Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

Early morning thoughts

TW for mental health issues, discussion of depression

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Thoughts about fanon!Derek’s characterization in fic have been percolating in my head for awhile and it kind of makes me uncomfortable, but I haven’t really been able to put my finger on it.

In my experience, Derek has a rich inner life, a lot of thoughts and observations, and ~~~feelings but he usually never voices them.

He’s usually denying himself something, namely his feelings for Stiles.

And it kind of plays out that he’s long suffering, sometimes at the wreck of the Hale house, sometimes its being/has been rebuilt, sometimes an apartment in town.

But there’s always this thread of… melancholy? stasis?

And weirdly I find myself rooting for him not to disclose his feelings, to stay stuck.

And then I realized that, to me anyway, Derek is being written as depressed even if people were just extrapolating from the show and weren’t consciously writing him as a depressed individual with a lot of emotional trauma.

Because usually, in his rich inner life, he has feelings of inadequacy and low self worth. He sees his only value to others as the Alpha, rather than a person.

Then I was hit with a wave of feels, because wow, even when I think I’m doing better on my own road to mental wellness, some things are hard to unlearn.

This is usually the point of the story where Stiles rescues Derek from his personal pit of despair and things are better.

And I like a good romance, but sometimes I wonder- what if Stiles never noticed? Gave his heart to someone else?

What does that say about me?

Am I still sick? (Yes, my brain is always going to be chemically imbalanced. But am I even better now?)

An argument for werewolf prophylactics:

wolfbad:

roseandthebeast:

teapotsahoy:

I don’t want to spoil the end of agentotter’s excellent fic, Five Times Stiles Doesn’t Actually Need A Condom (And One Time He Does) but, spoiler, Stiles gets it on with a werewolf, and they use a condom.  Stiles has good reasons for insisting on a condom in that fic, but I would like present a general argument for this fictionally uncommon practice.

1. Derek tells us that werewolves are immune to disease: immune does not mean incapable of transmitting.
2. And really, anyone who tells you they are a special exception to using condoms is definitely someone you should be using condoms with.
3. Derek tells us werewolves are immune to disease.  Here are some other things Derek has told us about biology:

• Lycanthropy takes away epilepsy.
• The bite turns you or kills you, there is no third option.
• A snake is immune to its own venom.

Derek failed Basic Werewolf Biology.

Also, if a person can be turned via a bite, how do they know if they can’t be turned via exposure to any other bodily fluids?

I’ve always thought the mechanism behind the bite was a virus that just needed contact with the bloodstream anyway, so it could be in any bodily fluids.

Bodily fluids are the important thing here, since no one in the show has ever turned by breathing in Special Werewolf Air, so it obviously isn’t airborne.

roseandthebeast:

runningwithdereks:

I’ve seen a couple of stories and a couple of posts that say that dog jokes about werewolves “racist.”  I wasn’t sure why it was bugging me, so I’ve been turning it over in my head a little bit.  Here’s what I’ve come up with:

I wouldn’t call itwrongto say that dog jokes about (white) werewolves are racist, per se.  Still, there’s something off about it to me. 

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A really good read. I particularly like trying to parse out exactly what kind of Other Teen Wolf is shooting for - honestly, fucked if I know; I find most Monster-Human dichotomies are drawn more clearly - but seropositive status was one that I grappled with and it’s interesting to see that other people have too. 

On the other hand, while it’s definitely unacceptable and gross to refer to Scott or Boyd as a dog or an animal - the website’s description was the most unbelievable thing, and I agree that there’s a racist layer to joking about a werewolf POC - I can understand why fic writers would make that parallel with all werewolves? Not just because Kate Argent used dog/bitch/pet jokes and language, and the other Argents have also drawn dog parallels by calling werewolves rabid and similar, which sets something of a precedent in tone, but werewolves are literally a different species in the world of Teen Wolf. Even though they’re mostly ‘in the closet’, to borrow True Blood’s vernacular, there are people who know about werewolves, and people who consider them subhuman, and I can see the parallels between werewolves living in a human world and any group given substandard treatment against the white/male/cis/het/seronegative/’choose your non-Other’ mainstream, even if Teen Wolf’s metaphor itself is a little muddled. 

Part of my take may be that I don’t believe I’ve seen this used as a joke, though - more often as ‘hey Stiles, this joke? actually offensive’ serious moment.

ETA - also, I would disagree (agree with what you’re saying) that dog jokes about werewolves are racist. Racist is not the word I would use, and I think that’s inappropriate.

