Anonymous asked: Why do you think Dean and Cas did only have two scenes really together/alone this season? (this also has to be the most least we've ever had even s7 featured more, I think). Do you think they will have another scene with each other still before s10 ends?
Butterfly replies: This starts with a digression, but I promise that I get to Dean and Cas.
So, when someone is writing a sexual & romantic endgame couple, there are a few different ways they can go about it.
a) you can get the sexual tension out of the way right away and milk the romance tension – this is what Farscape did with John and Aeryn. Farscape is basically the love story of John & Aeryn; that’s the main thrust of the show. Which is great if you’re into that and… not so great if you’re mostly into the show for the cool aliens.
b) you can have them get together. and break up. and get together. and break up. and get together. If you write a couple this way, I will hate them with every fiber of my being but it’s a pretty popular way to write endgame couples on tv. Ross and Rachel from Friends being a big example. Also Robin and Ted in How I Met Your Mother. In non-romance terms, this is basically what Supernatural does with the Sam & Dean relationship and is a primarily part of why I’m just not that into it because writing any kind of relationship this way, whether romance or friendship or family, just ends up coming across as toxic sludge to me. I just want the pain to stop, lol.
c) subtextual romance. this may be subtextually fulfilled in the end or it may be textually fulfilled. Het couple example of a subtextual romance becoming subtextually canon would be Sam and Jack from Stargate: SG-1. Because of the need for military approval for the show, they tiptoed around the idea that Sam and Jack had feelings for each other. As someone who wasn’t into Sam & Jack, I liked this better than the John & Aeryn model basically because that meant I could ignore it most of the time, lol, but this model tends to be really frustrating to shippers. Because it’s ~obvious~ if you’re paying attention to the hints, but it’s also not text. This is where Destiel is currently living for me, but it’s a more frustrating experience with a non-het pairing for obvious reasons.
Anyway, so you have this subtextual romance. How do you keep them from becoming text? In Sam and Jack’s case, the ‘big bad’, as it were, was the fact that they were in the military and Sam reported directly to Jack. There’s an episode in S4 or S5 where they talk about this more directly but even then they couch it in somewhat vague ~feelings~ terms, iirc, because the writers were under those same guidelines if they wanted to continue to get approval from the military for the show.
So, for Sam and Jack, the reason they’re being kept apart is external. It’s the organization that they belong to. Dean and Cas have been given external reasons to be kept apart as well – Naomi in mid/late-S8, the tablet in late S8, Gadreel in early S9. But they also have internal obstacles – the character interactions that they’ve had over the course of the last few seasons have set up a dynamic where they both want to be around each other but both feel like the other person has more important things to do and they don’t want to get in the way of that.
For Dean, the ‘more important thing’ is Sam; for Cas, the ‘more important thing’ is Heaven/the angels. Cas leaves Dean behind in S8 for the sake of angel things, pretty much over and over. When Cas finally does make his way to the Bunker to stay, Dean kicks him out because Sam is in trouble.
Now, they could have gone two ways with the feelings – they could have had a lot more bitterness and acrimony between Dean and Cas because of all these issues. But Carver-era SPN has very decidedly not taken that route. Instead, they are very good for each other; they are the lights of each other’s worlds. It’s sweet. S8 was basically the road that got them to this place – we got the more obvious romantic moments but we also had more tension and anger between them. S8 (for Dean) and early S9 (for Cas) was where they dealt with their issues, basically, and ended up in this very emotionally soft and sweet place.
But that very sweetness means that they don’t get to enjoy it very often. Being around Cas makes Dean happier, which means that for the sake of this specific story, they would either need to disrupt the Cas & Dean softness (by having them at odds/angry with each other again) or they need to keep them separated. That they choose to separate them rather than add more conflict to the relationship does mean we get fewer scenes, but it also means the scenes are basically cotton-candy levels of sweet, and they just say nice things about each other and are supportive and stare a lot and are big darlings with crushes on each other. Both The Burger Date and the end of “Soul Survivor” fit those broad strokes, lol.
IDK if we’ll get another cotton-candy scene with them this season. I wouldn’t be surprised to get one more because that would be pretty balanced, one at the start, one in the middle, one at the end, to remind us that these two care about each other so much, especially given how much that’s been driving Cas’s actions, especially. They’ve set it up right now to go either way – they could bring back some conflict by having Dean pissed off at Cas (and Sam) about going behind his back to save him, or they could have Dean understand the reasoning and not hold it against him, just like Cas didn’t hold Dean kicking him out against him once he understood the reasoning.
Original Post:
three types of romance
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>French</option><option ... >Frisian</option><option ... >Galician</option><option ... >Georgian</option><option ... >German</option><option ... >Greek</option><option ... >Gujarati</option><option ... >Haitian Creole</option><option ... >Hausa</option><option ... >Hawaiian</option><option ... >Hebrew</option><option ... >Hindi</option><option ... >Hmong</option><option ... >Hungarian</option><option ... >Icelandic</option><option ... >Igbo</option><option ... >Indonesian</option><option ... >Irish</option><option ... >Italian</option><option ... >Japanese</option><option ... >Javanese</option><option ... >Kannada</option><option ... >Kazakh</option><option ... >Khmer</option><option ... >Korean</option><option ... >Kurdish</option><option ... >Kyrgyz</option><option ... >Lao</option><option ... >Latin</option><option ... >Latvian</option><option ... >Lithuanian</option><option ... >Luxembourgish</option><option ... >Macedonian</option><option ... >Malagasy</option><option ... 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butterfly