#and dean's relationships with others including and especially cas are important parts of the narrative

[angelsdean]

is it surprising that a destiel and dean hating sam blog is making a poll complaining abt things that suck abt the fandom and it literally just boils down to the fact that they hate destiel and dean and people who love dean like ?? curate your dash better idk what to tell you.

[holyhellpod]

Holy Hell: 3. Metanarrativity: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship? aka the analysis no one asked for.

In this ep, we delve into authorship, narrative, fandom and narrative meaning. And somehow, as always, bring it back to Cas and Misha Collins.

(Note: the reason I didn’t talk about Billie’s authorship and library is because I completely forgot it existed until I watched season 13 “Advanced Thanatology” again, while waiting for this episode to upload. I’ll find a way to work her into later episodes tho!)

I had to upload it as a new podcast to Spotify so if you could just re-subscribe that would be great! Or listen to it at these other links.

Please listen to the bit at the beginning about monetisation and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to message me here.

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Transcript under the cut!

Warnings: discussions of incest, date rape, rpf, war, 9/11, the bush administration, abuse, mental health, addiction, homelessness. Most of these are just one off comments, they’re not full discussions.

Meta-Textuality: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship?

In the third episode of Season 6, “The Third Man,” Balthazar says to Cas, “you tore up the whole script and burned the pages.” That is the fundamental idea the writers of the first five seasons were trying to sell us: whatever grand plan the biblical God had cooking up is worth nothing in face of the love these men have—for each other and the world. Sam, Bobby, Cas and Dean will go to any lengths to protect one another and keep people safe. What’s real? What’s worth saving? People are real. Families are worth saving.��

This show plugs free will as the most important thing a person, angel, demon or otherwise can have. The fact of the matter is that Dean was always going to fight against the status quo, Sam was always going to go his own way, and Bobby was always going to do his best for his boys. The only uncertainty in the entire narrative is Cas. He was never meant to rebel. He was never meant to fall from Heaven. He was supposed to fall in line, be a good soldier, and help bring on the apocalypse, but Cas was the first agent of free will in the show’s timeline. Sam followed Lucifer, Dean followed Michael, and John gave himself up for the sins of his children, at once both a God and Jesus figure. But Cas wasn’t modelled off anyone else. He is original. There are definitely some parallels to Ruby, but I would argue those are largely unintentional. Cas broke the mold. 

That’s to say nothing of the impact he’s had on the fanbase, and the show itself, which would not have reached 15 seasons and be able to end the way they wanted it to without Cas and Misha Collins. His back must be breaking from carrying the entire show. 

But what the holy hell are we doing here today? Not just talking about Cas. We’re talking about metanarrativity: as I define it, and for purposes of this episode, the story within a story, and the act of storytelling. We’re going to go through a select few episodes which I think exemplify the best of what this show has to offer in terms of framing the narrative. We’ll talk about characters like Chuck and Becky and the baby dykes in season 10. And most importantly we’ll talk about the audience’s role, our role, in the reciprocal relationship of storytelling. After all, a tv show is nothing without the viewer.

I was in fact introduced to the concept of metanarrativity by Supernatural, so the fact that I’m revisiting it six years after I finished my degree to talk about the show is one of life’s little jokes.

 I’m brushing off my degree and bringing out the big guns (aka literary theorists) to examine this concept. This will be yet another piece of analysis that would’ve gone well in my English Lit degree, but I’ll try not to make it dry as dog shit. 

First off, I’m going to argue that the relationship between the creators of Supernatural and the fans has always been a dialogue, albeit with a power imbalance. Throughout the series, even before explicitly metanarrative episodes like season 10 “Fan Fiction” and season 4 “the monster at the end of this book,” the creators have always engaged in conversations with the fans through the show. This includes but is not limited to fan conventions, where the creators have actual, live conversations with the fans. Misha Collins admitted at a con that he’d read fanfiction of Cas while he was filming season 4, but it’s pretty clear even from the first season that the creators, at the very least Eric Kripke, were engaging with fans. The show aired around the same time as Twitter and Tumblr were created, both of which opened up new passageways for fans to interact with each other, and for Twitter and Facebook especially, new passageways for fans to interact with creators and celebrities.