Sinsense has brought up seropositive status before as a possible Other they might be aiming for, but yes, the metaphor is very muddied.

The Argents’ views on werewolves is what I think informs fandom about how to tackle this and I agree that ‘racist’ is not the best way we could get that across. I’ve always thought ‘bigot’ was a more useful term, but ymmv.

I’ve seen a few fics that actually call hunters speciesist through the Stiles filter, which I’m not sure how I feel about.

We start to tread the biological divide then, and I’m not certain how different werewolves are supposed to be. Is the child of a werewolf and a human infertile? Can a human and a werewolf have children? Are the children of were/human pairs always human?

Are werewolves a subspecies? A different branch entirely that still evolved with bipedalism and all that jazz?

Still not okay with this

magdalyna:

So my headcanon for spanking/daddy kink story!Scott is getting more … ground, should I say? I can see more of it.

So, the first story is tagged dubcon because I think Peter should come with that warning automatically and for me as the author, I don’t see it as rape because Scott isn’t sure.

Scott told Finstock that he liked girls, but Peter confuses the issue for him, just a little.

Peter is dangerous but charming and Scott finds himself disarmed by him. Peter thought he was clever. Peter is negotiating with him, not talking down to him.

When Peter pressed the ruler to his chin he felt a tendril of anticipation work down his spine.

He’s embarrassed but he could have forced Peter off him and he didn’t.

So he counts and then it gets weird, because it didn’t go how he thought it would, Peter is — he’s praising Scott.

And it feels, it hurts but it’s almost good? in a sense. It’s like he’s accomplishing something, when he counts off correctly. 

So he just … he decides not to fight this, even if its weird, because its getting good, now, now that the first few are done.

When Peter tells him to get on the bed he doesn’t run for it. He could have, in that moment. Maybe.

And if Peter spanking him had been good, as weird as that was then Peter fucking him was amazing.

He wasn’t expecting that in the morning Peter would be so tender with him, either.

What is my life.

roseandthebeast said:

…. yesssssss please???

Story is up here and it’s a series now.

Still not okay with this

magdalyna:

So my headcanon for spanking/daddy kink story!Scott is getting more … ground, should I say? I can see more of it.

So, the first story is tagged dubcon because I think Peter should come with that warning automatically and for me as the author, I don’t see it as rape because Scott isn’t sure.

Scott told Finstock that he liked girls, but Peter confuses the issue for him, just a little.

Peter is dangerous but charming and Scott finds himself disarmed by him. Peter thought he was clever. Peter is negotiating with him, not talking down to him.

When Peter pressed the ruler to his chin he felt a tendril of anticipation work down his spine.

He’s embarrassed but he could have forced Peter off him and he didn’t.

So he counts and then it gets weird, because it didn’t go how he thought it would, Peter is — he’s praising Scott.

And it feels, it hurts but it’s almost good? in a sense. It’s like he’s accomplishing something, when he counts off correctly. 

So he just … he decides not to fight this, even if its weird, because its getting good, now, now that the first few are done.

When Peter tells him to get on the bed he doesn’t run for it. He could have, in that moment. Maybe.

And if Peter spanking him had been good, as weird as that was then Peter fucking him was amazing.

He wasn’t expecting that in the morning Peter would be so tender with him, either.

What is my life.

wolfbad said:

wait what’s the part your not ok with? cause thats pretty awesome from where I’m standing.

I’m not ok with the rapid pace at which my control of this has descended. I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT IT. AND NO ONE ELSE WILL PLAY WITH ME.

Still not okay with this

So my headcanon for spanking/daddy kink story!Scott is getting more … ground, should I say? I can see more of it.

So, the first story is tagged dubcon because I think Peter should come with that warning automatically and for me as the author, I don’t see it as rape because Scott isn’t sure.

Scott told Finstock that he liked girls, but Peter confuses the issue for him, just a little.

Peter is dangerous but charming and Scott finds himself disarmed by him. Peter thought he was clever. Peter is negotiating with him, not talking down to him.

When Peter pressed the ruler to his chin he felt a tendril of anticipation work down his spine.

He’s embarrassed but he could have forced Peter off him and he didn’t.

So he counts and then it gets weird, because it didn’t go how he thought it would, Peter is — he’s praising Scott.

And it feels, it hurts but it’s almost good? in a sense. It’s like he’s accomplishing something, when he counts off correctly. 

So he just … he decides not to fight this, even if its weird, because its getting good, now, now that the first few are done.

When Peter tells him to get on the bed he doesn’t run for it. He could have, in that moment. Maybe.

