY DISTURBED LOVE FOR EACH OTHER IS SO /INTERESTING/
Omg, I love this post. Not because I feel forgiving towards John lately (naaah :P) but because I’ve been feeling a confused sense of the show pushing Perfect Mary again as I rewatch season 6, and this is extremely refreshing to read…
Like, admittedly at this point it must have been 2 years since I last watched 6x19 so I really can’t remember but them mixing Mary and Eve together ways made me think about how Mary’s deal is sort of like Eve’s original sin thing in the SPN universe… Not that Eve in season 6 actually was anything to do with Biblical Eve but it makes me think… Anyway yeah it’s all put me in the mood to actually contemplate her character as far more than the idol she’s remembered as. I mean, like, literally they remember her as an idol in the same way you have idols of the virgin Mary, another namesake parallel… I find it so interesting Mary is paralleled to these two figures one who is remembered harshly in general for bringing sin into the world, and another who is remembered for being pure? It’s these weird extremes she symbolically inhabits while probably as a human being that we never got to know was this complicated, normal, messy person who we could ascribe a personality as deep, messed up, and conflicted as Dean’s where she doesn’t actually meet either extreme end of the parallels of biblical mother figures she’s compared to…
(I don’t know I read this post last night when I was very tired with a migraine and slept on it and woke up with the same headache but still reallly wanted to comment because ARGH MARY. One of the under explored fascinating characters of the series who looms over the entire thing without getting a word in edgeways. Mid season 6 with the Campbell storyline has Samuel and Sam and Dean constantly “talking over” her by speculating on what she would have wanted, what she would have thought…)
hawtsee asked:
londonrainings answered:
HILLARY. GOD I LOVE HER SO THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME THE CHANCE TO TALK ABOUT HER.
I must confess that some of my love for Hillary Clinton is borne out of a feeling of protectiveness, because she gets so much shit for stuff that is either a) untrue or b) so blatantly rooted in misogyny it’s amazing people think it’s okay to say out loud.
But before I get into why I love her, I want to take a minute to address the common criticisms thrown her way.
1) She’s too conservative.
Well, first of all, when she was a senator she voted with tumblr’s beloved Bernie 93% of the time. Second of all, when she was First Lady she spearheaded an attempt to pass Universal Healthcare, something that is still seen as a progressive dream in the US over two decades later. In fact, the main criticism of her as a First Lady was that she was *too liberal* and *too idealistic.* She took an absolutely brutal beating from all sides in her eight years as First Lady, so when she ran for public office she recalibrated (only slightly, because again, her differences with Sanders are pretty negligible) and having learned her lesson from the backlash to her attempt at healthcare reform, she moved towards more incremental policies. She still supports raising the minimum wage, criminal justice reform, gun control, paid family leave, and the right for all women to decide when (or if) they want to have children.
Considering the fact that the Republican Party wants to dismantle banking regulations, overturn the legalization of gay marriage, ban abortion, and keep “conversion therapy” legal, I think she’s got a long, long, long way to go before she’s anything resembling conservative.
2) She gave speeches at Goldman Sachs and therefore must be incredibly corrupt.
Except giving these sorts of speeches is very common amongst the political elite and the fact that she spoke to Goldman Sachs does not mean she’s somehow beholden to them any more than the fact that her speech the American Association of Travel Agents means she will ban price comparison websites for travel. She got paid– very well– because that is how you make money when you’ve reached her level of politics. You don’t have to like it, but it’s how things work right now. Acting like this is a unique flaw for Clinton is disingenuous at best.
3) There’s just something about her– she’s untrustworthy. She has to be hiding something.
This one is the most infuriating, because Hillary has been in the public eye on a national level since 1992. Republicans have spent thousands upon thousands of hours investigating her for various supposed wrong doings, and they have discovered…that her husband had an affair with an intern and she had a slightly-shady email account.
