long answer to destiel ask
Mar. 1st, 2015 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
butterflyYou mentioned both ‘this arc’ and ‘this season’ and those really are two separate things — or, rather, this season is a subsection of the current arc (the ‘Dean’s downfall’ arc). A lot of people mentioned S9 as the point where ‘things changed’ but I would pinpoint it to the back half of S8. In particular, I believe it happened once the writers knew that S9 was basically a lock. So, they began the process of down-shifting on Dean and Cas because instead of racing towards an ending at S8, they were going to need to settle in for a slow burn.
To my eyes, S9 is the continuation of what had already begun in episodes like 8x17. This is a collaborative, somewhat organic process — while the writers threw in the one-sided Megstiel as a distraction, it was Jensen who kinda took it down another notch by taking the heart out of the crypt scene and setting up something that the writers (from what I saw in both S9 & S10) took as a challenge. Jensen didn’t think Dean was capable of verbally expressing his love to his loved ones, even when he was on the brink of death. And so we have, in early S9 (9x02), Dean mentioning flat-out that he has problems with “love… and love”, the writers taking Jensen’s difficulties and making it textually part of Dean’s overall characterization and storyline. They’ve now taken this hurdle that Jensen created and set it up as something for the narrative to conquer.
And what it takes to do that is to completely break Dean down and rebuild him from the ground up, to allow him to grow into himself and, just possibly, become the sort of man who can tell the people he loves that he loves them.
8x23 is also when textual queerness waved good-bye to us for the entirety of S9. As many people noticed, S9 is full of queer subtext but was stripped of all queer text. Even the Charlie episode contains no references to her sexuality, though the relationship with Dorothy was laden with subtextual romantic potential (and, it’s key to note that, at the time, Felicia Day did not pick up on that queer subtext, instead seeing it as a platonic friendship (she mentioned this at a con) — this was the way of queerness in S9 in general. S8 forced people to notice queerness, while S9 allowed them to ignore it if they were not the sort of people attuned to it already). It’s not until 10x05, “Fan Fiction”, that queer text returns to Supernatural (and, very fittingly, the queer text that left us in Dean and Cas’s presence — their viewing of the new couple in 8x23, also returns via Dean and Cas, in the form of Dean witnessing Kristen and Siobhan’s relationship. It ended and then was born again with Destiel). And now, when Charlie comes back in “There’s No Place Like Home”, she’s allowed to express her sexuality again, the way she wasn’t in “Slumber Party”.
While it was Charlie in 9x04 that made me tilt my head and begin to wonder where the textual queerness had gone, my thoughts on what the show was doing didn’t click for me until 9x11 — Gadreel and Abner’s relationship was like something out of a tragic queer story from the Hayes Code days. Subtext, subtext, subtext, all the way up to the grand finale of Cas being “in love… with humanity” and yet having done it all for “one man” (and, of course, the undertones and queer subtext that was building up in Crowley and Dean’s relationship over the second half of S9 was another example of the heavy subtext and yet non-existent queer text, with every queer reference Crowley made dismissed as a joke by the part of the audience wearing heteronormative lenses, especially since the writers actually put him in bed with a demon possessing a female vessel, so again the contrast of queer subtext vs het text (with the lack of/insufficient consent that featured so often in the S9’s het text). We also had 9x06, which was so heavily colored in with subtext that Misha got a note from Carver, our showrunner, to play Cas as a ‘jilted lover’ (and yet, again, all the text is heterosexual).
Why was S9 so relentlessly heterosexual in text? This I can’t even really speculate about, because I don’t have enough information. I know there are some different theories out there re: conflict in the writers’ room & whatnot. TBH, I’m just glad/relieved that S10 brought queer text back into the picture. With S9, the build-up of subtext related to Dean and Cas continued, but with the stripping out of unrelated queer text, it was hard to see how any potential Destiel-related climax to their storyline could breach the subtext/text barrier. After 9x04, I talked about how the ‘ending’ that Dorothy and Charlie got mirrored the ‘happy endings’ slash shippers tended to get a lot from their pairings in the ’90s and early 2000s — they’re together & primarily bonded to each other, but the romantic aspect is subtext rather than text. This is what happened with The Sentinel, due South, House MD, etc. And, of course, it stood as a direct contrast to the very textually romantic ending to Charlie’s 8x11 episode. And I had to consider the implication that the show was sending the message that this was as far as they were willing (or able) to go with Dean/Cas in the end, too, having them be only subtextually canon. But then Kristen & Siobhan happened in 10x05, which has made me relax a bit on that front.