And if Peter spanking him had been good, as weird as that was then Peter fucking him was amazing.

He wasn’t expecting that in the morning Peter would be so tender with him, either.

What is my life.

Why Peter Hale is Teen Wolf’s Hannibal Lecter; why Peter/Stiles; and how I incepted myself into shipping Peter/Isaac

roseandthebeast:

If you go into the Peter/Stiles tag, there are sometimes people asking for fluffy or cute Peter/Stiles. Which just doesn’t always jive with me. I mean, I can see it, don’t get me wrong, in infinite universes with an infinite number of possibilities and also, I totally loved the mini-fic ravenspear wrote where Peter kidnaps a baby, because that is some shit he would do, okay. What makes me eyeroll is that it’s usually accompanied by an explanation of how Peter Isn’t That Bad, Wasn’t He Just Murdering For Revenge? Forgetting, you know, all his general terrorizing and going for Allison’s throat and driving Lydia pretty close to insane and killing his niece Laura and oh yeah, the nurse he murdered. She didn’t even have a name, so she’s not important, amirite? Violence against woman is no big deal! I mean, no one has said it better than Snow - Peter Hale Doesn’t Want Your Goddamn Redemption Arc.

Which got me thinking about the times I would find Peter being fluffy or domestic in character, outside of total AUs, and really - Peter Hale is my Hannibal Lecter. Neither of them are nice people. They kill for a purpose, sure, and for a few of their victims you might even applaud their deaths because they weren’t good people themselves (Kate Argent; Mason Verger), they both have tragic and compelling backstories for their actions (whole family burned alive; captured by Nazis, has to watch those same Nazis cannibalize his sister), but at the heart of it Peter and Hannibal are both still serial killers. They’re both charming, no doubt; they’re both smart, and urbane, and clever, and just a little bit sassy - in fact, if Peter doesn’t make a Chianti joke going forward I am going to be madly disappointed -  but they’re both Bad Guys, and not the Wreck-It Ralph kind, okay. (Which isn’t to say Peter can’t be with Stiles or they couldn’t get their own sort of happy ending, but it has to be their happy ending; and goddamn, but I love the end of novel!Hannibal, don’t you?)

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Holy fuck. In a good way, Amanda, srsly!

Have I mentioned here how 12 yr old me imprinted on Silence of the Lambs to a ridiculous extent? Because I did.

Tell me your thoughts on yoai serial killers, I implore you.

You raise excellent points on Isaac, and oh, how I wish we had a better grip on the baby betas. Because let’s face it, Isaac and Stiles are both ripe for molding.

And Isaac also has a sense of flair, remember? Clawing the lockers, anyone?

It would almost be too easy, for Peter to make his case to Isaac, to train him with a soft hand, like Derek hasn’t.

ladyw1nter:

magdalyna:

hungrylikethewolfie:

rainglazed:

Teen Wolf Meta: I find it interesting…

ladyw1nter:

…in the spaces of time I’ve been at work and pondering a great many things, how the narrative common to most of my favorite fic has Stiles navigating that weird pedestal’d place of soft (feminine) power.

ie. When one simply cannot, by training or otherwise, get over the hump of…

Very much in agreement with all of this.  I noticed this too, while I was reading a Sterek fic last night, that a theme that keeps popping up is Stiles’s desire to take care of himself, to be able to protect himself and not rely on the others so much, Derek in particular.  Now there are definitely hints of this through out the actual canon, season two’s Battlefield in particular, but fandom just seems to have taken this ball and run with it, bringing up Stiles’s anger and frustration about his inherently weaker state as a human again and again, his desire to feel like he’s actually contributing, his insecurities that he’s not really ‘one of the pack.’

This is especially interesting since on a surface level you’d expect Allison to get this kind of treatment — her entire arch hinges on the sentiment, ‘I want to be strong.’  However, if you take a closer look at how her arc progresses, it deviates from the usual ‘girl power’ story line — the way she goes about pursuing this power is evocative of those old shonen animes, where the young male lead trains endlessly and seeks out teachers so that he can protect those he cares about/gain revenge/’I just want to become stronger’ a la Naruto, Dragonball, etc.  Allison deals with the fallout of ambition, abusing power, losing sight of what’s important in the pursuit of her goal, all a very stereotypically male themes.