But being the creators, they have ultimate control over what is written, filmed and aired, while we can only speculate and make our own transformative interpretations. But at least since s4, they have engaged in meta narrative construction that at once speaks to fans as well as expands the universe in fun and creative ways. My favourite episodes are the ones where we see the Winchesters through the lens of other characters, such as the season 3 episode “Jus In Bello,” in which Sam and Dean are arrested by Victor Henriksen, and the season 7 episode “Slash Fiction” in which Dean and Sam’s dopplegangers rob banks and kill a bunch of people, loathe as I am to admit that season 7 had an effect on any part of me except my upchuck reflex. My second favourite episodes are the meta episodes, and for this episode of Holy Hell, we’ll be discussing a few: The French Mistake, he Monster at the end of this book, the real ghostbusters, Fan Fiction, Metafiction, and Don’t Call Me Shurley. I’ll also discuss Becky more broadly, because, like, of course I’ll be discussing Becky, she died for our sins. 

Let’s take it back. The Monster At The End Of This Book — written by Julie Siege and Nancy Weiner and directed by Mike Rohl. Inarguably one of the better episodes in the first five seasons. Not only is Cas in it, looking so beautiful, but Sam gets something to do, thank god, and it introduces the character of Chuck, who becomes a source of comic relief over the next two seasons. The episode starts with Chuck Shurley, pen named Carver Edlund after my besties, having a vision while passed out drunk. He dreams of Sam and Dean larping as Feds and finding a series of books based on their lives that Chuck has written. They eventually track Chuck down, interrogate him, and realise that he’s a prophet of the lord, tasked with writing the Winchester Gospels. The B plot is Sam plotting to kill Lilith while Dean fails to get them out of the town to escape her. The C plot is Dean and Cas having a moment that strengthens their friendship and leads further into Cas’s eventual disobedience for Dean. Like the movie Disobedience. Exactly like the movie Disobedience. Cas definitely spits in Dean’s mouth, it’s kinda gross to be honest. Maybe I’m just not allo enough to appreciate art. 

When Eric Kripke was showrunner of the first five seasons of Supernatural,  he conceptualised the character of Chuck. Kripke as the author-god introduced the character of the author-prophet who would later become in Jeremy Carver’s showrun seasons the biblical God. Judith May Fathallah writes in “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural” that Kripke writes himself both into and out of the text, ending his era with Chuck winking at the camera, saying, “nothing really ends,” and disappearing. Kripke stayed on as producer, continuing to write episodes through Sera Gamble’s era, and was even inserted in text in the season 6 episode “The French Mistake”. So nothing really does end, not Kripke’s grip on the show he created, not even the show itself, which fans have jokingly referred to as continuing into its 16th season. Except we’re not joking. It will die when all of us are dead, when there is no one left to remember it. According to W R Fisher, humans are homo narrans, natural storytellers. The Supernatural fandom is telling a fidelitous narrative, one which matches our own beliefs, values and experiences instead of that of canon. Instead of, at Fathallah says, “the Greek tradition, that we should struggle to do the right thing simply because it is right, though we will suffer and be punished anyway,” the fans have created an ending for the characters that satisfies each and every one of our desires, because we each create our own endings. It’s better because we get to share them with each other, in the tradition of campfire stories, each telling our own version and building upon the others. If that’s not the epitome of mythmaking then I don’t know. It’s just great. Dean and Cas are married, Eileen and Sam are married, Jack is sometimes a baby who Claire and Kaia are forced to babysit, Jody and Donna are gonna get hitched soon. It’s season 17, time for many weddings, and Kevin Tran is alive. Kripke, you have no control over this anymore, you crusty hag. 

