Gah

[jmtorres]

So I've been reading this epic SPN fic, and it's well-written, which is why I've kept reading for the last hundred thousand words, but it's also anti-Ruby, she's making Sam evil, Sam has to give her up entirely, etc. And like, I kind of said, "Okay, I'll buy into this for the duration of the story, even though I think Ruby is awesome," but I finally figured out what it is about this story that's getting up my nose, and it's not just that it's anti-Ruby, it's that Castiel gets out from under Heaven's thumb and develops feelings and opinions as an 'independent' and questions Heaven's stance on the whole apocalypse thing while Ruby is irredeemable, not given the same ambiguity and space for growth. You could argue that that's very in line with how the end of season four and season five have turned out, but the thing is, this story is a season four AU, started at 4x14 when Ruby was frankly still pretty up in the air, and it's very clearly a fix-it in terms of making the characters talk to each other--I have this whole thesis about how the apocalypse would not have happened if Heaven and Hell had afforded Sam and Dean the opportunity to talk to each other for five consecutive minutes in the course of season four--so every time I come across some line where the hard parts of relationships are getting fixed with actual communication (the bit that set off my navel-gazing here is Castiel going to Sam for advice on how to break it to Dean about him having been the first seal, so that, meta-speaking, Dean will hear it there and not from Alistair), I keep feeling like why're you gonna put all this effort into fixing things for them and not do anything for Ruby?

Part of this comes from I have this really strong sense of Cas and Ruby being parallel, Heaven and Hell's respective manipulators on the Winchester boys. So I feel like fandom (and the show, but dude, I am so seriously off playing in AU land it's not even funny) lets Cas off the hook a lot more than they ought to and hates on Ruby a lot more than she deserves. I think... ideally I think they should have had parallel paths to right down the middle of new loyalties to humanity, but if they're going to have different paths, having the angel turn out to be on our boys' side while the demon is the traitor all along is not interesting, there's nothing unexpected enough to be worth caring about in that storyline.

So sayeth me, anyway.