spn - early morning thoughts on demon!dean
Oct. 8th, 2014 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
butterflyDemon!Dean and the extent to which he cares is very fascinating to me. I don’t really want to talk about next week’s promo because promos can be misleading so I will limit this to this week as much as I can, but, man, demon!Dean.
And one of the interesting things is how hilariously wrong Crowley is* about the way Dean would react to being a demon. Because, he pretty much was expecting a standard-issue demon – bloodlust, nastiness, sexual assault, etc. (and, why not? Cain killed and fought for centuries before he learned his way out), and malleable.
Instead, he’s dealing with someone who is still more Dean than he is demon and yet all the most reliable way to leash Dean Winchester no longer works at all, as Cole also learned at the end of the episode – Sam Winchester is no longer a reliable goad in the way that he used to be.
What we learn from Cole’s scene with Dean on the phone is that Dean is no longer willing to drop everything to save Sam’s life. He’s prioritizing his whims over everything else. And it is his whims. He wants to drink, so he drinks. He wants to fuck, so he fucks. “Heeeey, isn’t that the dude that Ann Marie said was her douchebag ex? I should totally beat him up for being a douche. Because I’m awesome like that. And then I should drink some more. And Crowley can go fuck off if he’s not being fun anymore. Maybe Ann Marie will be more fun for a road trip? But then Ann Marie says ‘mean’ things and won’t go with me, so I’m gonna say mean things back and then pout when it’s obvious that I went too far.” He’s literally living from impulsive whim to whim, and when he doesn’t have a specific thing to focus on, he falls back onto the standard Dean Winchester coping package of drinking and sex.
This is a Dean without that voice in the back of his head reminding him that nothing is more important than looking after Sammy, reminding him of his responsibilities. A Dean who can leave a note and then write off anything else that happens to Sam as Sam’s own fault for poking the bear. He does still care about Sam – he immediately added Cole to the 'kill’ list once he finds out Cole has captured and plans to kill Sam – but he’s not going to go face off some random dude in order to save Sam. I mean, there’s bars out there that he hasn’t yet gotten drunk in, and Dean has his (new) priorities. Going off to save Sam just doesn’t sound like a fun time. It sounds like work, just like running Hell sounds like work. Taking care of Sam has always been couched in terms of being Dean’s 'job’ and, hey, now he’s off the clock, so stop bugging him already. He doesn’t want to help Crowley with Hell and he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his (rather more eternal) life saving Sam.
So, yeah, very interested in more demon!Dean exploration next week.
* tbh, basically the whole episode was kinda funtimes laughing at Crowley. He made the wrong kind of monster! He thought he could control demon!Dean because, hey, he knows Dean and he knows demons. But, lol, joke’s on him. Over and over. But it’s a similar mistake to what he made with Cas back in S6. Crowley is good at figuring out how people will behave… until he gets too close. Then he loses perspective and he consistently believes that he matters more to the target than he actually does.
Original Post: demon!dean