Some thinkysex fic recs

Anon asked: “What would you say are the must-read Johnlock fics?”

AW YIS. I love this question, though strangely enough I’ve never really answered it before on my blog. This isn’t anything remotely resembling a list of everything I love or think is brilliant and worthwhile; this is the list I give to colleagues when I want them to understand why I take fanfiction so seriously. (That’s why they include descriptions and explanations.) You might could title it the Thinkysex Fic Recs. They’re in alphabetical order, and in all cases the author’s entire catalogue is worth reading.

aderyn, the “Deep Map” and “Compounds or Stars” series. In terms of sheer technical abillity and poetic vision, I think aderyn is the best writer in fandom. She’s a writing professor and a poet, as well as a lover of science (you’ll find a whole lot of scientific terminology in her work, used as much for the beauty of the terms as the ideas). Her pieces take very close reading; every word is tuned and turned to fit into the whole. Some of her phrases will ring and hold in your head for days: “oh, for the dead reckoning he learnt as a child”; “sleep (let nothing catch fire).”

anarmydoctor, “If Metal Had a Choice,” “The(y) Kiss,” “The Yearly Revolution.” Language and narrative structure set these stories apart; the author’s not a native English speaker, so her diction is unique and original, and you can hear strong influences of Jorge Luis Borgés and Julio Cortázar in the magical, multi-leveled way she tells her stories.

eldritchhorrors, The Cold Song. I have to admit that I get kind of choked up when I try to talk about The Cold Song, because in all honesty I think it’s one of the best psychological novels I’ve ever read (and it’s not even finished). Sherlock has Asperger’s, and Sherlock and John practice BDSM, and these things are described with incredibly vivid accuracy. But in the end the story’s about Asperger’s and BDSM the way Hamlet is about treason and murder: yeah, sure, but there is SO much more going on here than that.

entangled_now, “Undercurrents.” This was the fic that hooked me into fandom, because brings the pleasure of deduction and the erotics of knowledge to the surface:  Sherlock reads John as if he were a crime scene, and goes from interpreting him to having sex with him. Mmmhmmm yes.

pennypaperbrain, Points of Light. A true understanding of BDSM can shed light on the emotional and eroticointellectual aspects of sexuality in a way few other things can. Both eldritchhorrors and pennypaperbrain prove this with their gorgeous writing and wrenching insight. The summary of Points of Light says it all: “This is a story about needing something right down to the bottom of your soul, and perhaps eventually getting it. Contains thinky, kinky sex.”

wordstrings, The Paradox Series. Wordstrings will be on a great many rec lists, because her portrait of Sherlock’s mental process is so unique and vivid (I don’t know that she ever says it’s Asperger’s, but it sure looks like it). For me, the core of this is his relationship to metaphor: the traditional metaphors of love—I want to get inside you, I want to mark you with my name—are literally true, and in combination with some of the best writing in the fandom, her stories are so powerful that sometimes I can’t even read them. (And I will never be able to listen to “Moon River” again without crying like a little girl.)

There are SO MANY more stories and writers that I love; message me off anon and I’d be happy to give you a longer list. I actually think it would be great to have a collaborative list or blog for Thinkysex Fic Recs—matter of fact, I took the URL thinkysexrecs with an idea to starting one. Problem is, anyone who thinks they should be on that list and isn’t is going to be hurt in a way far worse than just not getting recced, because to not be considered thinky enough could be a huge insult. And anyone who’d presume to be a final arbiter of the thinky is an asshole. So I haven’t done anything with it, and have kept this list REALLY short. I hope it’s useful!

A fabulous list of amazing talent.

Female Reading of the Male Gaze, and Sherlock

Why the dismissal of women’s readings of Sherlock bothers me so much

Film and television are visual mediums. The text comes from what we see, not just the script, and definitely not extra-text commentary. Sherlock especially is a strikingly visual story that is all about looking.

