Snowflake Challenge - Day 5

Day 5 - in your own space, promote a canon/talk about a part of a canon that you love. Leave a comment in this post saying that you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I'm going to talk about one of my favourite canons in Supernatural, which is that Dean's Impala, Baby, is a character in her own right and not just a car.

Dean always talks to and about his Baby as if she's a real person, and the fans have always viewed her as a real character and bonafide member of Team Free Will long before the show adopted that canon in Season 11 with their Baby-centric episode, 'Baby'.

I love the Baby episode, and it's one I will watch repeatedly and never get tired of. The one thing I appreciate most about that episode was that they never gave Baby a voice. You never heard her speak, she was just always there, as always, a loyal, silent stalwart support for the boys. Her being mute meant that fans could overlay their own interpretation of her thoughts and feelings.

This was important for me, because Baby is something of a fanfiction muse for me. I have a collection of almost fifty Baby-POV fics at my AO3 account, which go back almost ten years and which I know will carry on growing.

Baby speaks to me in a way that no other character does because I have been able to build her a personality.  Writing Baby fanfiction is almost like writing original fiction because I'm projecting my own interpretation of Baby's character onto a blank canvas.  

I'm almost the same age as Baby so I feel I can relate to her!

In my fics, Baby doesn't speak, just as she didn't in the episode.  She communicates with the reader entirely through internal monologue.  She's strong-willed, intelligent, and being a lady of a certain age, she has maturity and life experience and no shortage of sass. 

She loves both her boys more than life itself and is fiercely protective toward them, but won't balk at putting either of them in their place if she feels it's deserved.  She's sleek and beautiful, and she knows it.   Her love of her boys is reciprocated, particularly by Dean who spoils her and pampers her rotten.  

But what is most fun for me is that she's (and I think this is where the projection part comes in) a hopeless Dean fangirl, and a shameless 'dirty old woman'.  She isn't above breaking down deliberately on occasion so that she can get Dean under her hood and handling all her moving parts!  She has been known to have the occasional radiator blow-out as a result.

As someone who has no knowledge and even less interest in cars, it's ironic that one of my favourite canonical characters in Supernatural is a car. 

But then we all know - Baby's no ordinary car!

For Borgmama1of5

As part of  spn_bigpretzel's 12 Days of Christmas challenge, I posted THIS collage, and borgmama1of5 asked me if I could post the same collage with the original pictures.

Now, on the basis that creating another Jensen collage is no hardship, I was happy to oblige.

This collage is created of all the original pictures used in the first collage but without all the sparkles and fancy effects ... with a couple of exceptions.

Bottom right, I couldn't find the original picture, so I chose another similar one.
Bottom left was a duplicate picture so I snuck a completely different new one in.