That’s it. Whitewater, Benghazi, all of it– it’s a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. If she really was the criminal that the Republicans (and some Bernie Bros) imagine, she’s a goddamn supervillian because her life has been under a fucking microscope for a quarter of a century. The “Hillary is untrustworthy” narrative arose out of the GOP’s completely unhinged need to hate her for everything, so every time a liberal repeats that disproven canard remember that you just made Rush Limbaugh smile. (And if you do, I hope you can live with yourself).
In fact, Politifact rated her public statements as true, mostly true, or half true (she is a politician, after all) 72% of the time. For comparison, Barack Obama is at 75%, and tumblr’s darling Grandpa Bernie comes in at a whopping…72%. And her percentage of statements rated straight out true is 23%, while Bernie’s percentage of true statements stands at all of 13%.
That’s right, motherfuckers: she tells the straight out truth more often than Bernie, but yet people cling to this “she’s a liar” narrative because it gives them an excuse to dislike her.
And why do they dislike her? Well, consider the fact that her approval ratings go down whenever she runs for office, only to rise again once she has the job. Oddly enough, the American people like her when she is doing her job, only to turn on her rather violently when she dares to reveal even the tiniest sliver of ambition. Go ahead, look at that and tell me that this need to dislike her is not rooted in an ingrained bias against women with ambition. I dare you.
But now let’s move onto why I like her.
I like her because Hillary is fucking smart.
Her policy proposals are interconnected, because she understands that raising the minimum wage will help single mothers, and that tackling substance abuse in the US cannot be done without criminal justice reform. She knows that racial issues in the United States are a symptom of a larger problem that penalizes people of color and is committed to multifaceted solution that takes into account the fact that poverty and racism are interconnected and you can’t fix one problem without addressing the other.
I like her because Hillary is tough.
I don’t mean “tough” in the macho sense of the word. I mean she has been a walking target for the GOP for twenty five fucking years, and she hasn’t folded. Every single thing she wears, haircut she gets, and food she eats gets scrutinized and more often than not, mocked. I personally wilt under moderately-severe criticism and I am in awe of her ability to face down people who think she should be hung for treason with hardly a wince.
I like her because Hillary gets shit done.
She’s a dedicated public servant who took a bruising primary loss in 2008 in stride and accepted a position in Obama’s cabinet, and her approval ratings as Secretary of State were almost unbelievably high. And here’s where my protectiveness of her comes in: Hillary has proven herself over and over again to be qualified, competent, and dedicated. People who have met her consistently describe her as a kind, thoughtful person, and as someone who has heard her speak in person I can say that she is an engaging, inspiring speaker. And yet people keep complaining that she’s boring, or awkward, or lacking an element of charisma that can’t be defined.
You know what I think? I think Hillary is the proverbial hall monitor running for student body president. She knows the principal and all the teachers, she knows exactly what policy changes are possible and how to go about getting them made. She’s done her homework, researched her positions, and diligently laid out her case for why she deserves the position.
And then the fun stoner from the art department walks up to the podium, announces that he will make the cafeteria serve pizza every day, and walks away to thunderous applause. Never mind the fact that lunch menus are dictated by federal policy and there is absolutely no way for one student to change that. Never mind the fact that it’s only one half thought out policy that won’t really, truly change the way the school is run. It sounds good, so people start looking for reasons to dislike her and justify why they won’t vote for her. They know she’d be great at the job, but…she wants it too much. And when the stoner is legitimately defeated, some of his worst supporters decide to vote for the racist jackass who punches kids with disabilities and drives a pick up truck with Confederate flags all over it instead (or write in something clever, like Seymour Buttz) because they really, truly can’t handle the fact that a woman might not just be qualified for a powerful position, but that she actually has the audacity to want it.