Any woman with any sense of self-preservation spends her whole life learning to read the male gaze. The reason is not because women are constantly checking to make sure they are desirable (as many men like to think); the reason is because women have to. The consequences for not noticing when a male gaze equals “desire” are very dangerous, and so obvious I don’t even have to explain them. Any woman who walks through a parking lot at night, who has to spend her days avoiding a co-worker who sexually harrasses her but not enough to make it worth it to fight back, who deals with members of the public service who laugh at her when she is being threatened (I am thinking of that woman in San Francisco who tried to get a BART bus driver to call the police when a man was threatening to rape her and got ignored)—any woman who LIVES ON THIS PLANET has to learn to be aware of the male gaze and interpret it for signs of arousal and/or danger from a young age. This is SO MUCH BIGGER than “women want romance” or “women want love” or any of that ignorant shorthand for “women aren’t reading this show correctly.” It is definitely bigger than Sherlock.

If a man stood right in my personal space and stared into my eyes I would know how to interpret that. If a man licked his lips while staring at my face I would know how to interpret that. If a man belitted and chased off my romantic partners I would know how to interpret that. If a man asked me to reach into his jacket and pull out his phone I would damn well know how to interpret that. Any time I have tried to brush aside suspicions under these circumstances, I was proved right that I should have trusted my instincts, and I wound up in dangerous situations (luckily, nothing terrible resulted thanks to being able to escape, but the danger was real). If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but at least I don’t get locked in a basement in Cleveland for a decade. Women have to err on the side of caution. People are right when they say the sexual tension moments in Sherlock are brief, but that doesn’t matter: if you’re a woman you have to take even the briefest flashes into account. There is a reason we call these moments “eyefucking.”

Sherlock is all about the power of sight, of the gaze, specifically the male gaze. (There’s a whole article in that, but I’ll resist.)

We get Sherlock POV when he interprets a scene, with those subtitles and graphics; we get John POV for everything else (that’s my reading, anyway; Watson is the narrator of the Sherlock Holmes tales, after all). There are only a few establishing shots/omniscient narrator scenes that aren’t from John or Sherlock’s POV, e.g. the victims at the beginning of ASIP, or Moriarty texting in front of Big Ben in ASIB or in a cell in THOB. We briefly see Irene’s POV as she looks at pictures of Sherlock (in that beautiful sequence where they look at pictures of each other), but that’s about it. (I’ve never been certain whether that dream sequence of Irene interpreting the “bed scene” was from her POV or Sherlock’s or both.) I have hopes we’ll see Molly’s POV in TEH but of course I haven’t seen it yet.

The denial of the male showrunners of Sherlock and the firm disagreement of the female fans just proves to me that even in the 21st century, men and women live in different worlds.

I don’t need this ship to be canon, it’s not the differing opinions that bothers me. The writers are free to write whatever they want and I’m on board. I just want some acknowledgement—from the world at large—that women’s perspective on human interactions is just as valid as men’s and doesn’t come from wishful thinking. Quite the opposite.

Bottom bit bolded, because THIS. Fucking THIS, a thousand times THIS. It cannot be said strongly or loudly or often enough: we get so, so fucking tired of being told that we’re delusional, when everything - everything - is telling a different story than the ones TPTB think they’re telling.

Women are forever being told we’re imagining it all - from PMS to actual hostility and danger to narrative romance, and everything in-between. Women are always ’imagining things’, and men are always there to set us straight. Well, fuck that.

Yep. We are totally blind.

THIS IS THE VERY FIRST POST ABOUT JOHNLOCK I SAW WAY BACK WHEN AND IT CONVINCED ME BEFORE I EVEN KNEW TJLC EXISTED

This is awesome!

Some thinkysex fic recs

Anon asked: “What would you say are the must-read Johnlock fics?”

AW YIS. I love this question, though strangely enough I’ve never really answered it before on my blog. This isn’t anything remotely resembling a list of everything I love or think is brilliant and worthwhile; this is the list I give to colleagues when I want them to understand why I take fanfiction so seriously. (That’s why they include descriptions and explanations.) You might could title it the Thinkysex Fic Recs. They’re in alphabetical order, and in all cases the author’s entire catalogue is worth reading.

aderyn, the “Deep Map” and “Compounds or Stars” series. In terms of sheer technical abillity and poetic vision, I think aderyn is the best writer in fandom. She’s a writing professor and a poet, as well as a lover of science (you’ll find a whole lot of scientific terminology in her work, used as much for the beauty of the terms as the ideas). Her pieces take very close reading; every word is tuned and turned to fit into the whole. Some of her phrases will ring and hold in your head for days: “oh, for the dead reckoning he learnt as a child”; “sleep (let nothing catch fire).”