Am I saying this is a bad thing?  ABSOLUTELY NOT.  I think this is a great.  I think it’s absolutely stunning that a popular teen show on MTV is genderswitching tropes and narrative devices and not putting their characters into boxes.  Stiles can struggle with feelings of anxiety under the constant threat of physical attack from individuals he’s shown in show to have no defenses against (Peter, Gerard, even his friends Derek and Scott and Erica if you really want to get picky).  I’d bring up constant low grade anxiety and how it’s addressed in The Gift of Fear but that’s getting a little off topic.  Allison can have the redemption arc that every Draco in leather pants seems to have but that’s never given to the girl.  Lydia and Jackson can be seen going through parallel experiences of body horror and loss of control, proving that it can be both a male and female narrative.  

I love how ladyw1nter’s pointed all this out about Stiles, because it’s been buzzing around in my own head for a while but I didn’t know how to put it into words.

So much good meta, yes yes yes.

That is a great point about how Allison has a shonen hero character arch.

The thing I forgot to bring up when I reblogged this the first time is how Stiles has narrative coded as feminine while simultaneously, some fans read him as a transman or ambiguously gendered. So it’s interesting, that maybe we are picking up some narrative cues, which may or may not ping Stiles as some sort of trans character, subtextually. 

I’m not sure that I would argue that Stiles is specifically subxtextualized to be transgendered, but I DO think that Stiles is coded/narratively placed to be seen as queer in GENERAL, be it sexuality, gender, or personality (the ‘odd one’). Which is not to say that being any of those types denotes any of the others, but that I think they’ve got Stiles (narratively and characterization-wise) as the one who, in ANY way that you look at the ‘normal’ rules, doesn’t fit in.

Which makes him a great ‘vessel’ for fandom; we who, almost by definition, have carved out our own creative spaces from mainstream media/storytelling. Our stories, by definition, don’t fit in naturally to the bulk of ‘normal’ rules.

I’ve written about Allison getting normally ‘male’ storylines before, but I pinged onto your mention of her her revenge arc, in that it’s a parental-revenge arc (usually male, see: batman) instead of a rape-revenge arc (which we usually see for females in movies, there’s actually an entire movie genre based off this theme where it’s a ‘powerful’ female getting revenge, but the negative/destructive side of the power is rarely explored beyond the physical destruction; see, Kill Bill). Specifically, Allison had the upper hand for the most part with Matt; not only was she capable of rejecting him, she was shown repeatedly rejecting him and then bringing him down at her party. The only exception to this was when the Kanima was involved, but in the scheme of S2 NOTHING was able to defeat the Kanima… except for love.

(Narratively, for S2’s arc, the Kanima was poised as pretty much an Infinity+1 Sword: “It’s the very best weapon in the entire game — even better than the Sword of Plot Advancement and the Infinity–1 Sword. But, in order to get it, you’ve got to put the plot on hold and embark on a five-hour sidequest! That, or go around killing enemies until one of them Randomly Drops it.”

So true it hurts.)

Which is exciting to me because of the weird place/flux that female power is; both in general and in our current culture. There’s several forms of female power ‘allowed’, but it’s rarely nuanced; virgin mary, mother, whore, rape-revenge seeker, bitch. There’ve been recent media of course that’d had more complex characters, who happen to be female (such as Buffy, Xena, the several in BSG) but it’s still more the exception rather than the norm (see: SPN). I’m really glad to see Teen Wolf be an exception.

I’M SO GLAD GIFT OF FEAR WAS MENTIONED. Because I was thinking of that a lot, actually, when I first watched those scenes with Lydia and a person who we later found out was young!Peter. Also when I watched Allison and Matt. It didn’t occur to me to apply the issue of low-grade anxiety to Stiles but that really really works.

To any female who haven’t read Gift of Fear yet, you really need to. Does anyone have a pdf of the book available? Because I would really just like to pimp the hell out of it.

To any guy who haven’t read Gift of Fear yet, PLEASE DO, if only to understand more.

tldr: if you take away anything from this, read Gift of Fear. It really makes watching Teen Wolf more interesting; and highlights differences in arc and arc-structure.

[edit]

THANK YOU sterekmess! Download link to Gift of Fear.

Stiles is totes coded as queer something, but the trans thing is more wish fulfillment on my part. The Gift of Fear makes me wonder if they’re gonna do the rape revenge thing with Peter & Stiles next season along with Lydia. Because I will never be convinced we weren’t supposed to read those scenes Peter had at the end of S1 with both of them as rapey as fuck.

Allison as Batman is really amazing if you think about it.And Scallison being a slash pairing is still mindblowing ~days out.

Also, with The First Time thread, as the ‘normal teenage experience’ Dylan having the masculine role and thus having to identify with his love interest as a female viewer, it is strange because I can’t place myself in either of them. 

