March-Stalkers Mighty: Author's notes
Author’s notes and readers’ questions.
In which I ramble. There are a few issues here that I felt like addressing, and some links to replies that questions that readers have asked in comments. If you have any questions - about the story, about the verse, about authorial decisions, about what happened off screen - leave a comment to this post and I’ll probably notice! The links to questions asked in comments may take you to LJ, AO3, or DW, as I post on all three.
Notes:
On sexuality.
On monsters and the mediaeval.
On the chapter titling scheme.
On the images.
Comments:
[NEW] On Gabriel’s relationship with Marie (the farmer who tried to poison him to save her sister’s children).
[NEW] On the environs of Marie’s farm, and Gabriel’s typical pedlar habits.
[NEW] On angel and archangel physiology.
On Gabriel’s touch aversion and how that came about.
On the sequence of events that Dean didn’t see between Dean riding back into the pass and Gwen joining Gabriel, Sam, and Castiel - i. e., how Gwen ended up Outside.
On angel tunics (hooray, fashion!).
On Gabriel as a pedlar of sex-ed porn.
On where Ellen was coming from in that conversation about incubi that really confused Dean.
On what Castiel asked Gabriel about the sexuality of human men - i. e., Castiel’s reaction to the shock of realising Dean did not actually know that all this kissing and foreplay had anything to do with sex.
And most importantly, for all your NOOO BALTHAZAR CANNOT BE DEAD needs: proposed OT5 pirate AU! (Just click on the lowest “thread” button when it runs out of page space.)
Sexuality.
I think I was almost eight chapters in when I realised that Dean was, unavoidably and despite all his bravado and swagger, a virgin. Not only that, but a rather ignorant one. We tend to forget just how privileged we are in out knowledge: lacking the readily available information of the internet, or the smaller-scale but similar effect of an easily available and relatively anonymous print culture, it would not be the norm in a town like Dean’s to know and discuss sex-related matters easily, especially with that wealth of theoretical detail that we all share. Every detail would have to be known by personal experience, or by that of someone who’s shared it with you, and couldn’t be depersonalised or disassociated from feelings like shame and envy or ew-I-didn’t-want-to-hear-that-about-her.
Some of you may remember me panicking about this realisation, partly because a Dean without a sexual history seemed such an unfamiliar beast, and partly because the sheer magnitude of the implications of that ignorance threatened to derail the entire fic into a “Dean Works Out That Gay Sex Is Okay” story.
The balance did work itself out, in the end, and dovetailed nicely with the rest of the thematic structure. However, the framework that Dean eventually develops to fit the idea of loving Castiel into is not quite the same as our inherited cultural one, and left me feeling that I had to explain myself a little, against two charges: that of making Dean default to homophobia, and of valorising marriage as the only valid sexual experience.
In any society, an individual or a category of individuality is always measured against the “norm”, for better or worse. When it comes to sexuality, our norm is heterosexuality. I don’t mean to say that straight sex is normal and gay abnormal, but that our perception of sex and sexual identity is still based on “straight” and “gay,” with a few other categories (like “bi”) that all still centre around the gender of the partners in question
In Dean’s world, by contrast, the idea of “homosexual” and “heterosexual” doesn’t exist. The norm against which he measures himself isn’t heterosexuality, but marriage. The real breakthrough for him isn’t that gay sex is physically possible - that one passes with a blink and an “oh, that’s okay then” - but that gay marriage is something that could work: that it is possible and legitimate to have romantic feelings for a member of the same sex, to want to set up house with them and spend the rest of your life with them in that way. Marriage is, after all, his only cultural model for long-term commitment of that kind. In a small town, sex outside marriage is too potentially divisive, even before factoring in the very real dangers of childbirth. “I want to marry you” is therefore the only way he can say (or think) “yes, this is real, this is serious, this is just as valid as every other couple who have ever set up house together in my world”. He isn’t celebrating difference (homosexual/unmarried/other), but assimilating it into the norm (heterosexual/married/real). Dean’s upbringing here means that a sexual relationship without marriage would feel to him like an insult to Castiel and a shabby, shameful parody of a ‘real’ relationship, but that has no bearing on my own opinions in real life.