Chuck is introduced as someone with power, but not influence over the story, only how the story is told through the medium of the novels. It’s basically a very badly written, non authorised biography, and Charlie reading literally every book and referencing things she should have no knowledge of is so damn creepy and funny. At first Chuck is surprised by his characters coming to life, despite having written it already, and when shown the intimidating array of weapons in Baby’s trunk he gets real scared. Which is the appropriate response for a skinny 5-foot-8 white guy in a bathrobe who writes terrible fantasy novels for a living. 

As far as I can remember, this is the first explicitly metanarrative episode in the series, or at least the first one with in world consequences. It builds upon the lore of Christianity, angels, and God, while teasing what’s to come. Chuck and Sam have a conversation about how the rest of the season is going to play out, and Sam comes away with the impression that he’ll go down with the ship. They touch on Sam’s addiction to demon blood, which Chuck admits he didn’t write into the books, because in the world of supernatural, addiction should be demonised ha ha at every opportunity, except for Dean’s alcoholism which is cool and manly and should never be analysed as an unhealthy trauma coping mechanism. 

Chuck is mostly impotent in the story of Sam and Dean, but his very presence presents an element of good luck that turns quickly into a force of antagonism in the series four finale, “Lucifer Rising”, when the archangel Raphael who defeats Lilith in this episode also kills Cas in the finale. It’s Cas’s quick thinking and Dean’s quick doing that resolve the episode and save them from Lilith, once again proving that free will is the greatest force in the universe. Cas is already tearing up pages and burning scripts. The fandom does the same, acting as gods of their own making in taking canon and transforming it into fan art. The fans aren’t impotent like Chuck, but neither do we have sway over the story in the way that Cas and Dean do. Sam isn’t interested in changing the story in the same way��he wants to kill Lilith and save the world, but in doing so continues the story in the way it was always supposed to go, the way the angels and the demons and even God wanted him to. 

Neither of them are author-gods in the way that God is. We find out later that Chuck is in fact the real biblical god, and he engineers everything. The one thing he doesn’t engineer, however, is Castiel, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Real Ghostbusters

Season 5’s “The real ghostbusters,” written by Nancy Weiner and Erik Kripke, and directed by James L Conway, situates the Winchesters at a fan convention for the Supernatural books. While there, they are confronted by a slew of fans cosplaying as Sam, Dean, Bobby, the scarecrow, Azazel, and more. They happen to stumble upon a case, in the midst of the game where the fans pretend to be on a case, and with the help of two fans cosplaying as Sam and Dean, they put to rest a group of homicidal ghost children and save the day. Chuck as the special guest of the con has a hero moment that spurs Becky on to return his affections. And at the end, we learn that the Colt, which they’ve been hunting down to kill the devil, was given to a demon named Crowley. It’s a fun episode, but ultimately skippable. This episode isn’t so much metanarrative as it is metatextual—metatextual meaning more than one layer of text but not necessarily about the storytelling in those texts—but let’s take a look at it anyway.

The metanarrative element of a show about a series of books about the brothers the show is based on is dope and expands upon what we saw in “the monster at the end of this book”. But the episode tells a tale about about the show itself, and the fandom that surrounds it. 

Where “The Monster At The End Of This Book” and the season 5 premiere “Sympathy For The Devil” poked at the coiled snake of fans and the concept of fandom, “the real ghostbusters” drags them into the harsh light of an enclosure and antagonises them in front of an audience. The metanarrative element revolves around not only the books themselves, but the stories concocted within the episode: namely Barnes and Demian the cosplayers and the story of the ghosts. The Winchester brothers’s history that we’ve seen throughout the first five seasons of the show is bared in a tongue in cheek way: while we cried with them when Sam and Dean fought with John, now the story is thrown out in such a way as to mock both the story and the fans’ relationship to it. Let me tell you, there is a lot to be made fun of on this show, but the fans’ relationship to the story of Sam, Dean and everyone they encounter along the way isn’t part of it. I don’t mean to be like, wow you can’t make fun of us ever because we’re special little snowflakes and we take everything so seriously, because you are welcome to make fun of us, but when the creators do it, I can’t help but notice a hint of malice. And I think that’s understandable in a way. Like The relationship between creator and fan is both layered and symbiotic. While Kripke and co no doubt owe the show’s popularity to the fans, especially as the fandom has grown and evolved over time, we’re not exactly free of sin. And don’t get me wrong, no fandom is. But the bad apples always seem to outweigh the good ones, and bad experiences can stick with us long past their due.

