#'forced amnesia for your own good' is sera gamble's like third favorite tool and she whips it out at every opportunity

[july-19th-club]

also im one of those people who genuinely likes lisa . i think she’s smart, practical, and above all knows when to quit. but i seeth at the bit with the way that the end of her arc was written bc like....how much more interesting and meaningful would it have been to acknowledge that the real reason this relationship doesn’t work out is because both participants specifically want something that the other can’t give. which isn’t to say they don’t try very hard and earnestly to give it anyway; that’s where the tragedy is i think.

because what lisa wants out of this partnership is stability and a family man, i think she specifically says ‘someone my kid can look up to.’ and dean cares about them both and genuinely does try to be some kind of parental figure, he cooks, he teaches skills, he provides. and he genuinely enjoys this for the most part. but because he and lisa never have that full discussion of exactly how fucked up his own childhood was, they never managed to acknowledge that without a lot of self-reflection and probably therapy, he's only good at being a parent because he was required to be from a young age, and he has no experience or understanding of the rest of what this life entails. nor does lisa want to be involved in even hunting-adjacent stuff, any more than he wants her to be involved with it. but it’s inevitable that ben will have questions, which he does, and which they handle poorly. she expects that having taken this man in she can then expect them all three to settle blithely into middle-class comfort, despite her personal distrust of the supernatural and his trauma from it.

and what he wants is...less clear, i think. he comes to her because she’s the safest, furthest thing away from the life he knows, and because it was his dead kid brother’s last request basically, which means that from the get-go this sweet safe life is a lot of responsibility. he wants something that will alleviate his grief and loss and help him feel like a full person again, but the rub is that this is an individual who’s never felt like a full person. he has relied on his family to feel complete his entire life, and you can’t transplant those emotions directly from one environment to another, it doesn’t work that way. more crucially, his brother died in a brutal, catastrophic manner that provided next to no closure, so he’s just walking around suburbia carrying shell-shock and depression around like cement shoes everywhere he goes, and neither he nor lisa are really anywhere near as prepared as they claim they are to handle ‘launching a cohabiting parenting relationship from pretty much the ground up on a foundation of forty parts genuine emotional fondness sixty parts raging unrelenting PTSD’.

so it’s no wonder it falls apart, but the show fails to really articulate why. dean doesn’t know what he wants in the long term, and the impression we get is that this is CLOSE TO but not QUITE what that thing would be, if he knew what it was and could talk about it. and so it falls back on the tired ‘i can’t drag you into my mess because it would be dangerous’ ‘i’m just not cut out for civilian life and i’m bad to be around’ stuff, which is only true as long as the plot allows it to be true. so it’s not really character-relevant at all except for the part where dean is a guy who constantly assumes he’s a tragedy magnet and blames himself for it. and we’re back to the self-loathing bit, which is not really news by now and really not nearly as interesting or important as ‘man just realizing at age of thirty that he has no clue who he is or what he needs in the slightest’