Gordon, of course, has a few words to say at one point that sound like homophobia. This is less of an issue, as he clearly isn’t a character with whom I (or probably any reader) will sympathise, particularly when he’s obviously being drunk and deliberately offensive. I’d still assert, though, that he isn’t actually being homophobic there at all. Homosexuality is far too unknown and unimaginable a category to be a ghoul, too incomprehensible to insult. Gordon’s beef there is Castiel’s race, not his gender, and insofar as he insinuates a sexual liaison it’s disgusting (to Gordon) for its cross-species nature, just as he might insinuate that Dean likes to creep out at night and do nasty things to the sheep. But the distinction there is more academic: I doubt it’s of particular moment to anyone why Gordon is being a dick!
Etayns and wodewoses and wights, oh my!
The monsters that inhabit this world are a mixture of Supernatural lore (shapeshifters, werewolves, skinwalkers), my own creation (the convenient will-o’-the-wisp, who just decided to turn up out of nowhere one day to menace our intrepid lads then became very plot-relevant later on), and Middle English ideas. Creatures like wodewose, etayn, barrow wight, werewight, are the sorts of thing an Arthurian knight might encounter in the woods.
Gawain, for example, when he sets out to seek the Green Knight (to paraphrase): “Sometimes with worms (ie, snakes/dragons) he wars, and with wolves also, Sometimes with wodewoses that lived in the wilds, Both with bulls and bears and boars other times, And etains of the high fells. Had he not been doughty and true, a good servant of the Lord, Doubtless he would have been dead many times.” They are creatures of imagination and shadow and allusion: we’d rarely get any details about what they actually are. As here, they just represent the kinds of dangers that are mentioned and dismissed in a sentence, the sorts of thing one expects when a knight is out in the wilds alone, proof of his prowess and the difficulty of his journey.
“Wodewose”, literally, is just “man of the woods”, but the image isn’t of a human but a distorted primitive human-shaped thing, the sort of creature that lives outside society in all senses, and preys on real people. Similarly, “wight” once just meant “person, creature, living thing,” and is sometimes used in Middle English literature (especially alliterative verse, where you need as many synonyms for common words like “person/man/knight” as possible) simply to mean “person.” However, in the later Middle Ages and afterward, until it dropped out of common use, it became more archaic and more marginalised, and was increasingly used to refer to “not our kind of people” or to spectral or uncanny creatures, often of human shape. This is the sense that Tolkien uses when he coins the term “barrow wight,” and the sense in which I use it in “werewight,” to mean any creature that changes into a savage animal at full moon.
In connection with this, I might as well mention that this is a fantasy AU, not a mediaeval AU. I’ve borrowed a few details - linguistic things, the Arthurian canon (and classical myth, to a lesser extent) as a basic literary canon that everyone knows, Jody’s use of parchment and rubrication and formal Latin phrases to keep the town’s annals. But they also have guns, and use the show’s style of spoken language and slang and American terminology even while they inhabit a fantasy British landscape of badgers and moors, and have some vague idea that silk comes from far away in the East. And things like butter churns and home cheese-making, of course, are hardly confined to the Middle Ages. I see no incongruities in this world, even when Dean salivates over burgers (which are, after all, only meat cooked in patties and placed between bread with a few other ingredients, hardly a concept exclusive to modern Western society). Put people like this in the middle of nowhere with limited resources and limited knowledge, give them an insular but fiercely protective society, let them be aware of things outside it and other ways of living but only as something theoretical and rarely relevant, and I think this is where they’d end up.
Chapter titling.