Did that last paragraph sound a little personal to you? Good. It should. I was that hall monitor (and eventually student body president, although there was no stoner opponent and while my high school had it’s fair share of racist jackasses, none of them bothered with student government). I know, on a very tiny scale, the garbage truck of crap that comes with being a woman who takes a leadership role. Navigating that is difficult, but Hillary has been doing it for decades without breaking a sweat.
I am also a woman who has agonized over every goddamn word in this response because I know that by being a woman with an opinion on the internet, I’m running the risk of getting an absolute avalanche of shit dumped on me. So I carefully chose every link to support my argument because if there’s even one tiny flaw in my logic, every single thing I said will be entirely discounted. Women don’t ever get to be good enough– we have to be perfect, or there’s no point in trying.
And there’s no doubt about it– Hillary is not a perfect candidate. She has positions I disagree with, but then again, so does Obama. There’s plenty of legitimate criticism out there, but so much of it is wrapped in this misogynistic bullshit that boils down to “she’s not behaving the way I want a woman to behave” that it’s nigh impossible to separate the two.
But honestly, if someone reading this still isn’t convinced:
You don’t have to like her, you just have to vote for her. Chances are, you’re never going to actually meet her, and if you do, it’ll be a handshake on a rope line and nothing else. She’s not your mom, your cranky aunt, or your mean fifth grade teacher. She’s not going to be your boss or your neighbor. She’s running for President of the fucking United States. And the alternative– and make no mistake, my friends, there’s only one alternative outcome here– is a misogynistic, racist windbag who brags about his desire to bar entry to this country based on ethnicity and religion. He openly idolizes brutal dictators and lashes out like a toddler up past his bedtime when he’s challenged even the slightest bit. He is an unhinged maniac who should not be in charge of running a gas station, much less the country, but those are your choices.
A competent, smart, thoughtful, dedicated public servant.
So yeah.
#ImWithHer
as mother’s day approaches, please remember that not everyone has a healthy, stable relationship with their mom, and posts that say “if you don’t love your mom you’re a terrible person” and “you’re pretty heartless if you don’t tell your mom you love her on mother’s day” are really emotionally manipulative and akin to guilt tripping. so please be mindful of what you post/reblog this mother’s day!
hannah is very reminiscent of s4 cas at this point tbh (one of the many reasons i love her)
i know it’s too early to truly tell, but this combined with the fact of cas’s personal journey + dying grace this season, i’m hoping that is priming hannah to be the next (and better, since she has past mistakes of other angels to reference + cas’s wisdom guiding her) leader of heaven, which would leave a great opening for cas to do what he seems to really want (yet hesitate to go after since he feels he doesn’t deserve it) which is become human and stay on earth with sam, and especially dean
Others might have a different view, but here’s how I see the distinction between sexism and misogyny. When a husband tells his wife, “I can’t quite explain why and I don’t even like admitting this, but I don’t want you to make more money than me, so please don’t take that amazing job offer,” that’s sexism. He could still love her deeply and be a great partner in countless ways. But he holds tight to an idea that even he knows isn’t fair about how successful a woman is allowed to be. Sexism is all the big and little ways that society draws a box around women and says, “You stay in there.” Don’t complain because nice girls don’t do that. Don’t try to be something women shouldn’t be. Don’t wear that, don’t go there, don’t think that, don’t earn too much. It’s not right somehow, we can’t explain why, stop asking.
We can all buy into sexism from time to time, often without even noticing it. Most of us try to keep an eye out for those moments and avoid them or, when we do misstep, apologize and do better next time.
Misogyny is something darker. It’s rage. Disgust. Hatred. It’s what happens when a woman turns down a guy at a bar and he switches from charming to scary. Or when a woman gets a job that a man wanted and instead of shaking her hand and wishing her well, he calls her a bitch and vows to do everything he can to make sure she fails.
Both sexism and misogyny are endemic in America. If you need convincing, just look at the YouTube comments or Twitter replies when a woman dares to voice a political opinion or even just share an anecdote from her own lived experience. People hiding in the shadows step forward just far enough to rip her apart.
