the winchester sons + sports: It's about how sports --often baseball in particular-- represent normal. John tries to entice Dean to talk and be "normal" again post-Mary with a baseball. Bobby forgoes hunting practice to just play catch with Dean and let him be a normal kid. Twelve year old dean considers joining the baseball team when they finally stick around somewhere for a longer stretch of time. But there are no trophies in John's storage locker from Dean's baseball games. We wonder if he ever joined the team at all. What Dean does find from when he was twelve is his first sawed-off. What represents dean's childhood? a gun. Dean kills someone for the first time when he is twelve. When Adam is twelve John starts visiting him and taking him to baseball games. When Sam is twelve he is on the soccer team. That same year, 1995, Dean is abandoned by John and experiences being a normal kid. He wins the state wrestling championship. Sonny proudly displays the award on his wall nearly two decades later.
today on bisexual dean headcanons: young dean jerked off thinking about gunnar lawless - but not in a gay way ok. he was just thinking about the guy's enormous.. talent, and his powerful.. skill, in the arena. dean watched or thought about his matches as a way to unwind. and he thought about gunnar in bed with a woman about what moves he might use simply admiring his form. yknow. like guys do. he's a fan of the sport. the highly performative sport and its very buff scantily clad male sportsman.
a very specific headcanon i have that i've just written into one of my longer wips (so you won't see the scene for an age) is that john is kinda a dick abt food and dean's eating habits. and he's just. so oblivious to the amount that his kids are suffering when he's gone. because dean sure as hell is not gonna bring up how the money is never enough, how they're near starving toward the end of some weeks. how they've relied on charity more than once. so when john comes back and gets them big full meals and dean especially practically inhales his food (bc he's hungrier, bc he's given more of his portions to sammy) john chides him to slow down, it'll make himself sick etc etc. but dean struggles. and he's always SO eager for burgers and pie and carb-y filling things. because he's starving. but he gets a reputation for "eating junk." john teases him for it. or berates him for it when he's feeling especially mean. when dean's older, stanford era, and they meet up for a hunt and get lunch dean still digs into his food a little too quickly, he asks the waitress for pie with a little too much gusto, and john shakes his head, laughing, saying it's a good thing dean's a hunter, it's a good thing he's got the grueling work to keep him fit or else all those burgers and pies would've definitely caught up to him by now. laughs at how dean still eats too fast, "you've done that since you were a kid. never grew out of it, huh?" and dean bites his cheek, bites back a remark about why he always ate so fast, why he's still always squirreling away food and jumping at every "free food" "free samples" opportunity even now when money is easier to come by
okay hold up hold up dean standing in front of stained glass so that it looks like he wears the saint’s halos. sam using holy water on demons and pretending he doesn’t notice the smoke and burn when it spills on his hands. a shot of dean standing among marble statues contrasted against bright light where it looks like he’s one of them. sam stumbling when he walks through and out of a demon trap. anna recoiling from them at first because sam’s soul has the quiet golden glow of believers but also the dark smoke of the demon blood, while dean’s is twisted and charred and broken from hell but has the bright branding of an angel’s grace.