Or, in this season of Supernatural, Dean the parent, Amara the child, and Amara-of-the-Whirlwind the Holy Spirit. Three separate entities, and yet all of a single essence.
Trinitarian theology gives me a headache – seems to me a lot of hyper-rationalizing and over-parsing of an idea better explained by repeating that God is omnipotent and ineffable, and maybe some vigorous hand waving. (plus I was hoping that we’d be getting Charlie as the risen Christ about now, so them making trinitarian motions instead is kinda disappointing.)
Man, for once I would like to just use the recommender needle size, instead of swatching forever to figure out the correct size…
I just want a sweater. *pouts and contemplates taking up a less frustrating hobby*
I knit so tightly I usually need to go two sizes up from the recommended size. If only we could split the difference!
…oh, if only we could…
I am going to make the oak cardigan of Alana Dakos. I wanted something I could knit up quickly, since the cold is coming and I have…uh… 1 cardigan. It calls for a gauge of 24 x 30 on 3.75 mm. I was positive and thought I might get away with 3mm, but nooooo… So even after trying 2.75mm, I might have to go down to 2.50mm.
*sighs*
Ooh, that’s pretty! I just worked up the courage to cast on Celestarium (the infamous star chart shawl – and it calls for 3.5 mm needles but I’m using 4 mm and I thought about going to 4.5) – it took me a while to figure out what beads I wanted to use since I used the silver-lined crystal on my last blue shawl and didn’t want to use them again (I went with some that have a kind of pearl finish). It’s going pretty well so far but it’s a pi shawl so I’ve really just barely started despite being on Row 38.
Dang! both of these are gorgeous. Seriously, does the Celestarium have actual constellations on it? Love the oak-leaf detail.
I’m working on something quick, hopefully. The Weekend Swoncho, in a Debbie Bliss Chocolate tweed. Nice and crunchy but not scratchy. I need to find something to binge-watch on Netflix, else it’s going to be The Winter Swoncho and it’ll be done just in time for spring.
Supernatural makes vigorous use of visual imagery to support the narrative. Just one more example: color.
The association of the color white and death started with the two Women in White early in the first season
From there, Dean and John stripped down to their most vulnerable, with little left to hold them here.
Hints of death showed up in What Is and What Should Never Be. The girl, John, and Mary weren’t really there. It was all a dream of those long gone.
It was a dream where Mary was associated with pink and red flowers and Sam with yellow flowers. It was Dean, on the brink of death, who was associated with white flowers.
Sam wore the blue and white shirt of sacrifice and death at the end of Season 2.
White has hinted at death throughout the remaining seasons.
Until here, in bold, Death rides the palest horse.
I felt like the beginning scenes in the bunker in “The Bad Seed” were an exercise in almost working as a team again. Sam, Dean, and Cas are talking together trying to puzzle out what to do next, but there’s one thing Sam and Dean skirt around and don’t quite get to. Not really out of flat out deception, but more from missing each other’s clues.
We start with Dean remembering his visions of the dark cloud, to the point where Sam has to say his name a couple of times. But he says he’s fine, and they drop it.
Then they’re talking about an absent God and Sam says, “It’s possible he’s still around, closer than you might think.” Dean replies, “What makes you say that?” but Cas immediately speaks before Sam answers.
Then we get Cas having his spell problem. They put him back in the chair and Dean has his hand on Cas until Cas says that, “It’s difficult with these voices.”
At which point Dean immediately does this:
And Sam says, “Are there voices?” and looks like this:
It seems to me that both Sam and Dean reacted a little strongly to what Cas said. Like they were just about to say, “Hey, I’ve had some voices/visions going on, too…maybe we should compare notes on this.”
But then Cas says it’s just angel radio and they relax.
As far as we know, Sam knows that Dean had a vision and that she spoke to Dean but Sam doesn’t know about the bond she talked about (and possibly any urges to protect the baby that Dean might only vaguely be aware of himself). And as far as we know, Dean doesn’t know anything about the weird vision Sam had at the hospital (or even that Sam was ever infected with the black vein stuff).
Communication among Team Free Will has gotten better, but it’s still not quite where it needs to be to really hash out all the problems to be faced.
The reason I shook my head when I
realized Jenna was played by the same actress as Emily (7.22) was
because the Winchesters deliberately left a kidnapped victim with her
(sexually abusive, emotionally manipulative) “father” and I knew –
having paid, yanno, an iota of attention to the way this show does girls
– that something similar was going to happen to Amara. Crowley
“stranger in a white van” grabbed her and was literally trying to train
her (gotta make her loyal, like a dog); cupcake, sweetie, good girl, let’s take a step back and look at the big picture of this storyline: a being older than God, older than Death,
has to Emma-grow her way into being, underneath Crowley’s command,
locked away and rewarded with a pink dress (Emily and her pink room,
sexual abuse victims and their pink clothing) and controlled (how much
food does she get, what does she watch, what can she read) and her anger
is only seen in privacy, a reflection of her older self she needs to wait to reach. She’s powerful, technically, but mostly she’s a baby little girl, she’s listening to Crowley, she’s shunted off to a side room, she’s a rotating cast of growing bodies and she – locked away longer than Lucifer was even alive – has to wait before she can act. (Because first we need to see Crowley try to shape her, control her; and whether he’s able to or not at the end of the day, the narrative will always make sure its a possibility for the female character.)
An additional summary of the women in this episode:
Women (witches) are a joke. Half the time they can’t even
finish the spell before a man is grabbing them (which somehow stops them), can’t defend themselves
and – besides Rowena – can’t save themselves. Dean winks and sticks his
feet up and talks to them like they’re stupid and beneath his notice;
Rowena is a joke to other witches and witches are a joke to the
Winchesters. Ruby used a map and fire to scry out Dean’s location in S4
and here we have make-up (mirror and foundation) to find Rowena. ”I’m a
nobody, I’m worse than nobody, I’m nobody’s third cousin who doesn’t
even get invited to dinner.”
Women are victims. We watch Cas stalk
and choke a woman,
Cas was on our screen trying to choke a woman to death, and Dean was watching
(how long would he have stood there and let it happen?) and we were
watching and our hero (not his fault, of course, can’t control his
actions and those Winchesters have inconsistent skills with handcuffs)
tries to choke a woman to death, he stalks and chokes her, we literally watched Cas
try to choke a woman to death, not his fault Dean tells him when he
apologizes for hitting Dean and there is a woman out there who was
recently almost choked to death, who ran (slowly) for her life and was
scared and hurt and as soon as she left the screen (left where she was
victimized) she was removed from our consciousness. Women get boiled
alive, they have their throats cut and then stabbed for emphasis, they
have violence visited upon them, over and over and over
again, they are dead and expendable.
Women are sexualized and
racialized and mothered. East Asian women are fetishized porn stars,
they are PR footage and silent voices and moans and available 24 hours a
day. Blonde women “have more fun” (she is about to be chained against
her will) and there to fulfill all those no homo needs (Dean was
definitely flirting with her, body close to her, in the dark, in an
isolated area, he is a big guy and he scoffs when she doesn’t want to
hear it.) They are pure evil but still somehow know how to be nannies
(and when they can’t, MOC can be feminized into their role.) They are
private jokes (MrsTran, “tiger mom,” was another woman Crowley locked
away) and dismissible.
This is how Buckner & Ross-Leming write women in this episode and this is how they write them in all of their episodes.
Hearseeno 