anarmydoctor, “If Metal Had a Choice,” “The(y) Kiss,” “The Yearly Revolution.” Language and narrative structure set these stories apart; the author’s not a native English speaker, so her diction is unique and original, and you can hear strong influences of Jorge Luis Borgés and Julio Cortázar in the magical, multi-leveled way she tells her stories.

eldritchhorrors, The Cold Song. I have to admit that I get kind of choked up when I try to talk about The Cold Song, because in all honesty I think it’s one of the best psychological novels I’ve ever read (and it’s not even finished). Sherlock has Asperger’s, and Sherlock and John practice BDSM, and these things are described with incredibly vivid accuracy. But in the end the story’s about Asperger’s and BDSM the way Hamlet is about treason and murder: yeah, sure, but there is SO much more going on here than that.

entangled_now, “Undercurrents.” This was the fic that hooked me into fandom, because brings the pleasure of deduction and the erotics of knowledge to the surface:  Sherlock reads John as if he were a crime scene, and goes from interpreting him to having sex with him. Mmmhmmm yes.

pennypaperbrain, Points of Light. A true understanding of BDSM can shed light on the emotional and eroticointellectual aspects of sexuality in a way few other things can. Both eldritchhorrors and pennypaperbrain prove this with their gorgeous writing and wrenching insight. The summary of Points of Light says it all: “This is a story about needing something right down to the bottom of your soul, and perhaps eventually getting it. Contains thinky, kinky sex.”

wordstrings, The Paradox Series. Wordstrings will be on a great many rec lists, because her portrait of Sherlock’s mental process is so unique and vivid (I don’t know that she ever says it’s Asperger’s, but it sure looks like it). For me, the core of this is his relationship to metaphor: the traditional metaphors of love—I want to get inside you, I want to mark you with my name—are literally true, and in combination with some of the best writing in the fandom, her stories are so powerful that sometimes I can’t even read them. (And I will never be able to listen to “Moon River” again without crying like a little girl.)

There are SO MANY more stories and writers that I love; message me off anon and I’d be happy to give you a longer list. I actually think it would be great to have a collaborative list or blog for Thinkysex Fic Recs—matter of fact, I took the URL thinkysexrecs with an idea to starting one. Problem is, anyone who thinks they should be on that list and isn’t is going to be hurt in a way far worse than just not getting recced, because to not be considered thinky enough could be a huge insult. And anyone who’d presume to be a final arbiter of the thinky is an asshole. So I haven’t done anything with it, and have kept this list REALLY short. I hope it’s useful!

A fabulous list of amazing talent.

#Dean Winchester #is an 11-year-old girl trying to talk to her crush for the first time

#Castiel #is an 11000000000-year-old angel trying to figure out what the hell a crush is

I have read five of these, and just now marked another 5 to read later (two others were already marked).

AFTER I got sucked into almost completely re-reading The Law of Equivalent Exchange by @awed-frog .

I had other plans for this evening…but I am not unhappy about this outcome. Yummy canon-compliant Cas POV.

Gaaaah, thank you so much for including me in such an awesome list, @bluestar86! And @durenjtmusings, all the love! That fic’s so close to my heart for many reasons, it’s always very moving to hear it speaks to other people. ♡

Destiel AU………….. :)

not to be “that person who stares at gifs and makes a weird whining noise in the back of their throat all day” but

I’m kinda suffering

A LOT

So here’s some gifs to drag you all down with me

You know if you feel like watching Dean quietly implode via his hand on a loop all day

I hate them

so fucking much

fuck you Dean do you see this side by side of how fucking clingy you are

like fuck them 

or better yet go fucking get a room

I mean in the grand scheme Dean made Cas a mixtape so I can’t even be bothered to gif this myself but I figured I should come back here because they won’t fucking stop

(x)

Please pay particular attention to the way their hands join thumb to finger as if completing a loop, a sort of symmetry in their touch, and the way Dean slows his hand and stops pulling it away as Cas’s hand reaches for him so their fingers and thumbs can connect so neatly

(And how Cas is already behaving way off usual but Dean still trusts him to DO this)

And and and so soon after Kelly took Cas’s hand to transfer the power to him and THAT was visually and obviously creating a connection and a power that flowed through touch

And I’m getting meta here on the post that was just my “presented without explanation but a lot of swearing” venting box but ARGH.

