#aka john's 'not now boner' moment

[stardustinthesky]

The woman who sold me this told me that I would definitely turn heads? Yeah well, if they turned much further, you'd be sued for whiplash.

[elizabethrobertajones]

@goodfemalecharacters you’re making me self-analyse >.> Thanks 

It was just a passing thought after noticing how much I linked that was about what Dean and female characters says about him rather than Dean and dudes posts... Of course then I went to dinner and had time to reflect on it so now *I’m* curious :P

I suppose if you were going to decide consciously do this, it would be because it’s so easy to frame all the Dean is bi meta as “Dean once got a boner looking at Cas and has a crush on Doctor Sexy” which is all fine but basically boils down to using the same pile of gifs to throw back at anyone who disagrees, old school gif war style but not for fun. And we have our refutations about their “Dean is straight” gifs so I’m sure they have refutations they spell out about the boner and that thing where Dean freaked Aaron out when he decided why not while being hit on to make him go away and leave Aaron the heck alone...

I mean there’s nothing WRONG with that but it all relies on the “this is what we see Dean doing around dudes” stuff

And then there’s the narrative stuff e.g. paralleling Dean’s crush on Gunnar (which was a mirror anyway to his crush on Dr Sexy) to Sam’s crush on the announcer lady. I like stuff like that a lot because it’s all pretty solid and a lot of Destiel meta comes under that with the parallels and themes and tropes, and also other stuff like the Benny x Dean vs Sam x Amelia set ups and so on. (And Charlie lampshading it and asking if Dean broke up too) and that’s all really solid meta that I love and I think we can build on to say Dean is definitely portrayed as having romantic or sexual interest or his relationships mirroring romantic/sexual relationships (idk where “poster on bedroom wall” or “watches his soap on TV” comes into this :P) but it is all still putting together narrative and symbolic stuff to prove that Dean’s portrayed by the narrative as being interested in men or at least suggesting romantic potential (I don’t think things with Benny ever WERE as much as the parallels suggested but that doesn’t mean they weren’t telling us some truth anyway. Like they’re each other’s one that got away or something). That’s the kind of meta I would build a house with :D

If you go one step more abstract (aka dangerous overthinking territory but I live out here :P) and discuss well if Dean likes men too, and this is a defining part of his character, how does this affect this that and the other about him, so you get performing!Dean meta which includes the fact he’s bi as one of the underlying things he’s covering over (the Dean vs cake thing was especially fun but even with wink winks from one of the writers, I wouldn’t call it easy to explain or prove because I’m still baffled at the wilful ignorance towards “vegetable water makes you gay” meta (I’m sorry, it’s so funny I can’t stop calling it that :P)). Uh, and other serious character stuff about his relationship with John or Samuel Campbell as the disapproving father figures, or Bobby as the supportive one. (There’s a lot of Bobby Knows meta floating around on my dash right now :P) And other stuff about how it affects him at a core level if he’s been raised in the macho hunter environment and so on. 

One of the siren/gay panic metas I wrote was about how horrifying it would be the siren might have got to him because he was bi and not on the guard for male attraction, which is how it got to him (and that moment of horror between the flask reveal and the siren smoothing it over and making it about brothers but DEAN wasn’t to know he was about to say that EITHER) and Crowley doing the exact same frickin’ thing to him in season 9 when he was already in a self-loathing pit of despair. Which all seems to come from canon for me but idk how reach-y it looks from the outside to construct that argument as it relies on some pretty abstract connections and empty spaces.