However, portraying us as losers with no lives who get too obsessed with this show — well, you know, actually, maybe they’re right. I am a loser with no life and I am too obsessed with this show. So maybe they have a point. But they’re so harsh about it. From wincestie Becky who they paint as a desperate shrew to these cosplayers who threaten Dean’s very perception of himself, we’re not painted in a very good light. 

Dean says to Demian and Barnes, “It must be nice to get out of your mom’s basement.” He’s judging them for deriving pleasure from dressing up and pretending to be someone else for a night. He doesn’t seem to get the irony that he does that for a living. As the seasons wore on, the creators made sure to include episodes where Dean’s inner geek could run rampant, often in the form of dressing up like a cowboy, such as season six “Frontierland” and season 13 “Tombstone”. I had to take a break from writing this to laugh for five minutes because Dean is so funny. He’s a car gay but he only likes one car. He doesn’t follow sports. His echolalia causes him to blurt out lines from his favourite movies. He’s a posse magnet. And he loves cosplay. But he will continually degrade and insult anyone who expresses interest in role play, fandom, or interests in general. Maybe that’s why Sam is such a boring person, because Dean as his mother didn’t allow him to have any interests outside of hunting. And when Sam does express interests, Dean insults him too. What a dick. He’s my soulmate, but I am not going to stop listening to hair metal for him. That’s where I draw the line. 

 Where “the monster at the end of this book” is concerned with narrative and authorship, “the real ghostbusters” is concerned with fandom and fan reactions to the show. It’s not really the best example to talk about in an episode about metanarrativity, but I wanted to include it anyway. It veers from talk of narrative by focusing on the people in the periphery of the narrative—the fans and the author. In season 9 “Metafiction,” Metatron asks the question, who gives the story meaning? The text would have you believe it’s the characters. The angels think it’s God. The fandom think it’s us. The creators think it’s them. Perhaps we will never come to a consensus or even a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps that’s the point.

The ultimate takeaway from this episode is that ordinary people, the people Sam and Dean save, the people they save the world for, the people they die for again and again, are what give their story meaning. Chuck defeats a ghost and saves the people in the conference room from being murdered. Demian and Barnes, don’t ask me which is which, burn the bodies of the ghost children and lay their spirits to rest. The text says that ordinary, every day people can rise to the challenge of becoming extraordinary. It’s not a bad note to end on, by any means. And then we find out that Demian and Barnes are a couple, which of course Dean is surprised at, because he lacks object permanence. 

This is no doubt influenced by how a good portion of the transformative fandom are queer, and also a nod to the wincesties and RPF writers like Becky who continue to bottom feed off the wrong message of this show. But then, the creators encourage that sort of thing, so who are the real clowns here? Everyone. Everyone involved with this show in any way is a clown, except for the crew, who were able to feed their families for more than a decade. 