*grumble grumble grumble*

They’re… cartoons… and they won’t… STOP this fuckery.

Like, bonus Sam casual pat on the back, Scoob.

*sigh* me again. 

I would like to take a moment - obviously this is slowed down noticeably in the 2nd - just to ruminate on how Dean’s touch goes gentle and relaxes his hand against Cas in that Soft™ way before he pulls his hand away.

every time spn uses the set to show angels with like. wings and halos or other representations of them being other and not human and much bigger than they seem i’m like wow. wow. absolute banger. that shit gets me every single time

like you’re going to look at me in the eye and tell me none of these make you feel insane? couldn’t be me

See, sometimes SPN slaps

Okay, reblogging this because it’s not even been ten minutes and I already received, like, fifteen links to tie metas (really, I can’t decide if this fandom is simply efficient or downright terrifying). Anyway, here they are - anon, enjoy.

Cas’ new tie - 2013, angel suits - 2014, lack of tie - 2014, more tie mysteries - 2014, trench coat - 2014, Dean and the tie - 2014, the new coat - 2014, the Jimmy Saga - 2015, Claire and nooses and hand porn - 2015, to tie or not to tie - 2015, Actual Corvid Cas - 2015, more hatred for the new coat - 2016

really when you think about it is it any wonder dean acts so alpha male butch, i mean these are the comments he gets NOW, and he’s only got more rugged as he’s grown up,it must have just been non-stop when he was younger,pretty pretty girly precious feminine princess etc etc, no wonder dean modelled himself physically off john, john’s handsome but he’s very much traditionally masculine features-wise, john was the rugged manly archetype dean desperately wished he was instead of being the pretty one,no wonder dean based his persona off the hyper-masculine square-jawed womanizer hero type you see in tv, if he acted manly enough people would be forced to respect him as a hero, so he buried the stuff like the panty kink and the cooking and the nesting and the liking nice clothes down as far the fuck as they would go, and they’re only just surfacing, but he’s still semi-constantly getting the reinforcement that he’s feminine in looks, and that’s setting him back every time (via neraiutsuze)

These tags are everything and I feel the need to clumsily invade them. I was having this discussion with Vee about the continuous objectification of Dean by the narrative (it’s a discussion I tend to revisit quite often) - he is often literally spoken about/traded/regarded as a kind of object, as a body because of the ‘blunt little instrument’ idea. it’s actually really fascinating to me because I think it plays SO MUCH into his self-worth (or lack therein), his perception of his own personhood. He continually defined himself in very specific ways growing up, most often through aspiring to be like John, but never quite making it - music, clothing, car, he still didn’t think he ‘measured up’ to that ideal (because he’s inherently dissimilar to his father and tied to his mother, and his parentification only underscores that). He had the craving for home and comfort and emotional attachment but had to repress it, and the only way he knew how was to adopt that outer layer of the soldier. and at some point he learned to use his physicality as an advantage, tricking adversaries with either the guise of attractiveness or brute strength, and then blindsiding them with intelligence or emotional capacity, but the latter qualities often went unnoticed.

And she said, “it’s not even the objectification it’s the kind of language /used/ to objectify him, you know? ‘pretty’ ‘delicate’ — arguably ‘feminine’ compliments that in a hunter’s world are associated with weakness. And so Dean pushes against that as hard as he can, using ‘girl’ and ‘bitch’ as insults (against Sam mostly). Like, his body is all he has, it’s the only thing that he sees as having some value and he guards it, he weaponizes it, and as you said, uses it as a tool to pull off plans and think up strategies that other people couldn’t.”

(Sam is much more that masculine ideal, and much more akin to John - all that fury and reckless impulse, so of course psychologically Dean projects, but that would probably lead me on a tangent. The point Vee made stands, though.)