Several of the long late-mediaeval poems have odd ways of labelling what we would think of as chapters. Dante’s Commedia (the adjective Divina was added later by other people, by the way) has canti, songs. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is divided into four fitts, although I’m not sure who named them that, given the only manuscript of the poem hasn’t really heard of whitespace, never mind headings and titles. Piers Ploughman, a fourteenth-century mystical poem that goes on for far too long, literalises its whole “journey of the soul” theme by naming its divisions passi (passus in the singular), ie, steps/paces. I’ve followed that here, but, in keeping with my theme, have made the association with the body more physical: each passus is divided into a pes dexter and pes sinister, right foot and left foot. (And yes, the historical prejudice against lefties is why we have the adjectives “dextrous” from one and “sinister” from the other!) Requies is a pause or a rest (as in the requiem mass and requiescat in pace, “may he/she rest in peace”), and pedes conjunctim is literally “feet together” - i.e., coming to a stop at the end of the journey.
... Yes, since you ask, this sort of thing does entertain me.
Images.
Some of the art has been done by others - surprised me with the beautiful image of Dean and Castiel that I've linked from the masterpost, and drew two pieces for the timestamp I wrote for the Sabriel minibang. These are, I hope, clearly marked - the dividers, forward/back/home images, and main banner are mine.
As to them: all the landscape shots are taken by myself or members of my family - most are of Bodwin Moor in Cornwall, some of Gippsland farms in southeastern Australia, one of mountains in eastern Spain, and the big banner image (if you can’t guess by the intensity of the green!) from somewhere in Ireland - Meath, if I remember right.
The animal shots are mostly things I had lying around somewhere, which probably came off google images at some point. More easily attributable are the images from editions of The Hound of the Baskervilles and Beowulf from early last century - those are easily recognisable by their style.
Finally, the manuscript images are various mediaeval bestiaries and maps and one astronomy text. The maps in particular are interesting, because of the way you will find stranger and stranger creatures the closer you get to the margins (which is etymologically related to the word ‘marches’!), very similar to the creatures on the wall of the town in this fic. As for example:
You might also want to cast an eye over the extras for this verse.
In which I ramble. There are a few issues here that I felt like addressing, and some links to replies that questions that readers have asked in comments. If you have any questions - about the story, about the verse, about authorial decisions, about what happened off screen - leave a comment to this post and I’ll probably notice! The links to questions asked in comments may take you to LJ, AO3, or DW, as I post on all three.
Notes:
On sexuality.
On monsters and the mediaeval.
On the chapter titling scheme.
On the images.
Comments:
[NEW] On Gabriel’s relationship with Marie (the farmer who tried to poison him to save her sister’s children).
[NEW] On the environs of Marie’s farm, and Gabriel’s typical pedlar habits.
[NEW] On angel and archangel physiology.
On Gabriel’s touch aversion and how that came about.
On the sequence of events that Dean didn’t see between Dean riding back into the pass and Gwen joining Gabriel, Sam, and Castiel - i. e., how Gwen ended up Outside.
On angel tunics (hooray, fashion!).
On Gabriel as a pedlar of sex-ed porn.
On where Ellen was coming from in that conversation about incubi that really confused Dean.
On what Castiel asked Gabriel about the sexuality of human men - i. e., Castiel’s reaction to the shock of realising Dean did not actually know that all this kissing and foreplay had anything to do with sex.
And most importantly, for all your NOOO BALTHAZAR CANNOT BE DEAD needs: proposed OT5 pirate AU! (Just click on the lowest “thread” button when it runs out of page space.)
Sexuality.
I think I was almost eight chapters in when I realised that Dean was, unavoidably and despite all his bravado and swagger, a virgin. Not only that, but a rather ignorant one. We tend to forget just how privileged we are in out knowledge: lacking the readily available information of the internet, or the smaller-scale but similar effect of an easily available and relatively anonymous print culture, it would not be the norm in a town like Dean’s to know and discuss sex-related matters easily, especially with that wealth of theoretical detail that we all share. Every detail would have to be known by personal experience, or by that of someone who’s shared it with you, and couldn’t be depersonalised or disassociated from feelings like shame and envy or ew-I-didn’t-want-to-hear-that-about-her.
