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

[alexseanchai]

The key characteristics of Valhalla are wine mead, women, song, and battles, yes? And the key characteristic of the people who go to Valhalla is they're Norsemen who've participated in battles and, presumably, in the yay-we're-alive parties afterward, which presumably had mead, women, and song, yes? I'm thinking heaven as presented in the show is Valhalla for anyone who had a reasonable expectation of going to Valhalla. SPN's heaven also seems like it'd equate fairly well to Elysium and to Hades (though skipping the part with Lethe), and Tantalus and Sisyphus are in Tartarus, right? I'm dead certain that Dean's line about knowing the feeling of being haven't-eaten-in-days hungry was a reference to one of the things he experienced in hell. The only other mythoses whose afterlives I'm familiar with are variants on reincarnation, which I'm fairly certain isn't in play in Supernaturalverse (and which I can't make the numbers work for in my head anyway--the population's expanding much faster now than it was before we figured out infant mortality, so not all new babies' souls can possibly come from dead people), or one simply goes pop like a bubble, which is certainly not in play in Supernaturalverse but it took outside interference for Dean and Sam to realize they were dead instead of dreaming so it's not at all unreasonable for pop-like-a-bubble believers to think they simply hadn't died yet, as proven by the fact that they hadn't yet gone pop. Three blind men and an elephant sort of deal. Complete with holy wars over whether an elephant is like a tree or like a rope.

One of the ways to go to hell according to the Qu'ran is to be Christian, so, given already-established validity of nonChristian belief systems, either people who don't rate their own personal paradise go wherever their beliefs tell them people whose afterlives are punitory end up (in which case to go to the Christian hell requires to be Christian) or there has to be a demon punching the ticket down. Which probably means most demons were Christian to begin with, because they'd have to either summon a demon to sell their soul to or be in the neighborhood after a demon summoning a la the victims in Crossroad Blues, and everything else to do with demons is Christian. But that brings us right back to invisibility of nonChristians, and is in any event contrary to what I just argued re Tantalus, so I'll shut up till I figure out an argument without internal contradictions.

Personally I think the plague Ruby mentioned is the Black Plague, because that's the only one most USians would think of. And while it's possible--hell, it's likely--that Ruby picked the Katie meatsuit and the blonde secretary precisely because they were blonde and pretty and would therefore conjure memories of Jess, and looks never crossed her mind when she picked out the Genevieve meatsuit or the maid, it is not as though it would have been terribly difficult for Ruby to find somebody to wear who looked like who she'd been, regardless of who she'd been, and it is unlikely that Ruby the black girl or Ruby the Asian girl would have had a noticeably harder time winning Sam's trust than Ruby the white girl. So if she had any lingering resentment about ending up in white people's hell, and given that she almost certainly got out of hell during AHBL and therefore wouldn't have the faintest idea about race relations in the US, why would she wear anyone white? (Well, Genevieve, but "I recycle" and "nobody to give a damn if this girl disappears" would be the paramount considerations there.) And if she was white to begin with, would it cross her mind to wear somebody nonwhite? (Except when the nearest person with access to the boys who wasn't already possessed happened to be nonwhite.) Throw in Ruby's established history with the demon who had the Malleus Maleficarum coven following in the footsteps of European witches, and I'm fairly certain the writers intend Ruby to have been a European witch. Any invisibling of the rest of the world is therefore on the writers, same as the invisibling of most everyone below middle class because the boys can't hunt something they don't know about and their knowledge is generally limited to what's been in the media which has a well-known bias in favor of stories featuring pretty white middle-class girls at the expense of anyone who isn't pretty or white or middle-class-or-higher.

ETA: Pasted that at 750words.com and it killed my word count for the day. Checked the stats and apparently my discourse on the various afterlives proves that my feelings today are mostly affectionate. This amuses me.

Oh for fuck's sake NoScript, how do I get you to believe that ***.dreamwidth.org is the same damn site as www.dreamwidth.org?

[jmtorres]

I feel like "all heavens and hells are the same heavens and hells" is a big cop-out. And that the only way it could work is if all the gods (or at least all the heads-of-pantheon) are the same god. I don't think one god, many names, or one heaven, many names is an interpretation that works for the supernatural storyverse.

Christian demons luring people to sell their souls and go to Christian hell might make sense, and certainly Ruby sold her soul.

I think Ruby (and the writers, but I'm not sure if I want to bother with a Doylian perspective here, I'm fed up enough with them re a lot of this) certainly meant the boys (us) to think she was referring to the Black Plague, but the reference was so VERY vague and the source so unreliable that I see no reason to take it at face value.

[alexseanchai]

One god, many names--no, definitely not. One heaven many names--there's a hundred billion heavens, almost a one-to-one ratio with the number of people who've died since the beginning of time.

[jmtorres]

But they're all run by the christian angels, so what does that mean for gods of other religions?

[alexseanchai]

...excellent question.

Are they necessarily all run by the Christian angels? The only heavens we saw are the boys' and Ash's and Ash was Christian and the boys' respective complicated relationships with faith are centered on Christianity. (Speaking of, Ash has been to Einstein's heaven and that of the author of the Kama Sutra. Neither of whom was Christian.) For all we know Osiris has a fine setup in the cluster of heavens devoted to the people who worshipped his pantheon.