Dean knows his vulnerabilities well, understands his depths, but doesn’t feel he’s allowed them, so outwardly he has the need to belittle those aspects of himself that he constantly was led to believe are flaws or wrong or weaknesses. It’s only recently that we’ve even seen him branch out a little more in something as basic as clothing (and the fact that he immediately views the Men of Letters’ bunker as a home, wants a place to keep things, finds the need to make real food - facets that also all lead into another discussion about his underlying connection to his environment and desires, but I digress).

And I’ve definitely discussed this before, but under extreme duress, he seemingly doesn’t have a lot of attachment TO his body because he began at some point to view himself as an extended weapon, he puts it out there all the time as a sacrifice and allows himself to be brutalized, but when it happens with someone he LOVES, there’s a paradigm shift there from sacrifice to sacrament, it’s when damage to his physical body somehow lets his soul leak through and that pulls his loved ones back from the brink. and obviously there’s a very disturbing element to the fact that he has closely had to tie physical abuse to expressions of love/salvation, and an unsettling aspect to how often people who claim to love him have beaten him down, but I think it sort of stands as this testament to what a powerful spirit he has, that his physical presence doesn’t contain it.

tl;dr he lives in a constant struggle between learning to value his individuality as a physical being and thinking he deserves a certain amount of pain to that physical being, regardless of how damaging it continues to be to his self-worth, and it becomes this very interesting identity crisis - a soul continually used as a body, a heart and mind overlooked for sinew and muscle and clenched fists and pretty green eyes.

So much yes to all of this. And, I mean, both actors who played young!Dean did a fantastic job, but I wish it’d be acknowledged in canon that young!Dean actually looked rather different, and much less masculine, and he surely hated it and it was surely used against him.

Stuck in the Middle (with You)/Like A Virgin

“Gay subtext always makes every movie better.” – Quentin Tarantino

Note: this is me squealing about Tarantino. For the actual meta about the Supernatural episode, Stuck in the Middle (with You), click here. 

One: if you haven’t seen Reservoir Dogs, stop reading. This post is going to be full of spoilers, and this movie is a masterpiece and deserves to be seen without knowing in advance what’s going to happen. And two: if you’re under the age of seventeen, and/or uncomfortable with a certain degree of profanity and violence, maybe wait a few years before giving this movie a chance. It’s rated R for a reason.

I’m a big fan of Tarantino and I love Reservoir Dogs - in some ways, I like it even more than Pulp Fiction, simply because it’s so miraculous - it’s his first film, and he wrote the script in three weeks, and he was hellbent on filiming it with 30K before Harvey Keitel basically gave him a million dollar, and even then Tarantino shot the entire thing in a month - seriously, I don’t even understand exactly how much work goes into making a movie, but everything about this just blows me away. I also have a weakness for huis-clos movies, and this is as close as you can get to huis-clos by respecting Tarantino’s unusual filming style, so, seriously - I’m in awe of it all.

And let’s be fair: there probably was no malicious intent (or very little malicious intent) in picking this movie as inspiration for a Supernatural episode. Tarantino is a great director, his movies always tell compelling, brutal stories about fully fleshed-out characters, and the Supernatural people love to play around and pay homage to various bits of cinematic and television history - this is part of what makes the show so interesting to watch. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to be a little shit and point out that Reservoir Dogs is a freaking Bible of gay subtext. The thing is in every other scene, and it’s so obvious you can see it from the damn moon. And, sure, probably those people who’ve never heard about subtext started to blink a bit too fast when the big reunion between Mr Blonde and Nice Guy Eddie went down, but let’s be honest - the movie actually opens with the sentence, “Let me tell you what [this] is about. It’s all about a girl who digs a guy with a big dick. Τhe entire song - it’s a metaphor for big dicks.” - so that’s it and we’re all set. Weirdly enough, they’re actually discussing Madonna’s Like A Virgin (she made a point of sending a copy to Tarantino and signed it, To Quentin. It’s not about dick, it’s about love), which is hilarious right from the start, because remember that scene? The first scene of what we thought would be a serious and violent heist movie - of what, as it turns out, is a serious and violent heist movie - and yet here are these career criminals, discussing Madonna songs. And that’s your first piece of gay subtext and queer coding, right in the first five minutes. So, I apologize for the mess, let’s do this right, Buzzfeed style and all -

The Five Most in-Your-Face Moments of Gay Subtext in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (a love letter by me)

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