Some of you may remember me panicking about this realisation, partly because a Dean without a sexual history seemed such an unfamiliar beast, and partly because the sheer magnitude of the implications of that ignorance threatened to derail the entire fic into a “Dean Works Out That Gay Sex Is Okay” story.
The balance did work itself out, in the end, and dovetailed nicely with the rest of the thematic structure. However, the framework that Dean eventually develops to fit the idea of loving Castiel into is not quite the same as our inherited cultural one, and left me feeling that I had to explain myself a little, against two charges: that of making Dean default to homophobia, and of valorising marriage as the only valid sexual experience.
In any society, an individual or a category of individuality is always measured against the “norm”, for better or worse. When it comes to sexuality, our norm is heterosexuality. I don’t mean to say that straight sex is normal and gay abnormal, but that our perception of sex and sexual identity is still based on “straight” and “gay,” with a few other categories (like “bi”) that all still centre around the gender of the partners in question
In Dean’s world, by contrast, the idea of “homosexual” and “heterosexual” doesn’t exist. The norm against which he measures himself isn’t heterosexuality, but marriage. The real breakthrough for him isn’t that gay sex is physically possible - that one passes with a blink and an “oh, that’s okay then” - but that gay marriage is something that could work: that it is possible and legitimate to have romantic feelings for a member of the same sex, to want to set up house with them and spend the rest of your life with them in that way. Marriage is, after all, his only cultural model for long-term commitment of that kind. In a small town, sex outside marriage is too potentially divisive, even before factoring in the very real dangers of childbirth. “I want to marry you” is therefore the only way he can say (or think) “yes, this is real, this is serious, this is just as valid as every other couple who have ever set up house together in my world”. He isn’t celebrating difference (homosexual/unmarried/other), but assimilating it into the norm (heterosexual/married/real). Dean’s upbringing here means that a sexual relationship without marriage would feel to him like an insult to Castiel and a shabby, shameful parody of a ‘real’ relationship, but that has no bearing on my own opinions in real life.
Gordon, of course, has a few words to say at one point that sound like homophobia. This is less of an issue, as he clearly isn’t a character with whom I (or probably any reader) will sympathise, particularly when he’s obviously being drunk and deliberately offensive. I’d still assert, though, that he isn’t actually being homophobic there at all. Homosexuality is far too unknown and unimaginable a category to be a ghoul, too incomprehensible to insult. Gordon’s beef there is Castiel’s race, not his gender, and insofar as he insinuates a sexual liaison it’s disgusting (to Gordon) for its cross-species nature, just as he might insinuate that Dean likes to creep out at night and do nasty things to the sheep. But the distinction there is more academic: I doubt it’s of particular moment to anyone why Gordon is being a dick!
Etayns and wodewoses and wights, oh my!
The monsters that inhabit this world are a mixture of Supernatural lore (shapeshifters, werewolves, skinwalkers), my own creation (the convenient will-o’-the-wisp, who just decided to turn up out of nowhere one day to menace our intrepid lads then became very plot-relevant later on), and Middle English ideas. Creatures like wodewose, etayn, barrow wight, werewight, are the sorts of thing an Arthurian knight might encounter in the woods.
Gawain, for example, when he sets out to seek the Green Knight (to paraphrase): “Sometimes with worms (ie, snakes/dragons) he wars, and with wolves also, Sometimes with wodewoses that lived in the wilds, Both with bulls and bears and boars other times, And etains of the high fells. Had he not been doughty and true, a good servant of the Lord, Doubtless he would have been dead many times.” They are creatures of imagination and shadow and allusion: we’d rarely get any details about what they actually are. As here, they just represent the kinds of dangers that are mentioned and dismissed in a sentence, the sorts of thing one expects when a knight is out in the wilds alone, proof of his prowess and the difficulty of his journey.