This ties into what you were saying about carving out space from the mainstream, because I am nongendered. Stiles exists in the same liminal space I do because of how the narrative situates him.

I find it interesting…

ladyw1nter:

magdalyna:

ladyw1nter:

…in the spaces of time I’ve been at work and pondering a great many things, how the narrative common to most of my favorite fic has Stiles navigating that weird pedestal’d place of soft (feminine) power.

ie. When one simply cannot, by training or otherwise, get over the hump of the physical power differential between human and werewolf.

Which is not to say that the average woman is necessarily biologically less capable than the average man, but that I think many modern mainstream cultures pressures those identifying as female into habits that discourage athleticism. (ie. muscles that don’t get used atropies or turns into fat. LET ALONE the fact that some still find muscles on females unattractive; I got scolded by my mother for gaining arm muscle definition.)

(which is also interesting in that I realized that Allison’s storyline, as it works out in my head, feels more masculine than Stiles’. And now I’m pondering Scallison as a slash pairing which is doing absolutely fascinating things to story implications and that entire Lady Gaga convo)

Anyways, GIVEN all that, while the stories around Stiles has all the earmarks of being general stories of ground-in disenfranchisement, I am somewhat amused/delighted/interested in how Stiles specifically is narratively well-poised to carry the stories of female disempowerment. Little Red in a pack of wolves. The lone female in a job/class/team/group of prior established male-dominated culture/setting.

I think key in these stories (I’m just gonna call them Red stories for now) is the sense of displacement from the group, the sense of one’s ability and of being unpowered (which is markedly interesting in that Stiles is more capable of carrying this than Lydia, whose story is more a story of identity and gaining knowledge than carrying out the task she sets her mind to, ie. see her determination to go to Jackson in season finale), the sense of being placed on a pedestal and protected.

Lydia, in contrast, for the past two seasons is always deeply aware of her place in the hierarchy even if it’s a place she wants to get out of, she knows her abilities and her contributions even if she hides it.

For Stiles, on a purely narrative level instead of a general level, knowledge is not an issue; but given the ‘yoda’ conversations, the saying Derek’s name just to hurt him, the place he has (or doesn’t have) with his father, with his teachers (‘I don’t hate Harris), and even at the end with Scott, his place is uncertain. His ability and contributions, (I’m not a hero), has always at least to himself been uncertain.

Among other reasons, but I think this one plays at least a huge part in why fandom has grabbed onto Stiles, as a character, and the Red narrative so damn hard. That, given the bulk of the fic produced and the trends of the fic most recced, that the Red narrative is deeply touching and personal to many of us who are or identify as female; in the sense that these arcs of struggling to carve out our own places in masculine/powered hierarchy, in struggling to prove ability and contributions, in struggling to not be protected and to not be placed on a pedestal, these are stories that I find deeply interesting, and deeply personal, and I presume that those like me find them to be like that as well.

These are the narratives that echo, for me. The narrative of Little Red.

(That the narrative is placed on the white, male body is only incidental.)

Firstly!  The Scallion thing. Um, that is a fascinating idea, because Scott is the athletic hero type yet he’s very … masculine-neutral. He’s very comfortable with himself and sexuality and gender. And Allison is definitely a more masculine character than EITHER Scott or Stiles.

The thing I wanted to poke at the last bit, how the narrative of Little Red is placed on a white male body.

I don’t really think that its incidental? That was a distinct narrative choice, there. Which is the part I find fascinating. Because he partially active (saving Derek’s life all those times, stealing Lydia’s phone, lobbing a bomb at Peter) while also passive (all those wall slamming gifs spring to mind, Peter’s everything) which is an interesting juxtaposition.

Oh! Yeah in the context of the show itself is not incidental, imho. But the place of Little Red in Teen Wolf fandom, and specifically dominant in the Sterek sub-fandom, I think  the actual ‘body’ of the character mattered somewhat less than his narrative positioning.

I’m reminded again of Hardison in Leverage, where he was pretty much immediately embraced by fandom because he was a total geek, and narratively positioned so, despite the fact that his team consists of genius people. Specifically, Hardison is not only smart, but GEEKY, in a way that fandom recognizes and appreciates. (contrast to the idea of nerdiness, which may or may not be fannishly welcomed)

I could say something here about how being a nerd is exponentially more damning as a minority, but I don’t really have the time/energy today.

Fans totally zero in on the geeky dude in the text, yep. I also forgot to say something there that I later added in a reblog, about Stiles being read by some people as FTM or otherwise gender nonconforming, in subtext and how that relates to his positioning as Little Red.