Psychology - Blog Posts

Do you ever think you'll stop drawing fanart? No offense it just seems like the kind of thing you're supposed to grow out of. I'm just curious what your plans/goals are since it isn't exactly an art form that people take seriously.

Ah, fanart. Also known as the art that girls make.

Sad, immature girls no one takes seriously. Girls who are taught that it’s shameful to be excited or passionate about anything, that it’s pathetic to gush about what attracts them, that it’s wrong to be a geek, that they should feel embarrassed about having a crush, that they’re not allowed to gaze or stare or wish or desire. Girls who need to grow out of it.

That’s the art you mean, right?

Because in my experience, when grown men make it, nobody calls it fanart. They just call it art. And everyone takes it very seriously.

Sometimes I hyperfocus so hard on something, I forget I’m a person until someone interacts with me. I feel like some wild animal seeing a human being for the first time. I’m like “oh yeah I’m supposed to speak and stuff”

Finally some good fucking romance representation

We have reached a point where the HEIGHT of romance is NO LONGER sacrificing yourself and your partner through unescessary pain and grief, hell and back. INSTEAD, it is the pain of Waking and caring for small children and getting them into SCHOOL clothes and COOKING breakfast as the sun shines over your sleepy eyes and your PARTNER waddling into the kitchen in your t-shirt and unwashed yesterday's boxers. THEY makes coffee and you serve them waffles AND toast. ROMANCE IS NOW MIDDLE AGED PEOPLE IN LOVE cuddling on a blanketed picnic bench in the backyard with too many sunflowers and too many bees but the NOISE HELPS YOUR PARTNER GO TO SLEEP AT NIGHT. SAY GOODBYE TO GRIEF AND SORROW SAY HELLO AND WELCOME QUIET WEDDINGS AND THERAPY AND CONTENTMENT. WE HAVE SUCCESSFULLY MANAGED TO ROMANTICIZE COMFORT AND REST. WE DID IT FOLKS.

OR potentially violent deviants. Because humanity is a social species and we have a strong sense of normal/natural. So if behavior is not normal then its unpredictable thus dangerous.

Oh, look, what's that?

That is #quality stuff

one of many reasons castiel spent the first year of knowing dean trying not to strangle him: dean’s weird little winchester-only dialect

i’m fucking obsessed with this right now, so buckle in for a meta. a cool fun (horrible) thing about dean’s dialogue is that a good 90% of what comes out of his mouth is:

a pop culture reference (“you’re just gonna take some divine bong hit, and shazam, you’re roma downey?”)

references to real life phenomenon (“i don’t wanna wake up missing a kidney in a bathtub full of ice” “try new mexico, i hear he’s on a tortilla”)

these also often take the form of nicknames, and dean has a tendency to give people nicknames in general or call them something besides their given name, whether it’s affectionate or rude (“easy there, van damme” “so i’m girl interrupted” furthermore castiel = cas, ezekiel = zeke, etc, see also frequent use of “chucklehead” “asshat” and on the nicer/endearments end “buddy” “pal” “sunshine” etc)

an idiom (“a snowball’s chance” “if it smells like a duck…”)

slang (“drinking the koolaid” “jonesing for some hooch” not to mention the literal endless amount of words dean uses to refer to killing - gank, waste, juice, ice, etc)

a metaphor (“power up your batteries” “fly me back to my page on the calendar”)

a euphemism (“cloud seeding” “i’d have given you an hour alone with her first”)

sarcasm (his habit of replying “peachy” or “super” when asked how he is)

wordplay (see: the entire “vampirate” and “werepire” debacles)

completely nonsensical (guessing what happened to a magical artifact: “it was dug up by tomb raiders? it was seized by the king of the dead by warlords?”)

said at lightning speed - if you pay attention, dean actually talks a LOT, usually a mile a minute (this makes me feel a way when you recall his year of mutism at age 4 but that’s another post)

slang IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE (casual usage of “guano,” etc)

a lie, a deflection, a joke, etc

or worse, something dean’s NOT saying, deliberately, because he’s one of the most repressed people on earth

the end result of all this being:

dean winchester is utterly infuckingcomprehensible. 

think about this. there’s an ENTIRE SECTION on EVERY SINGLE EPISODE PAGE of the spn wiki devoted to JUST explaining dean’s pop culture references, because the average viewer won’t have seen everything he’s talking about either. they have a whole page for this called “hunter’s lingo,” but honestly, it’s not all hunters, just sam and dean’s fucking batshit communication style. even i don’t understand dean half the time. SAM gets it, sam speaks it back to dean a lot in the early seasons, but that’s because sam and dean are 1. practically two halves of the same person 2. FREAKS. every time we get an episode that involves outsider POV is devoted to them going “what the fuck is WRONG with them?”

enter castiel. technically speaking, the show implies that angels are omnilingual. castiel should understand every language known to man, but knowing the meaning of words doesn’t help him understand the following:

pop culture references

references to real life phenomenon

nicknames

idioms

slang

metaphors

euphemisms

sarcasm

wordplay

you get the idea.