“Wodewose”, literally, is just “man of the woods”, but the image isn’t of a human but a distorted primitive human-shaped thing, the sort of creature that lives outside society in all senses, and preys on real people. Similarly, “wight” once just meant “person, creature, living thing,” and is sometimes used in Middle English literature (especially alliterative verse, where you need as many synonyms for common words like “person/man/knight” as possible) simply to mean “person.” However, in the later Middle Ages and afterward, until it dropped out of common use, it became more archaic and more marginalised, and was increasingly used to refer to “not our kind of people” or to spectral or uncanny creatures, often of human shape. This is the sense that Tolkien uses when he coins the term “barrow wight,” and the sense in which I use it in “werewight,” to mean any creature that changes into a savage animal at full moon.
In connection with this, I might as well mention that this is a fantasy AU, not a mediaeval AU. I’ve borrowed a few details - linguistic things, the Arthurian canon (and classical myth, to a lesser extent) as a basic literary canon that everyone knows, Jody’s use of parchment and rubrication and formal Latin phrases to keep the town’s annals. But they also have guns, and use the show’s style of spoken language and slang and American terminology even while they inhabit a fantasy British landscape of badgers and moors, and have some vague idea that silk comes from far away in the East. And things like butter churns and home cheese-making, of course, are hardly confined to the Middle Ages. I see no incongruities in this world, even when Dean salivates over burgers (which are, after all, only meat cooked in patties and placed between bread with a few other ingredients, hardly a concept exclusive to modern Western society). Put people like this in the middle of nowhere with limited resources and limited knowledge, give them an insular but fiercely protective society, let them be aware of things outside it and other ways of living but only as something theoretical and rarely relevant, and I think this is where they’d end up.
Chapter titling.
Several of the long late-mediaeval poems have odd ways of labelling what we would think of as chapters. Dante’s Commedia (the adjective Divina was added later by other people, by the way) has canti, songs. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is divided into four fitts, although I’m not sure who named them that, given the only manuscript of the poem hasn’t really heard of whitespace, never mind headings and titles. Piers Ploughman, a fourteenth-century mystical poem that goes on for far too long, literalises its whole “journey of the soul” theme by naming its divisions passi (passus in the singular), ie, steps/paces. I’ve followed that here, but, in keeping with my theme, have made the association with the body more physical: each passus is divided into a pes dexter and pes sinister, right foot and left foot. (And yes, the historical prejudice against lefties is why we have the adjectives “dextrous” from one and “sinister” from the other!) Requies is a pause or a rest (as in the requiem mass and requiescat in pace, “may he/she rest in peace”), and pedes conjunctim is literally “feet together” - i.e., coming to a stop at the end of the journey.
... Yes, since you ask, this sort of thing does entertain me.
Images.
Some of the art has been done by others - surprised me with the beautiful image of Dean and Castiel that I've linked from the masterpost, and drew two pieces for the timestamp I wrote for the Sabriel minibang. These are, I hope, clearly marked - the dividers, forward/back/home images, and main banner are mine.
As to them: all the landscape shots are taken by myself or members of my family - most are of Bodwin Moor in Cornwall, some of Gippsland farms in southeastern Australia, one of mountains in eastern Spain, and the big banner image (if you can’t guess by the intensity of the green!) from somewhere in Ireland - Meath, if I remember right.
The animal shots are mostly things I had lying around somewhere, which probably came off google images at some point. More easily attributable are the images from editions of The Hound of the Baskervilles and Beowulf from early last century - those are easily recognisable by their style.
Finally, the manuscript images are various mediaeval bestiaries and maps and one astronomy text. The maps in particular are interesting, because of the way you will find stranger and stranger creatures the closer you get to the margins (which is etymologically related to the word ‘marches’!), very similar to the creatures on the wall of the town in this fic. As for example:
You might also want to cast an eye over the extras for this verse.