Briefly noted

[rivkat]

While I largely agree with many of the underwhelmed reactions I’ve seen, there was one note-perfect character bit: Dean and his disgusted references to “humans.” It’s both an entirely consistent callback to S1 and The Benders, where Dean expresses the exact same sentiment, and a creepy demonstration that what Sam got back might not be 100% pure Dean. (And now I really, really want to know where Sam was during the days he was dead.)

Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: Not the book you’d expect a guy with political intentions to write, which makes me love him even more. From the second paragraph of Chapter 1: “When the weather was good, my roommate and I might sit out on the fire escape to smoke cigarettes and study the dusk washing blue over the city, or watch white people from the better neighborhoods nearby walk their dogs down our block to let the animals shit on our curbs--'Scoop the poop, you bastards!' my roommate would shout with impressive rage, and we’d laugh at the faces of both master and beast, grim and unapologetic as they hunkered down to do the deed.” Thoughtful and open and complicated, everything you’ve seen and hope to see. Though there’s much of the story left to be written, I was struck by what he said about Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington: “he held out an offer of collective redemption.” A little too much striving for lyricism in language, but I don’t actually care.

Comments

[counteragent.livejournal.com]

Yeah---Sam's died twice, where was he? Demon blood...seems like a stretch to say "heaven."

I think I've seen it referenced in fic, but not the subject of one. It would be v. cool if he already knew a lot of these things about hell. A few days has gotta be a few months, right? Did he last on the rack? Or did his status as a part demon mean he got torture things right away? Hmmmm....

I guess it would be pretty hard to wank that he actually remembered where he was all along, as he truly didn't seem to remember in 2/22.

[oracle134.livejournal.com]

Not the book you’d expect a guy with political intentions to write
I agree. I was surprised by how easy Obama's book was to read, and it pulled me in pretty easily.

[suzume-tori.livejournal.com]

I had actually JUST seen Benders -- I had managed not to see it the first time around somehow, so my friends were passing the time by filling in any gaps in my season-1 viewing experience until Spn started again. (Except for Bloody Mary. Don't have the guts for that one.) Thus, the 'argh, HUMANS' seemed simply a repeat of previous sentiments -- i.e., Dean being horrified that something so horrible is a person, and not a 'monster' that he's been trained to fight.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I agree on the repeat--and yet there's something about the switch between "people" and the more distancing "humans," especially when we have reason to think that Dean was at least on the way to becoming a demon, that makes it more than just a callback for me.

[someblazingstar.livejournal.com]

I'm in ur lj, reading ur posts (sorry), and - I always thought it was weird, that the show has NEVER addressed, or even really brought up, exactly what happened to Sam when he died. Where did he go? For how long? Does he remember any of it? It's interesting that Sam spent half of this season nagging Dean about Hell until he finally spilled, but I don't think Dean ever asked Sam if he remembered being dead, and if he did, it was immediately dropped afterwards. I agree with aspects of the meta you linked in a different post, that it makes sense that the show has largely switched to Dean POV because Sam's is generally too narrow to encompass the story now being told, but it's really weird to me, even with the heavier focus on Dean, that such a potentially huge aspect of such an important event was entirely ignored. Makes me wonder if it's going to come up later, or if they just didn't really think about it?

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Odds are they didn't really think about it, but I can make it work--I suspect Sam was either in limbo or in Heaven, because he was one of the good guys, and he has no memory either way. I think it would be a perfectly reasonable "rule" if people didn't remember post-resurrection unless they'd been tortured in Hell.