From the LiveJournal of prentice_molly, August 2009

Meta, RPF, and Why I'm Conflicted

So hi guys. This is...not what I expected to be posting tonight. I'm specifically tagging Iknowaghost, trickfic, and princess_aurora-don't need to tag misty-chan, because she was on IM with me last night while I was busy freaking out.

Some of you probably know that my SPN collection was incomplete. I was missing Children Shouldn't Play..., The Usual Suspects, Houses of the Holy, Heart, Red Sky..., and Jus in Bello. Usually I'm a stickler for reading/watching things in order, but with SPN I couldn't help myself, plus by the time I got into the fandom a bunch of the earlier books were getting hard to find. I had all of the first arc (through John's death) because of a lucky find at a used book store; the second arc, however, was harder to track down, and someone bought the single copies of RSaM and JIB out from under me at the comic shop.

Thus you can imagine the squee two weeks ago when I opened an unexpected box that showed up just in time for my birthday and all my missing books were inside, courtesy of a RL friend with too much money and very good book-search skills. Now, these days I am a Responsible Adult (tm), so I wasn't blowing through them the way I would have when I was in college, but two nights ago I started JIB. I was really looking forward to it, because I liked the Henriksen arc and I knew JIB was his send-off.

This is where we have a digression.

I come from a big family. Really big. We're-all-Irish-and-Italian-Catholics big. (Well, OK, I am not a Catholic, no thanks to the best efforts of my parents when I was too young to protest, but you know what I mean.) I have a whole lot of cousins I'm not very close to. One of them was named Nancy.

I say "was named" because she died, eighteen months ago, when the police station where she worked as a secretary blew up. Gas leak, apparently. But wait, you say-wasn't Nancy the name of the secretary in Jus in Bello? Didn't she die, when Lilith came after Sam and Dean and destroyed the station?

Why yes. Yes it was, and yes she did.

When I got to the part where the secretary's name was Nancy Fitzgerald, I thought, "Wow, what a funny coincidence." When I read the physical description of her and compared it to the women on that side of the family, I did something of a Simple Dog Head Tilt. But then at the end, when the station blew...well, that was just a bit much, and so I did some poking around.

What I found was, frankly, creepy. The people who die, the bit parts, the teaser victims, they don't always get anything more than a first name; it's not always clear, even, what town the boys are heroically saving from evil in this volume. But whenever it was possible to track down names and places...they are always real. If you're curious, you can read the list of references after the cut at the bottom, but I'll just hit some high points:

* Stanford senior Jessica Moore died in a fire in her off-campus apartment just before midnight on November 2nd, 2005. She had a live-in boyfriend, who refused to talk to reporters.

* The plane crashes in Phantom Traveller were real, even the dates and times.

* Several young women were killed in Saint Louis by a serial killer who apparently gained access to their homes by impersonating their husbands and boyfriends. A man named Zachary Warren was initially suspected in the death of his fiancee, but was cleared when the real killer was shot by a SWAT team.

* A family in Minnesota was discovered to have been kidnapping and killing people for literally decades. The father and one brother are dead; the second brother's in prison and the youngest child, a girl named Melissa, is in foster care.

* A guy called Andy Gallagher disappeared from Guthrie, Oklahoma in early 2007.

* There was a rash of strange deaths and vicious "pranks" on the campus of Springfield University (Ohio) in the spring of 2007.

* There's a picture from the Biggerson's "Dinner For A Year" contest from a restaurant in New York (state), showing two handsome men-one tall, and one very tall-holding a huge mock gift certificate. (I am not reopening the casting debate, but I have to admit the guy on the right looks more like the description of Dean than my own personal choice, Misha Collins, otherwise known as Avon from the Blake's 7 reboot. OK, maybe I am reopening the casting debate.)

* A middle-aged couple called Madge and Edward Carrigan were discovered dead in their home on Christmas Day, 2007, having been stabbed with branches from their own tree.

* Jeremy Frost, a resident of my very own Pittsburgh PA, died in his sleep in early 2008.

* You all know the Ghostfacers website actually exists, right?

But you wanna know the kicker? The one that really makes me wonder what the ever-loving fuck Carver Edlund thinks he's playing at?

Archives for small newspapers aren't always online, even in this day and age, but in the case of Lawrence Kansas I got lucky. Let me quote the relevant sentence:

John Winchester and his sons Dean, 4, and Sam, 6 months, escaped the blaze, but firemen were unable to rescue Mary Winchester.

Dateline: 3 Nov 1983. I think we know Sam and Dean's last name now.

You may or may not know that I have a Thing about RPF-it really bugs me for some reason. I don't think I look down on people who like it or write it, but it's not something I can do myself. Write all the Sarah/Allison or Nathan/Adam you want; I will be over here. And I've just discovered that my fandom, the fandom that took me away from the Dresden Files and Firefly both, is basically RPF with monsters. And I do not know how to handle that. I'm not sure if I would be quite this upset if it weren't for the personal connection-I didn't spend a lot of time with Nancy or anything, but we did share some small number of genes, you know? I have, as they say, a dog in the fight.

So...that's where I'm at. If you're interested, all the links I could find that seem to relate to the real-world counterparts of things in the books are under the cut. I'm not planning to drop out of fandom-if nothing else, I can always go back to DF and Firefly; I've even been known to write for Buffy and various Marvel titles in my day. I'm leaving all my SPN fic up for now, and if I decide to take it down I'll give advance notice. But I need to think about things. I haven't bought my ticket to the con yet, and at this point I don't know if I'm going to, no matter how nice it'd be to finally meet some of you in person. And I've got a couple of challenge WIPs, including a Big Bang, that I'm now kind of side-eyeing and argh.

I wish there were some good way to get in touch with Edlund, but I don't think he needs a fangirl demanding to know what he thinks he's doing. And I mean, this is all about ethics and where certain lines get drawn, and my lines aren't the same as anyone else's, necessarily.

Just...read it for yourself, I guess, and tell me what you think. Comments are staying on, but I'm logging IPs and trolling is not going to be tolerated.

(Let's see how far down this rabbit hole goes)

mood: There's no icon for seriously, seriously messed up, is there?
location: In the windmills of my mind
music: Look, I liked mullet rock before the books, OK?