Destiel ask (romance in carver-era)
Jan. 16th, 2015 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
butterflyAnonymous said:
I have a question, why do you think Sam as no love interests anymore? I’m using “love interest” as the really broad term spn presents those things. like in the this and the last season Dean had Robin from his past, slept with Suzy and Anne Marie. Cas “had” April (ew dreadly duo that was referenced twice if it wasnt horrible to begin with), went on a date with Nora and the Hannah thing. but Sam…. ? No one night stand love interest nothing…?afterthoguht to the message I just sent you about Sam and no love interest I just realized that pretty much every women Cas has interacted with (apart from the antagonist of his story arc Naomi and underage girl Claire) in the last couple of seasons included some form of romantic/sexual components. Meg 8x17+ reference 9x03, April 9x03+reference in 9x09, Nora 9x06, Hannah and even the Nephilim flirted with him. lol what …why?
Excellent question, anon! I would love to take a look at Carver & ~love interests~ in Supernatural. Because it is kinda glaring that Sam hasn’t even really looked at a woman since Amelia, meanwhile Dean and Cas are having women thrown in their narrative direction at the drop of a hat.
IIRC, Sam has had two episodes where women have flirted with him (“LARP & the Real Girl” back in S8 and “Ask Jeeves” in S10). I can’t think of any in S9 at all. And, of course, in both of those cases Sam was pointedly shown to lack reciprocal interest. In LARP, the intended implication was that Sam wasn’t interested in starting up anything post-Amelia, not even something brief/temporary, while the “Ask Jeeves” example was more to illustrate the characters of the sisters than to tell us anything about Sam. We also had Sarah at the end of S8, but their brief S1 romance was just nostalgia for both of them by that point.
And Amelia was a character whose relationship with Sam was essential to his S8 (and beyond) characterization. So, all of them were examples of ~relationships~ that very much ‘served the story’, to steal Chad Kennedy’s words. So, to put it simply, Sam isn’t having love interests because romantic love just isn’t what his story has been about ever since he decided against staying with Amelia.
Are Dean and Cas’s examples the same and, if so, why does the show need so much more of them? If not, then why do they exist for Dean & Cas in non-serving-the-story contexts but not for Sam?
Dean’s characterization has long been founded on living up to the ideals of his dad. Being a tough macho manly-man who listens to rock music, drives a muscle car, drinks to suppress his feelings, kills things, saves people, has sex with women. “To be the man daddy wanted” as 10x05 put it. Working on the car, drinking, hunting, sleeping with women – all of these have been shown to be coping mechanisms that Dean uses when he’s trying to force himself past his emotions. He uses them so freely because they were what was 'permitted’, basically, under John’s rules of how to be a man.
Dean is also charming in a flirty way, in general – the show pointed out that he presents this same side of himself to both women and men when Abaddon read the minds of two people Dean used his charm attack on in “As Time Goes By”, but this is something attentive members of audience had already noticed. Dean has weaponized his own attractiveness and frequently uses it to distract, disarm, charm, or fluster other people.
So, going into Carver’s SPN, we already had those pieces of the Dean puzzle. And yet S8, itself, is very light on the actual flirting from Dean to anyone (which we noticed at the time). Ellie flirts with and makes a move on him and yet, despite the fact that she’s pretty much exactly his type, Dean turns her down. He shows his normal non-serious flirty side a handful of other times in S8 (the nurse in 8x08, Benny’s relative in 8x09), but nothing with intent. Much like Dean isn’t very interesting in drinking – another prime coping mechanism he’s used in the past – Dean doesn’t show much interest in one night stands.
In S9, both of those urges of Dean return with a vengeance. Once Dean acts to override Sam’s wishes and puts Gadreel inside his brother, he starts on a downward spiral (one that is still spiraling). I noticed at the time (as did others) that the crossroads demon deal of the end of S2 was paralleled with Dean making the deal with Gadreel in the beginning of S9, but I didn’t really put all the pieces together myself until about halfway through S9 to see why S9!Dean is very similar to S3!Dean (Admittedly, for me, this is partly because S3!Dean is my least favorite version of Dean, so I was unhappy/rebellious about Carver putting that version into the middle of this story).
So, we have two contrasting situations in S9 for Dean when it comes to romantic vs sexual situations (with women) – and I divided that up because that’s exactly what we got. Robin was romantic; Suzy was sexual. Robin, explicitly, is what Dean has to give up in order to take care of Sam, while situations like the one with Suzy are what Dean feels like he’s still allowed to have under the rules he’s been trained to live under. So, that’s exactly the sort of situation we saw with Sam – these are 'love interests’ who 'served the story’.
At the beginning of S10, demon!Dean doesn’t carry all the emotions that human!Dean did, but he’s still defined by Dean’s upbringing. He’s acting out in response to it, but we see that he still clings to the coping mechanisms that daddy gave him permission to use – violence, alcohol, sex – though taking them to the extreme. The situation with Ann Marie was 100% about serving the story, as opposed to ~titillating sexy times~, since none of their sexual encounter appears on-screen at all, just the aftermath where they don’t even touch. The encounter with Shaylene shows the now human again Dean attempting to do the same as he did in S9 with Suzy, but it’s halted before it’s done more than leave the gate, because Dean sees that, despite her words, Shaylene isn’t there because she wants to be there, but because she’s being forced, and that matters. It’s a lead-in to the story of the week, but it’s also showing us how Dean’s desperation to fit back into his normal daddy-approved box isn’t working out so well for him these days, because it’s a little too desperate – he didn’t even realize that Shaylene was using sex-line standard patter in their text conversation. Now that Dean is facing the extent of his downward spiral head-on, I’m unsure where they plan to go with this thread – will the back half of S10 and S11 be more like S8? We’ll see.