So, in the midst of all this heterosexuality, the show did build up the subtextual connections between the kind of love that saves and the kind of obsession that kills and damns. We’ve seen example after example of this in this arc, which encompasses more than this season (as you mention re: S8). A rewatch of S8 shows how closely married to S9’s themes it was, and I suspect the same will prove true once S10 has completed airing as well.
But now we come back to this season and your primary question — will romantic love save Dean? Or will it be inner strength? Or will it be Sam?
I mentioned a little while back the symbolic nature of the broken mirror in Dean’s room — we see it broken into three parts. I see the salvation of Dean coming from three pieces as well — himself and “love… and love”. There is an element of inner strength that’s needed, there’s the support of his family (Sam, plus some from Charlie, Jody, etc) — but, I stress, this MUST be done in a non-toxic and non-trapping way, or it will likely further damn Dean instead of save him —, and then there’s our “… and love”. The “…and love” are the romantic loves that we’ve seen happen over the course of this arc (and love is the key — it’s not about infatuation or lust or possessiveness, but about unselfish and genuinely supportive love).
With season ten, we have seen more examples of what doesn’t work than what does, I agree, because we’re at the part of the arc where it has to seem like there’s no hope for Dean, but I’ll work through it piece by piece, and point out the parts that stood out to me as emphasising the “… and love” part of our equation, and I’ll also point out where the healthiness of the love is shown to be an essential part of the equation.
“Black” through “Soul Survivor”, demon!Dean was the ‘MotW’. It was ‘the people who loved [him]’ that saved the day. Two people — Sam and Cas. Brotherly love with Sam and… undefined profound love that eerily matches up to the various romantic loves we’ve been shown through S8&9 with Cas. Additionally, brotherly love is coupled with a mention of brainwashing from Dad (demon!Dean; “Soul Survivor”).
“Paper Moon”. Familial love fails to keep Kate’s sister from being a killer; all it did for Tasha was delay her death for a year or two, not prevent it, and it turned her into a ‘monster’ in the process.
“Fan Fiction” also focuses more on the brotherly bond & touched on the brainwashing from Dad aspect. But, of course, we have a nod to healthy love in the form of Kristen and Siobhan, who are cute and dressed up as Cas & Dean, plus we have a song about waiting patiently for the right time to be with someone.
“Ask Jeeves” — Dash puts down the gun when the woman he loves asks him to. Meanwhile, with the shifter, familial love is coupled with trapping someone and keeping them from leaving and, in many ways, destroying their ability to live a full life. The shifter, like Tasha, merely had her death delayed and was turned into a ‘monster’ by the way familial love ‘saved’ her.
“Girls, Girls, Girls” — Rowena makes her way back into Crowley’s life, setting him up for joining the Winchesters in our ‘how toxic family bonds doom us all’ theme. Dean and Cas’s storylines parallel. Sam is unable to reach through to Dean’s mirror. Caroline’s love for her husband is what breaks through to Hannah and makes her realize that she doesn’t have the right to take over another person’s life, so she lets Caroline go. Romantic love saves Caroline. And this is the episode where Dean specifically credits the plural ‘people who love me’ who saved him back in 10x03.
“Hibbing 911” — this episode is more of a showcase for Jody & Donna, so it’s mostly building on their previously characterizations but we, of course, have another nod to how familial love can trap and doom in the form of the vampire family hunting the sheriff down and trying to drag him back into their way of life. This is something of an inverse of Sam basically doing the same thing to demon!Dean in 10x02/10x03 (obviously, Sam’s version is more sympathetic, as he’s forcing someone to stop being a ‘monster’ and into being closer to human rather than attempting to force someone who is trying to live as a human to act as a ‘monster’).
“The Things We Left Behind” — Much as there usually is at the halfway point, we have a shift of focus here, as we pivot from focusing on toxic families to focusing on ‘how on earth can this Mark be controlled oh my goodness?’, which is where we get a taste of the love theme again more obviously, but not before we also run through other possibilities.