Anyway trying to discuss how this all fits with Dean and female characters he’s canonically been actually interested in romantically/sexually takes us all the way back to the gif wars and like, refuting the ridiculousness of showing him kissing a woman as proof he’s straight like, duh of course he makes out with women, he’s BI as in you’re all in danger... I think we don’t talk about the female love interests/Dean’s interest in women much because it gets all psychoanalyse-y (it comes up a lot with comparisons like Carmen and Ann-Marie and Lisa to Mary, for example (side note: always here to pull receipts on Sam doing the same so it’s a Thing on the show not just a Dean thing)) or the idea of because he’s bi women are safe so hooking up is a kneejerk reaction (don’t disagree, but it’s often the end of the discussion when it’s brought up like that to explain his hooking up behaviour) 

And idk, the Lisa post came about because I saw a lot of discussion about Lisa comparing her to the “Amelia is a figment of Sam’s imagination” theory and she has the El Sol djinn dream connection, but I do also believe Dean loved her and the weirdness of it has a ton of sexist bad writing in the end of season 5 (season 5ausagefest, honestly >.> Name me a female character who isn’t randomly in 1-2 episodes then dies or disappears completely from the narrative and then start listing 4 archangels, 4 horsemen and TFW + Bobby and Crowley :P) and Gamble did a salvage job on her in season 6 but too late to fix all the weirdness of Dean showing up on her door out of the blue, while also knowing Dean can’t stay with Lisa because of the formula of the show >.> So I took the chance to explore it a bit deeper and compare to 2x20 and why Dean might be struggling with self-acceptance and how Lisa is easier, and tracing their relationship back to season 3 and Gamble’s work to suggest Dean thought she was endgame but even by the end of season 3, it was seeming clear she wasn’t, but there’s an *explanation* already there in the text of why when Dean “imagines himself happy” it’s with her.

I also don’t see the female love interests as no homos or whatever, just part of the complex tapestry of Dean. Carmen in 12x18 is from the same writer as Gunnar Lawless in 11x15. I don’t think it all magically goes away when they write Dean hooking up. And there’s maybe some wariness to drag some characters into it because touchy fandom, and some because we already KNOW he likes women so does writing about Dean & Lisa actually tell us anything new, when the meta format in this debate is normally about proving with positive examples of Dean x dudes and using evidence that’s easy to argue for bisexuality, so delving into the heterosexual encounters seems redundant.

But I don’t know! I never planned to do this, I just wrote about what interested me, and then I suddenly had a realisation the pics I put in that post were ALL Dean and blonde women which made me laugh because even though I dragged in Cas and Gadreel and Crowley at least, the actual subtext was ALL about the women as the narrative device to link it all together through various homoerotic moments, and then I realised all the meta I linked was discussing Dean and how various heterosexual encounters shaped or showed his inner landscape. I guess I’m just interested because Dean and his sexuality is all over the place so it’s a rich topic and it shows in ways other than flirting with dudes. 

I remembered writing this that I was obsessed for a while when my long meta rewatch hit season 4, with Anna as a proxy the show used so Dean could hook up with Cas. And they used the handprint moment in the car sex scene to PUT Cas into that scene. Dean was having sex with the symbolic representation of angels and Cas is that angel on the customer service desk who represents Heaven to him, and it’s his mark on Dean’s arm. And Sam hooked up with Ruby, the symbolic representation of Hell, and he drank her blood even though it was Azazel’s that went in his mouth first but no one makes it nearly as weird as that ridiculously romantic/erotic shot of Anna putting her hand over the handprint and making the *entire* scene about Cas...

Hrm. 

I mean I feel sort of bad using these characters as props for the meta, but the show uses them as props - Wendy in 1x03 is literally there as T&A and Dean gets a boner over her which the camera jokes about, and that’s her role over. Lisa is an emotional pit stop, Carmen wasn’t real, Anna was the most realised character but she still seemed, narratively, there to balance out Sam x Ruby and how Dean x Cas was the obvious opposing force in the narrative, but AFTER that she got to be an interesting character in Cas’s vicinity. (I mean I guess she was a “No homo” but she had plot and character stuff going for her from the start, it’s just her role in 4x09 and 4x10 was SO different from later, and she was originally only going to be there 2 episodes)... 

But yeah I only just realised this so I have no idea wtf I’m doing and I don’t think this is an a critique of how we write meta per say because I have written miles of the easier stuff about Dean and dudes as well, and I don’t feel wildly feminist for these metas, due to the fact I’m using T&A or prop-for-the-manpain characters as exactly that instead of exploring them for themselves rather than what they do for Dean :P