Okay side note… over the past year or so I’ve been in process of realising that even in fandom queers are in the minority. I know the statistic is that 10% of the world population is queer, but that doesn’t seem right to me? Maybe because 4/5 closest friends are queer and I hang around queers online, but I also think I lack object permanence when it comes to straight people. Like I just do not interact with straight people on a regular basis outside of my best friend and parents and school. So when I hear that someone in fandom is straight I’m like, what the fuck… can you keep that to yourself please? Like if I saw Misha Collins coming out as straight I would be like, I didn’t ask and you didn’t have to tell. Okay I’m mostly joking, but I do forget straight people exist. Mostly I don’t think about whether people are gay or trans or cis or straight unless they’ve explicitly said it and then yes it does colour my perception of them, because of course it would. If they’re part of the queer community, they’re my people. And if they’re straight and cis, then they could very well pose a threat to me and my wellbeing. But I never ask people because it’s not my business to ask. If they feel comfortable enough to tell me, that’s awesome.  I think Dean feels the same way. Towards the later seasons at least, he has a good reaction when it’s revealed that someone is queer, even if it is mostly played off as a joke. It’s just that he doesn’t have a frame of reference in his own life to having a gay relationship, either his or someone he’s close to. He says to Cesar and Jesse in season 11 “The Critters” that they fight like brothers, because that’s the only way he knows how to conceptualise it. He doesn’t have a way to categorise his and Cas’s relationship, which is in many ways, long before season 15 “Despair,” harking back even to the parallels between Ruby and Cas in season 3 and 4, a romantic one, aside from that Cas is like a brother to him. Because he’s never had anyone in his life care for him the way Cas does that wasn’t Sam and Bobby, and he doesn’t recognise the romantic element of their relationship until literally Cas says it to him in the third last episode, he just—doesn’t know what his and Cas’s relationship is. He just really doesn’t know. And he grew up with a father who despised him for taking the mom and wife role in their family, the role that John placed him in, for being subservient to John’s wishes where Sam was more rebellious, so of course he wouldn’t understand either his own desires or those of anyone around him who isn’t explicitly shoving their tits in his face. He moulded his entire personality around what he thought John wanted of him, and John says to him explicitly in season 14 “Lebanon”, “I thought you’d have a family,” meaning, like him, wife and two rugrats. And then, dear god, Dean says, thinking of Sam, Cas, Jack, Claire, and Mary, “I have a family.” God that hurts so much. But since for most of his life he hasn’t been himself, he’s been the man he thought his father wanted him to be, he’s never been able to examine his own desires, wants and goals. So even though he’s really good at reading people, he is not good at reading other people’s desires unless they have nefarious intentions. Because he doesn’t recognise what he feels is attraction to men, he doesn’t recognise that in anyone else. 

Okay that’s completely off topic, wow. Getting back to metanarrativity in “The Real Ghostbusters,” I’ll just cap it off by saying that the books in this episode are more a frame for the events than the events themselves. However, there are some good outtakes where Chuck answers some questions, and I’m not sure how much of that is scripted and how much is Rob Benedict just going for it, but it lends another element to the idea of Kripke as author-god. The idea of a fan convention is really cool, because at this point Supernatural conventions had been running for about 4 years, since 2006. It’s definitely a tribute to the fans, but also to their own self importance. So it’s a mixed bag, considering there were plenty of elements in there that show the good side of fandom and fans, but ultimately the Winchesters want nothing to do with it, consider it weird, and threaten Chuck when he says he’ll start releasing books again, which as far as they know is his only source of income. But it’s a fun episode and Dean is a grouchy bitch, so who the holy hell cares?

Season 10 episode “fanfiction” written by my close personal friend Robbie Thompson and directed by Phil Sgriccia is one of the funniest episodes this show has ever done. Not only is it full of metatextual and metanarrative jokes, the entire premise revolves around fanservice, but in like a fun and interesting way, not fanservice like killing the band Kansas so that Dean can listen to “Carry On My Wayward Son” in heaven twice. Twice. One version after another. Like I would watch this musical seven times in theatre, I would buy the soundtrack, I would listen to it on repeat and make all my friends listen to it when they attend my online Jitsi birthday party. This musical is my Hamilton. Top ten episodes of this show for sure. The only way it could be better is if Cas was there. And he deserved to be there. He deserved to watch little dyke Castiel make out with her girlfriend with her cute little wings, after which he and Dean share uncomfortable eye contact. Dean himself is forever coming to terms with the fact that gay people exist, but Cas should get every opportunity he can to hear that it’s super cool and great and awesome to be queer. But really he should be in every episode, all of them, all 300 plus episodes including the ones before angels were introduced. I’m going to commission the guy who edits Paddington into every movie to superimpose Cas standing on the highway into every episode at least once.

