blargh

[jmtorres]

This is about three and a half days I've lost to being sick and exhausted at this point, and right now in the semester I can't afford it. I keep wanting to turn my brain on enough to write fic and I can't do that so how the fuck am I supposed to do homework?

I want to do something nonstandard with Ruby's historical background (because honestly, "when the plague was big," not that fucking specific) and I need to bounce this off people and work out the kinks, because sending non-European, non-christian girl to christian hell where she turns into a demon is kind of... what the fuck. Like it's granting christian mythology superiority in this storyverse even over people who don't believe in it, because one specific way to get sent to hell is not to believe in the christian mythos, and that overrides whatever her beliefs were? Not so cool. Not in general but especially not when non-christian mythologies have valid existence in this storyverse. When I tried a few basic parameters on Ruby herself, Ruby was pissed off as fuck to have landed in white people's hell (in the historical parameter set I gave her, christian missionaries she'd known were white, her folks weren't, ergo, "white people's hell.") I mean, this brings up the larger question of in the Supernatural universe, are (lingering ghosthood), [christian] heaven and [christian] hell the only afterlives available to humans, or are other beliefs valid? Can people be reincarnated? Is there a Hades, with Elysian fields and Tartarus? A Valhalla? Etc?

Maybe catching up on recent episodes later will kick me some new ideas on this. Damn it, I dislike defaulting Ruby to christian/euro background, it feels like invisibling the rest of the world not to explore other possibilities, but it's... problematic. yeah.

(At least I can get that much think on, even if I'm not writing actual narrative?)

Comments

[gelasius]

I've generally thought that other afterlives are absolutely possible (though rarely seen) in the SPN 'verse, and those people that are bound to other gods/other religious paradigms go to whatever afterlife is overseen by those gods/religious paradigms. Hell is just where you go when the Demons (in Hell) manage to Get Your Soul through a deal, or win something in the game they play with Heaven, and maybe also with other Gods. And that the Hell/Heaven dichotomy is the one we see the most because a) it's the story Sam and Dean are involved in, and b) most of those other afterlives don't meddle so much in the modern US landscape.

So, in my mind, Ruby's backstory could totally have a non-Christian paradigm in her actual beliefs, and that's where her witchcraft knowledge/practices comes from, but some-deal-or-something-else happened during her lifetime that caused her to end up in Hell. Which is still pretty what-the-fuck, but it might give you some room to work in.

Does that make any sense?