The Pet Whisperer by liliaeth
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Read from April 05 to 08, 2014 — I own a copy, read count: 1

What a Horrifying and Disturbing Story! I have been forcefully defiled. Mind Raped!

I admit it does have some entertainment value, but the munching on humans killed me. I mean I love the angst and liked the wicked pet training, but.... PLEASE! DO NOT EAT PEOPLE! Argh!

Humans as main course on the dining table of Gods. *dying* Gods hunting humans as food, even the children aren't safe. *dies in agony* Keeping humans as livestock for their juicy meat. *am so dead* Some of luckier ones are kept as household slaves, and the luckiest are those pretty ones which the Gods kept as eye-candies aka pets. The pets aren't exactly safe from ending up on the table as well. Da fuq!

How I wish this story could just focus on the pet training and leave out the grisly stuff. Each time I think of it... I.... *pukes everywhere* The slaughter of innocents both angers and sickens me so much I could feel my soul burning at the atrocities happening at every turn of the story. The author is sure brave and daring but too over-the-top with the horror aspect, it squicked me out even knowing she might be trying to deliver her message on animal abuse and to encourage vegetarianism.

The thing is, this story is utterly disturbing and horrifying as the amount of outright cannibalism overshadowed the pet training aspect eventhough petplay should be the main focus of this story as per suggested by its title and blurb. I kept on reading this morbid tale because I couldn't stop until I find out what would happen to Dean at the end.

WARNING: You really can't unseen what you have seen. For sure this is NOT for the faint-of-heart unless you are into gore and cannibalism. Beware of being eaten alive while kicking and screaming even your soul aren't spared. If you could curb your curiosity, I would advice you to stay away from this. The blurb didn't have any warning on the extreme cannibalism. I did blame myself for not checking out the story tags throughly before diving into it.

I am pretty sure that title and blurb would potentially leads unsuspecting readers who are looking forward to some petplay fun with added bonus of the famous Castiel-Dean pairing into the darkest void of evil and then gets drown in human misery so great one would felt scarred for life; speaking from the view of a traumatized reader. I have no way out now, it's too late for me. Go safe yourself!

Da fuq I've just read. @_@;
I need fluff pronto!

THE RATING
I am giving this a 2 stars not entirely because of the disturbing nature of the in-depth cannibalism, it is also due to the quality of the writing itself. There are parts where the plots fails and the characters has OOC moments here and there. I am also deducting points for not staying focus on the promised petplay theme. To be clear, I did appreciate the parts on the pet training and the melding of multiple mythologies with modern religion.

To put it in other words, this story is as entertaining as an intense nightmare you fought to wake up from.



STORY DETAILS:
Title: The Pet Whisperer
Author: liliaeth
Publication Date: July 21st, 2012
Type: Fanfiction of the Supernatural TV Series, 66,475 words (Completed fanfic)
Genre: Alternate Universe M/M-F/M-M/F Fan Fiction, Horror
Characters: Castiel, Dean Winchester, Original Female Character(s), Hades (Greek and Roman Mythology), Demeter & Persephone (Greek and Roman Mythology), God (Supernatural), God!Castiel
Tags/Keywords:

cannibalism, vore, pagan gods, eating humans, dehumanization, slavery, dubious consent, body modification, sounding, butt plugs, piercings, conditioning, rape, pet training, bisexual, gay, heterosexual, multiple partners, breeding

(spoiler show)

Description:
The pagan goddess Despoine is widely regarded as the best trainer of human pets in the supernatural world. When the new god Castiel demands her aid in training his pet Dean, she definitely knows better than to say no.

Words:66,475 Complete - Chapters:19/19 - Free Download
Supernatural Fanfic




* Reviewed on April 8th, 2014

*:--☆--:*:--☆:*:--☆--:*:--☆--:*:--☆--:*:--☆:*:--☆--:*:--☆--:*


View all my reviews

Barthes' most famous contribution to the semiotics school of structuralism, post-structuralism: though not his most-read according to GoodReads (an accolade reserved for Camera Lucida). While I love all of the Barthes that I have read, I think this should be required reading somewhere (the first part, anyway). Barthes is brilliant; his eyes seem always turned to the world as it is, and yet remain mindful of the world as it seems: that is the premise of Mythologies. Intentionally or unintentionally, everything we observe has a meaning and a counter-meaning, which change and reverse roles based on the society which views them. The actor's casual headshot: symbolic of his 'everyman'-ness, or rather his apotheosis above every man? The Tour de France: a meritorious battle of bikes, or rather the stock-puppet sitcom-drama of bikers' personalities? Toys: innocuous playthings, or instruments of class-shackling and occupational pre-fitting? Drinking wine: a symbol of French national, equalizing pride, or an instrument of expropriation from French capitalists over the Algerian farmers? These are the kinds of dualities which Barthes discusses in his Mythologies (so well written and well argued you may not even remember you bought it hoping for a sultry summation of Leda and her cygnus-seducer. No grey-eyed goddesses or illustrious Joves here, save the moonfaced Greta Garbo or the Romanesque Marlon Brando)

I have not viewed the world with the same naive glaze since reading Barthes' Mythologies, and whether it has caused me to overthink is debatable, but it has forced me to think more critically about the world of messages around me. Not just the message-laden world of advertisements, of which I was already dubious, but also of objects, cult-classics movie posters, favorite-books, cover-art, newspaper articles from The Wall Street Journal to The New Yorker to Home & Garden and Men's Fitness, Food Network Magazine and so forth. For example, from Los Angeles Times, today:

A city's unrealized ambitions in 'Never Built Los Angeles'
The article describes a new, permanent exhibition of the passed-over projects of Los Angeles: the phantom freeways, the might-have-been monorails and suggested subways, the sky-scrapers of could-have-been and the plush potential parks. While the the exhibition and the article offer this alternative-history on display as a wistful reminder of the many potential Los Angeles-es that could have existed, there is a more sinister criticism of the mayoral governance that the city has had, which aborted the many better projects. The exhibition comes in stride with a new mayor, Eric Garcetti, and makes the political statement that the unhappy denizens of Los Angeles want more of these projects to be brought to fruition, not left unrealized on scraps of stock-paper.

The exhibition is a sign. The signifier is the "never built Los Angeles" though the intended message is "should have been Los Angeles" - perhaps not wholly should have been, but at least in part. This signified message is in turn the signifier to the latent message of a sort of Marxist equalizer: that capitalism in cahoots with bureaucracy has bastardized the Los Angeles skyline, stunted its greatness, handicapped its potential. The signal is not of a great city, but of a Lost Paradise. While the message is that the past should educate the future, the ultimate message is that Los Angeles is a future foregone. Tossed tramways and abbreviated bikeways overshadow the ill-concieved and rightfully miscarried monstrosities averted. The remote past, and more significantly the unchosen past has simultaneously the luring life of the future and the death of the past. Instead of being a pivot for the city's projection, the exhibition serves instead as a tombstone.

Now, I'm not as brilliant as Barthes, and I am not well-informed in the culture of Los Angeles, but that is the kind of though-process which Barthes utilizes in dissecting French culture. Mythologies is about digging in to every sign, asking what is this supposed to signify to me? what does it actually signify? It is a thought process which does not require genius, for as Barthes proclaims: "myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear. There is no latency of concept in relation to the form: there is no need of an unconscious in order to explain myth." The world is populated with distorted messages, it is our responsibility as readers, thinkers, participants in our cultures to reconstitute the messages which reach us in distortion, not to let it lead us into complacency.

tautology dispenses us from having ideas, but at the same time prides itself on making this license into a stern morality; whence its success: laziness is promoted to the rank of rigor.

We must not be slaves to our own laziness, but rather discover the truth about us: we must uncover with a vigor. For myth is a sly mischief-maker, it masquerades as truth, as the obvious and the assumed. Myths are like puns: they have different meanings to the casual auditory observer and the close reader:

No, syntax, vocabulary, most of the elementary, analytical materials of language blindly seek one another without ever meeting, but no one pays the slightest attention: Etes-vous allé au pont? --Allée? Il n'y a pas d'allée, je le sais, j'y suis été.

As a collection of three of Yeats' pamphlet-esque collections of Irish folklore - Celtic Twilight, Secret Rose and Stories of Red Hanrahan - this seems like it should be great. But a weird thing happened on the way to its collection: Yeats grew up. As happens to many of us, as he matured Yeats grew more conservative; he quit the Golden Dawn, the occult society, and sidled towards more conventional religion. By the time he put this collection together, he was embarrassed by some of its more flowery ideas, and the end result is that he edited all the fun out of it. See my review of Celtic Twilight, and then consider this: neither of the quotes in that review made it into this book.

It's not worthless; Yeats collecting Irish folklore will never be worthless. But the original is exhilarating, bursting with ideas; this is more stodgy. It's just not as cool.

In high school, I used to attend the wrestling meets. I'm not sure why. I hated spectator sports, having endured a brief period of sullen cheerleading where I found myself unable to whip up a frenzy over first downs or sis-boom-bah on command.

Among the high school wrestlers I watched, there were some who elicited greater and lesser degrees of sympathy or repugnance, while one--though otherwise an inarticulate hulk--was transformed on the mat into a figure of grace, performing pins swiftly and cleanly. Barthes' wrestlers comprise more explicit types, e.g., the bastard, the image of passivity, the image of conceit, the bitch, etc. Wrestling, in Barthes' view, becomes a starkly defined conflict, where virtues and vices as personified by the contestants, engage in a battle that is a virtual psychomachia.

Barthes' world of wrestling, then, emerges as allegory in its purest, most elemental sense. Wrestling's landscape, drained of entity save the combatants, emerges as the opposite of mimesis. Here, time and causality recede into the background. For Barthes, wrestling, like biblical narrative, occurs on a horizon so blank, every gesture becomes a clear act of signification. The rapidly changing positions of the wrestlers splinter the narrative into thematic junctures, like a slide show where each frame of action, perfectly fused with meaning, replaces another.

Our interpretation at these points of thematic juncture involves a movement into myth--as Barthes explains it--for we simultaneously generalize and impoverish the meaning of the action on the wrestling mat. Within the construct of myth we create for wrestling, there operates a coherent system of conduct, a sort of decorum of indecorum, where "foul play" becomes "legitimitized," but the "absence of punishment" (29), the rupture of the tit-for-tat balance, is taboo.

Wrestling, Barthes proposes, provides intense satisfaction for its audience, where for once there is "an ideal understanding of things; ...the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction" (29).

In this essay, like the others Barthes presents in this collection, he emerges for me as the sharpest and most provocative of those writing on semiotics and structuralism.