“Fan Fiction” starts with a tv script and the words “Supernatural pilot created by Eric Kripke”. This Immediately sets up the idea that it’s toying with narrative. Blah blah blah, some people go missing, they stumble into a scene from their worst nightmares: the school is putting on a musical production of a show inspired by the Supernatural books. It’s a comedy of errors. When people continue to go missing, Sam and Dean have to convince the girls that something supernatural is happening, while retaining their dignity and respect. They reveal that they are the real Sam and Dean, and Dean gives the director Marie a summary of their lives over the last five seasons, but they aren’t taken seriously. Because, like, of course they aren’t. Even when the girls realise that something supernatural is happening, they don’t actually believe that the musical they’ve made and the series of books they’re basing it on are real. Despite how Sam and Dean Winchester were literal fugitives for many years at many different times, and this was on the news, and they were wanted by the FBI, despite how they pretend to be FBI, and no one mentions it??? Did any of the staffwriters do the required reading or just do what I used to do for my 40 plus page readings of Baudrillard and just skim the first sentence of every paragraph? Neat hack for you: paragraphs are set up in a logical order of Topic, Example, Elaboration, Linking sentence. Do you have to read 60 pages of some crusty French dude waxing poetic about how his best friend Pierre wants to shag his wife and making that your problem? Read the first and last sentence of every paragraph. Boom, done. Just cut your work in half. 

The musical highlights a lot of the important moments of the show so far. The brothers have, as Charlie Bradbury says, their “broment,” and as Marie says, their “boy melodrama scene,” while she insinuates that there is a sexual element to their relationship. This show never passed up an opportunity to mention incest. It’s like: mentioning incest 5000 km, not being disgusting 1 km, what a hard decision. Actually, they do have to walk on their knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. But there are other moments—such as Mary burning on the ceiling, a classic, Castiel waiting for Dean at the side of the highway, and Azazel poisoning Sam. With the help of the high schoolers, Sam and Dean overcome Calliope, the muse and bad guy of the episode, and save the day. What began as their lives reinterpreted and told back to them turns into a story they have some agency over.

In this episode, as opposed to “The Monster At The End Of This Book,” The storytelling has transferred from an alcoholic in a bathrobe into the hands of an overbearing and overachieving teenage girl, and honestly why not. Transformative fiction is by and large run by women, and queer women, so Marie and her stage manager slash Jody Mills’s understudy Maeve are just following in the footsteps of legends. This kind of really succinctly summarises the difference between curative fandom and transformative fandom, the former of which is populated mostly by men, and the latter mostly by women. As defined by LordByronic in 2015, Curative fandom is more like enjoying the text, collecting the merchandise, organising the knowledge — basically Reddit in terms of fandom curation. Transformative fandom is transforming the source text in some way — making fanart, fanfic, mvs, or a musical — basically Tumblr in general, and Archive of our own specifically. Like what do non fandom people even do on Tumblr? It is a complete mystery to me. Whereas Chuck literally writes himself into the narrative he receives through visions, Marie and co have agency and control over the narrative by writing it themselves. 

Chuck does appear in the episode towards the end, his first appearance after five seasons. The theory that he killed those lesbian theatre girls makes me wanna curl up and die, so I don’t subscribe to it. Chuck watched the musical and he liked it and he gave unwarranted notes and then he left, the end.

The Supernatural creative team is explicitly acknowledging the fandom’s efforts by making this episode. They’re writing us in again, with more obsessive fans, but with lethbians this time, which makes it infinitely better. And instead of showing us as potential date rapists, we’re just cool chicks who like to make art. And that’s fucken awesome. 