“The Hunter Games” — “There’s a little monster in all of us,” Cas tells Claire, which is again signaling the shift we’re going to see in the upcoming episodes — that’s a major theme from now on, the monster within, along with the accompanying theme of the ‘second chance’.
“There’s No Place Like Home” — Charlie gets a second chance by embracing her darkness and accepting it as part of herself. Her violent side, much like Dean’s, is eaten up with the desire for revenge (consider Dean’s litany of reasons to kill Metatron in 9x23).
“About a Boy” — Tina gets a second chance by embracing the magical change that was forced on her. And another nod to familial love not being all it’s cracked up to be, with Hansel either eating his sister’s heart by choice or (if you subscribed to the theory that Gretel and the witch are the same) working together with his sister to slaughter people.
Dean declares he’s going to ‘believe in himself’ and quits all the healthy stuff he was trying in the previous episode, diving right back into booze (and, debatedly, attempts at flirting, depending on how you read his early interactions with Tina). This does not stop even after Tina talks about second chances at the end of the episode — if anything, Dean descending into his old coping mechanisms accelerates in “Halt & Catch Fire”, with Dean constantly eating and leering in the first half of the episode.
“Halt & Catch Fire” — Romantic love saves the day. It was the only way to save the last girl’s life. Both the girl and the wife get a second chance by facing the truth and accepting the reality of their lives without pretending that damage wasn’t done. Dean takes the wrong lesson from the episode and decides to give up entirely on trying to find a way to cure the Mark, because living healthy for five minutes didn’t work and living unhealthy for five minutes also didn’t work, so obviously nothing will work.
“The Executioner’s Song” — you called what happened earlier in the season a ‘reframing’ of Cain’s story, but that’s definitely something I’m going to have to disagree with you about. What I saw being illustrated was the negative space of where Colette should have been but was conspicuously missing from. We had Sam pointedly bringing up the question that ‘somehow’ Cain was able to resist, but just because it was a mystery to Sam doesn’t mean it was a mystery to the audience. We got the answer to that question back in 9x11 (Sidenote: what the show is deliberately doing here reminds me of what Mark Oshiro is accidentally doing in his MarkReads of “Guards! Guards!” — which is to say, the answer to ‘who committed the crime’ of the book was solved a few sections ago, but Mark (likely because of the way he switches between books as he does his reads) had forgotten that the answer was already given, so he’s come to a different conclusion based on the current section of the book, an answer that is hilariously wrong to anyone who knows the truth. But the truth was there in the text all along, and Mark having forgotten that the book spelled out the answer doesn’t mean that it wasn’t spelled out. The same is true of Cain — the answer was spelled out for us in 9x11 — that Sam never found out about the answer and is speculating based on incorrect information doesn’t retroactively change the answer to match Sam’s speculations).
‘Somehow’, Cain was able to resist for centuries and then, once he got a taste of blood again, he wasn’t able to go back to resisting. This was deliberately brought up and the answer deliberately not given this season, despite the fact that Dean knows the answer. Cain was able to resist before because he had Colette and her memory. After what he did in 9x11, he no longer felt worthy of her memory, so he no longer was able to summon the willpower to resist. If we’d seen Cain still successfully abstaining from violence, then they would have been reframing the issue as one of 'inner strength wins out’, but the fact that he was no longer able to resist reminds us that he was able to resist before. Inner strength failed to help Cain. The answer to why remains unspoken, but anyone who watched S9 knows the answer. But Dean doesn’t believe unconditional romantic love is even an option for him, hence why he tries to argue that Cain can resist via sheer willpower.
And, on a Destiel note, Dean also definitively chooses trusting Castiel over Crowley in 10x14 when he hands him the Blade, reconnecting a loop that was broken on the bridge back in S9 when he walked away from Cas and Sam and ended up falling into Crowley’s clutches.
So, Dean is Charlie, Dean is Tina, Dean is all three of the featured characters in H&CF (the girl, the wife, the ghost), Dean is Cain and is Cain’s descendants. But mostly Dean is Dean — we can take inspiration from those characters and hope Dean travels a better road than the ones that ended painfully.
Anyway, that’s basically how I’ve viewed the season so far— does all that help illustrate my perspective?