listen to me. look me in the eyes. castiel cannot understand a single fucking word that comes out of dean’s mouth. my guy laid a hand on dean winchester in hell and immediately fell in love with him and has no fucking idea what he’s talking about ever. because not only is dean winchester’s way of speaking CLINICALLY insane, and sometimes incomprehensible even to other human beings who are not sam, castiel is an angel, and someone prone to taking things even more literally than other angels do

go back and watch and watch seasons 4-5 especially. the reason cas does so much squinting and head tilting is because every time dean opens his mouth castiel has to open up his mental “dean winchester dictionary” and translate entire paragraphs on the fly, because again, dean never shuts up!

what makes this extra hilarious to me is this gem:

this line is from 5.13. at this point cas has known dean for AN ENTIRE YEAR AND A HALF. what you see here is my guy SNAPPING. cas made an EFFORT in this scene. he asked who glenn close was. he’s telling dean that he can’t understand him. he is doing his level best to have a normal conversation with this guy he has a crush on and for the life of him he cannot do it (equal but opposite energy to cas blowing up the gas station and motel room in 4.01, tbh)

yes, cas can understand dean’s tone. he can use context clues, and he usually gets the general idea. and when cas DOES understand dean’s jokes, he laughs at them. the first time we ever see him smile is during their 4.07 heart-to-heart when dean says “it was a witch, not the tet offensive.” since cas has knowledge of human history, he knows what the tet offensive is; he got the joke, and he laughed.

but as far as actual dialogue goes, he consistently struggles to keep up. even after metatron gives castiel the pop culture knowledge in season 9, cas struggles to put it to put it to proper use (dean: “you wanna just walk right into the death star?” cas: “what does a fictional battle station have to do with this?”). whenever he asks dean to clarify it’s always when he’s most annoyed, like most of the time he knows it would be futile but he’s too annoyed to care. (dean: “i don’t know who’s on first, what’s on second!” cas: “what IS second???”) i’m pretty sure he spends seasons 4-6 wanting to shake dean by the shoulders and ask him why he is LIKE THIS. 

it takes cas - who, again, is omnilingual - YEARS to begin to acclimate to dean’s speech and start speaking that language back to him. it’s season 8 before we start really hearing him use slang, season 9 before he begins to understand wordplay, season 10 before he starts using pop culture references (to other angels, who immediately fail to understand him, which disappoints him immensely), and season 11 before he really gets into metaphors. i don’t remember what season he started using “yeah” instead of “yes” but i do know it took a really damn long time. 

and honestly, i don’t think cas truly got the hang of it until at least season 11-12. that’s something like 7 or 8 YEARS. it’s more than half the time they’ve known each other at the point of the series finale. 

so what’s true romance, fellas? it’s falling completely and totally in love with the most inexplicable person you will ever meet in your whole 4.5 billion year life, even though you have yet to understand a single thing he’s ever said to you. thank you for coming to my ted talk

I recently had an epiphany about the nature of adulthood. It's kind of like an oak tree.

In botany, the term "tree" does not describe a type of plant. In fact, many different plant groups have evolved into "trees". The term "tree" is a description of a shape/lifestyle that plants can take so you wouldn't really call a freshly sprouted acorn a tree yet. It is a sapling. I think adulthood is similar but kind of the opposite.

Adulthood is not a description of shape but a description of behavior. I have seen many adults who still acted quite childishly and many supposed children who act very adult-like. And no I am not meaning adults who have fun or otherwise don't fit society's arbitrary description of adult behavior.

To better define it, adult behaviors are ones that are motivated by an understanding of the existence of self, and an understanding of the existence of others.

Adults understand that they, themselves, do exist. They understand that they can perform actions that will change their environment. They know that those actions will have consequences. They know that those consequences will, in turn, impact themselves. I have seen many adult-shaped people who did not understand this and thus acted as though they were not under the effect of their own actions, which is untrue. I have also seen many adult-shaped people who acted as though they could not perform any actions to cause a change in their environment which is untrue. Both of these behaviors are very childish.

But to clarify, I am not talking about people who are struggling. I am not talking about people who don't know what to do. I am not talking about people who are trapped in terrible situations with little chance of escaping without outside help. I am saying that if you are asking questions like "What will I do?" or "What am I doing?" or "How will I get out of this?", then, by those very questions, you are displaying one-half of the mentality that proves that you are an adult.

The other half is the understanding of the existence of other people. Other people exist, and on the surface, many adult-shaped people will claim to understand this, but they don't understand it. They know it, and they hate it. They disregard or don't understand the fact that other people exist and are just like themselves. They are people who can affect their world and cause change, who have their own view of the world and feel things just like everyone else.

It is the combination of these lines of thought that leads to more adultlike thinking. Such complex thoughts like "If other people exist and are as unique as I am, then I have probably felt things that other people haven't felt, and other people have felt things that I could never understand. Both of these things co-exist and are both okay. Experiences that I don't understand are still valid." This kind of thinking is what makes you an adult. If you cannot think like this then you are not an adult, but an adult-shaped child.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

Critique away.