#and dean became john winchester but if john had rabies

[scoutdoesstuff]

INCREDIBLY well said that's not even going into dabb's very particular asian racism but yea. the truth is i have only watched tidbits here and there and i know the storylines and the directions of the characters in s14/15 and just KNOWING about it makes me grind my teeth and refuse to watch it this is why... inherently even if the finale was a happy one it doesn't take away the two seasons of complete character fuckery granted i left at s8 and am hugely biased in favour of early seasons so that's just my overall stance on spn in general but all that said this is why even finale fix its for me don't work unless i inherently ignore............ huge parts of late season canon they did butcher their characters on occasion before that but when i heard about this storyline i Noped outta there before even starting it just sucks! it sucks that a show that relied on character driven narratives spun on its heel on all established prior facts about said characters by doing so it loses its main appeal also in sum: it's a hell nope from me spn meta

adding this tags because YEAH!

(i think it’s also worthwhile to highlight dabb’s racism because it’s glaring and awful. like kevin would’ve had a completely different ending if he’d been kevin williams and not kevin tran)

also want to add -- the dabb era relied on both character assasination AND the character’s frequently holding the idiot ball in order to generate conflict and storylines. and it sucks to watch! even if you’re ok with dean becoming a monster to his sort of life partner/boyfriend’s child (which i’m not lol to be clear), it’s really really dissatisfying to watch people just be unfathomably stupid over and over again. i think the most egregious example of this is when they lost the god gun to lilith because they put it in the glovebox in the implala. like ... what the fuck even was that???

plotlines were sloppily executed. arcs didn’t pay off. characters and even objects of interest were abandoned wholesale after being shoehorned into the plot. and the worst part, for me at least, is that while dabb does some INSANE shit to his characters, almost no one reacts to it like it’s an insane thing to be happening. they bring mary winchester back from the fucking dead and everyone’s like “well that’s weird”. they bring back not!bobby from an alternate universe and sam and dean barely even blink!! their whole ass father figure comes back from the dead -- except it’s not him it’s some dude from another world wearing their father figure’s face -- and they never even discuss this fact! they just roll with it!!!

i’ve seen posts discussing how dean is the only member of the main cast who reacts to any of the insane stuff like it’s insane -- and that’s super true. but honestly? even he reacts to very little of the dabb era craziness. he just ... kinda rolls with it 90% of the time, which gives every new event that happens this weird uncanny valley feeling, almost like it’s a soap opera and the truly otherworldy has become totally normal but in a very twilight zone kind of way.

and as deliberate as they are about destroying dean’s kindness and cas’ backbone, they’re as delibrate about destroying sam as a character with any kind of personality or will or thoughtful feeling. i think you can easily make an arguement that soulless sam had a larger emotional range than sam in the dabb era.

this is all to say, great OG post and great tags. the ending that dean and cas (and sam) got was bullshit, but a happy ending would be equally hard to swallow after the plotlines of seasons 14 and 15 and the general fuckery of the dabb era.

(tags copied from @casenergies​)

A lot of Destiel blogs I look at hate Dabb, I don't really understand why apparently he made Dean too angry?

Ohhhh nonny, it's absolutely not that he made Dean "too angry." It's that during his era the writers routinely shredded Dean's previously established character and ignored or backtracked his prior development in order to create additional tension and conflict where there didn't really need to be additional tension and conflict. I've also seen many people say, and I agree, that Dabb's era kind of flattens Cas out and doesn't allow him to experience emotions other than "sad martyr" nearly often enough.

Dean being angry is in character. Dean reacting to stress and trauma with anger is in character. Dean masking pain with anger is in character. And to be fair, Dabb era does a pretty good job of calling out Dean's anger as a secondary emotion and/or trauma response. Though they don't ever really deal with it, which is another problem for another day.

What's not in character is that Dean would ever treat any child the way he treats Jack in seasons 13-15. What's not in character is that Dean would ever call someone his child, his family, and then turn around and claim they aren't later.

What's definitely not in character is that Dean would ever give up on any member of his family as a lost cause, no matter what they did or how dangerous they were in the moment, or in general. We've seen this to be true with both Sam and Cas, multiple times. We've seen this with John (while possessed) and Mary (while brainwashed). Hell, we've even seen this with characters Dean only interacts with on screen a handful of times, like Claire and Garth.

An in-character Dean would have fought for another way until they found one or it killed him. An in-character Dean would sooner let Jack kill him than put a gun to Jack's head. Hell, an in-character Dean should've been the one to put a bullet in Chuck, and it should've happened the very first second after Chuck suggested shooting Jack.

It's always been a cornerstone of Dean's character that he does not give up on family. He doesn't put anything before his family, whether that's found family or blood family. Not the mission, not the greater good, not the will of his father or God himself. And yet we're supposed to believe that he's willing to do the "hard, ugly thing" with Jack? No, I'm not buying it.

And as for Cas...Cas should have been furious at Dean for locking Jack in the mal'ak box, a fate so awful Dean himself had nightmares about it before it even happened to him. Cas should have been ready to tear Dean limb from limb for even considering putting a gun to their son's head.

That's his baby. That's his son. And I'm sorry, I know first-hand that there are parents who make excuses for shitty significant others and let their kids suffer the consequences, but I don't buy Cas as one of those people. Do you?

No, we should have gotten Alleyway Ass-kicking 2.0 for that shit, but instead? Cas acts like Dean has any right whatsoever to be angry at him, leaves without even giving Dean a well-deserved piece of his mind, and then comes back and accepts Dean's forgiveness like Dean isn't the one who needed forgiving in that scenario.

And really, it all just boils down to Dabb walking this weird line in seasons 14-15 where he was trying to raise the family drama stakes by giving them a kid that they love who might or might not be evil, but also pulling back hard to just-the-brothers state by having no one in this so-called family actually act like a family should. Because seriously, what parent who loves their child wouldn't go absolutely fucking feral at the suggestion of someone harming them in retaliation for an accident? Much less their other parent who's supposed to love them?

Like...I'd say Dabb and whoever else wrote on seasons 14-15 just doesn't understand parenthood, but I'm not even a fucking parent. I have not a single maternal or paternal bone in my entire body, and even I get it better that these chuckleheads, so it can't be that.

And it's just really frustrating because what does it say about Sam and Dean as people if they can sincerely call someone their child and then even consider killing him? If Dean can actively plan to do it and Sam doesn't do anything but look sad and say but no Dean I don't like this? If Cas can even look at the man who put a gun to his baby's head afterward, much less embrace him, much less die for him, leaving said child in the care of the guy who wanted to kill him and the guy who wasn't trying very hard to stop it? What kind of people are they, if they can do those things? To their own child?

It's character assassination for Dean, Sam, and Cas, and completely treating anyone who's not blood kin to the brothers like they're disposable. So that's probably why most Destiel fans, who tend to care a lot about the whole "family don't end with blood" message in the show, don't like Dabb or his era very much.