That’s Dean. Cas is a somewhat different story.
First of all, where Dean is generally the actor in these, ah, stories of sexual and/or romantic desire, Cas is invariably the acted on, the object. He’s flirted with and doesn’t understand (or doesn’t want to acknowledge understanding) what’s going on. He’s pushed into situations he’s not prepared for and didn’t agree to. He’s manipulated into doing something he shows no signs of desiring of his own accord. This includes all the various flirtations that random characters throw at that he deflects or ignores, Meg doing all the pushing in 8x17 to try to get him to reciprocate her sexual interest, April taking him home and kissing him without asking first, Nora saying things that (reasonably) make him believe she’s asked him out and him textually going along because ~it’s what humans do~, Hannah doing all the pushing in S10 by forcing her nudity and a kiss on him.
Like with Dean’s characterization, this approach to Cas isn’t new to Carver era – Cas has pretty much always been an object of desire rather than the person doing desiring. In S7, Meg tries to push Cas into a sexual relationship that he shows no interest in following up on, it’s Dean who pushes him into the encounter with Chasity in 5x03, etc. It does, however, kinda get turned up to eleven once Carver takes over. Cas isn’t just attractive and appealing; in Carver-Era SPN, he’s pretty much The Most Attractive Guy Ever. He’s the ultimate desire-object, both sexually and non (with all the issues that come along with characters treating him as an object rather than as a person).
So, to get back to your question, what’s the purpose of all this?
We have, I think, three main possibilities for why Dean and Cas have more narrative threads of romance and sexual desire wound into their stories than Sam does.
1) Ye Olde No Homo (aka lol Queerbaiting).
2) Heterosexual text used as a complement to the queer subtext, because the subtext can’t, for whatever reason, become text.
3) Heterosexual text being used as a funnel towards (as well as a complement to) explicit queer text.
I waver between 2 & 3, personally, though I will briefly address 1.
The difference between 1 & 2 is that, in 2, the showrunners (or at least one of them) want to make the pairing text but, for behind-the-scenes reasons, aren’t allowed. 2 is, basically, what I read happened in Legend of Korra. In that case, queer subtext was acknowledged and canonized by the creators but was not explicit text in the work itself (not on the same level as the heterosexual romances in the work).
By contrast, in 1, there is no intention or desire on the parts of the showrunners to go canon or to have the queer reading be considered as a prominent reading. This is the 'tease but then make sure, textually, that it is all known to just be teasing’ aka what I hear happens in Sherlock (but cannot verify on account of not watching the show).
The reason that I do not feel Destiel belongs to that first category is two-fold. The external/meta reason is because… c'mon, we know these writers. They are not trying to hurt us or fuck us over or make fun of us. That doesn’t mean that they always avoid hurting us, but they aren’t trying to do so. Robbie Thompson, the writer of “Fan Fiction”, does not dislike queer readings. And this group of writers, after getting feedback on S9, have gone to great lengths to improve their treatment of female characters in S10. They care. They are far from perfect, but they care about their fans and they are very aware that many of their fans are young queer women. They are not maliciously trying to use queer fans for ratings. Whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it sincerely.
The internal reason is that, yes, while we’ve had quite a lot of heterosexual text involving Dean and Cas, the show has not been using it to deny or contradict the queer subtext (note: I am speaking specifically of the Carver Era here). Instead, it’s more often used to highlight or parallel the subtext. Ex. the situation between Dean and Robin is paralleled against Dean doing pretty much exactly the same thing to Cas (letting go of his own potential happiness because he needs to take care of his brother). However, this kind of parallel structuring alone does not indicate text will happen – here, is where I’ll mention The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies, which featured strong parallel stories and editing between the Bilbo & Thorin storyline and the Kili & Tauriel one, but only the het pairing was given explicit text to confirm romance. I’m inclined to feel like the Supernatural writers have more latitude than the Hobbit ones when it comes to inserting actual text (see: Charlie), however doing so with minor characters is still a different story than doing it with a lead.
So, for me, it’s between 2 and 3. The reason I hover between the two – despite feeling that the text is screaming “3” all the way – is because I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. There are a thousand and one reasons I could think up for why text could get pulled from the screen despite the showrunners’ best intentions. The reasoning behind 3 when it comes to season 8 & 9 is fairly fully covered by thevioletcaptain’s “weight of the world” meta series, so I won’t repeat that here, but will proceed to S10 instead.
Cas and Hannah has been a direct commentary on, and parallel to, Dean and Cas. From the promo for 10x10, it looks like those similarities are due to deepen even further, too. Dean and Shaylene were also directly paralleled against Cas and Hannah, as were Dean and Crowley. While this could be considered evidence for either 2 or 3, it’s the weight of the subtext that makes me lean towards 3. At a certain point, deepening the subtext is pretty impossible and you either have to commit or bail. Supernatural keeps dancing right up against that line and, eventually, I don’t see how they can avoid toppling over it. It’s the sheer weight of the subtext that makes me feel it will become text by or at the end of the series.
Basically, I feel like they’ve deliberately painted themselves into a corner, narratively speaking. But we’ll see. Like I mentioned, there are a thousand and one ways for things to go wrong.
Original Post: Romance in Carver-Era