q – Page 33 – jfby12backup

thisdiscontentedwinter:

ravewulf:

athenadark:

thisdiscontentedwinter:

Pew is princeescaluswords.

And I don’t think it’s canon that Stiles is Scott’s anchor, but there’s a scene at the end of Season 3 that very much heavily implies Stiles is something to Derek, since out of all the people his subconscious could have dreamed up for that moment, it’s Stiles.

So it’s open to interpretation, I guess! But definitely not explicit!

Ish

that Derek trusts Stiles is absolutely canon

that Derek turns to Stiles for reassurance and information is absolutely canon

that in an episode of maladaptive daydreaming Derek pictures Stiles as having the answers is absolutely canon

but the anchor thing is ….

okay there is this thing called “Ludonarrative dissonance” which is a fancy technical term for when the narrative [story] of a game is not supported by the gameplay

so if you play Vampyr for example there’s a huge deal about not feeding but you spend a good portion of the game eating vampire hunters who don’t count in the morality of the game – basically in a game about the morality of eating people you can eat THOSE people just fine and it spoils the game

the cinematic equivalent does not have a defined name yet but will probably be something like kinonarrative dissonance where the language of film [shot composition, color, symbolism, lighting] does not support the narrative as it is presented

teen wolf does this – it just doesn’t have a name

this is what we mean when we say “it’s not supported by the narrative” or “the show and the tell don’t agree”

and the anchor system is exhibit A in this

according to scott all werewolves have anchors and those anchors help them not eat people

according to the wider universe the anchor system was put in place by peter to help derek through a rough time but the fire happened before he could be taught through it but that the better system is the buddhist mantra of the acceptance of change [the sun, the moon and the truth] and all of the other werewolves use this successfully even when they struggle with the change

Derek learns this in s4 and is taught it by Stiles at the same time Stiles teaches Liam, he understands what Peter tried to teach him with the mandala and failed and through repeated examples we learn the anchor system is a set up for failure

kino-narrative dissonance the story we’re told is contradicted by the story we’re shown and it’s entirely deliberate

so Derek seeking out Stiles in a dream-state and gaining information from Stiles he could not otherwise have had [the finger counting thing] shows that when the chips were down he turned to stiles for knowledge and reassurance = that is absolutely canon

you can interpret that that he sought out stiles as his anchor but if he did he quickly stopped using an anchor for the mantra post s4, and in doing so achieved full shift

he stopped making stiles accountable for his mental well being – a thing addressed in dialogue about scott when allison dumped him

—

but the maladaptive day-dream itself is ABSOLUTELY worth mentioning because of what it means

it was, according to davis specifically, inspired by a short story by Ambrose Bierce called “an occurrence at owl creek bridge” in which a soldier in the civil war escapes a hanging and walks home through a dark forest to his wife but it is revealed that he doesn’t escape the hanging and it’s what he sees as he dies – he goes in search of his wife and in this instance Stiles is the wife.

the same technique is used in the video game Dead Space where the protagonist Isaac Clark [both names used in teen wolf] goes in search of his wife Nicole who he does not know is a ghost manufactured by the ship to get him to spread its infection.

It’s also the entire plot of jacob’s ladder, a film so heavily borrowed for from teen wolf it should have it in the main character’s list where estranged from his wife Jacob wanders through bardo and in the last scene is revealed that he is dying and enters heaven through redeeming himself with her

I can go on, but there is a pattern here

it’s not “open to interpretation” in that you CAN read it that way, it’s very hard to read it any other way that Derek’s most important person at the end of 3b is Stiles, but that doesn’t make him his anchor

@athenadark correct me if I’m misinterpreting but I think another way of putting it is that, in that moment, Derek did use his mental image of Stiles to anchor himself back into reality but anchors themselves aren’t some mystical/magical thing for werewolves. It’s just a mental technique.

Kind of like needing to think of happy memories or thoughts when casting a patronus charm in Harry Potter. The specific memory or thought doesn’t matter as long as it is powerful enough to do the job.

As a fandom we put in extra meaning into anchors that isn’t there because Scott put in extra meaning that wasn’t there. He wanted it to mean something that Allison was his anchor and that it was fate. But it wasn’t.

It was just a mental technique that helped.

If you can use them, more abstract concepts are going to be more stable as they don’t depend on the current state of yourself/people you care about/the world. A werewolf having something stable and unchanging, completely independent of what’s going on around them/inside them, would be extremely beneficial to staying in control of their shift and keeping cool under extreme circumstances.

Reblogging for the, as always, amazing meta!