I just have to note that the characters literally say the word Destiel after Dean sees the actors playing Dean and Cas making out. He storms off and tells Sam to shut the fuck up when Sam makes fun of him, because Dean’s sexuality is NOT threatened he just needs to assert his dominance as a straight hetero man who has NEVER looked at another man’s lips and licked his own. He just… forgets that gay people exist until someone reminds him. BUT THEN, after a rousing speech that is stolen from Rent or Wicked or something, he echoes Marie’s words back, saying “put as much sub into that text as you possibly can.” What does Dean know about subbing, I wonder. Okay I’m suddenly reminded that he did literally go to a kink bar and get hit on by a leather daddy. Oh Dean, the experiences you have as a broad-shouldered, pixie-faced man with cowboy legs. You were born for this role.

Metatron is my favourite villain. As one tumblr user pointed out, he is an evil English literature major, which is just a normal English literature major. The season nine episode “Meta Fiction” written by my main man robbie thompson and directed by thomas j wright, happens within a curious season. Castiel, once again, becomes the leader of a portion of the heavenly host to take down Metatron, and Dean is affected by the Mark Of Cain. Sam was recently possessed by Gadreel, who killed Kevin in Sam’s body and then decided to run off with Metatron. Metatron himself is recruiting angels to join him, in the hopes that he can become the new God. It’s the first introduction of Hannah, who encourages Cas to recruit angels himself to take on Metatron. Also, we get to see Gabriel again, who is always a delight. 

This episode is a lot of fun. Metatron poses questions like, who tells a story and who is the most important person in the telling? Is it the writer? The audience? He starts off staring over his typewriter to address the camera, like a pompous dickhead. No longer content with consuming stories, he’s started to write his own. And they are hubristic ones about becoming God, a better god than Chuck ever was, but to do it he needs to kill a bunch of people and blame it on Cas. So really, he’s actually exactly like Chuck who blamed everything on Lucifer. 

But I think the most apt analogy we can use for this in terms of who is the creator is to think of Metatron as a fanfiction writer. He consumes the media—the Winchester Gospels—and starts to write his own version of events—leading an army to become God and kill Cas. Nevermind that no one has been able to kill Cas in a way that matters or a way that sticks. Which is canon, and what Metatron is trying to do is—well not fanon because it actually does impact the Winchesters’ storyline. It would be like if one of the writers of Supernatural began writing Supernatural fanfiction before they got a job on the show. Which as my generation and the generations coming after me get more comfortable with fanfiction and fandom, is going to be the case for a lot of shows. I think it’s already the case for Riverdale. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the woman who wrote the bi Dean essay go to work on Riverdale? Or something? I dunno, I have the post saved in my tumblr likes but that is quagmire of epic proportions that I will easily get lost in if I try to find it. 

Okay let me flex my literary degree. As Englund and Leach say in “Ethnography and the metanarratives of modernity,” “The influential “literary turn,” in which the problems of ethnography were seen as largely textual and their solutions as lying in experimental writing seems to have lost its impetus.” This can be taken to mean, in the context of Supernatural, that while Metatron’s writings seek to forge a new path in history, forgoing fate for a new kind of divine intervention, the problem with Metatron is that he’s too caught up in the textual, too caught up in the writing, to be effectual. And this as we see throughout seasons 9, 10 and 11, has no lasting effect. Cas gets his grace back, Dean survives, and Metatron becomes a powerless human. In this case, the impetus is his grace, which he loses when Cas cuts it out of him, a mirror to Metatron cutting out Cas’s grace. 

However, I realise that the concept of ethnography in Supernatural is a flawed one, ethnography being the observation of another culture: a lot of the angels observe humanity and seem to fit in. However, Cas has to slowly acclimatise to the Winchesters as they tame him, but he never quite fit in—missing cues, not understanding jokes or Dean’s personal space, the scene where he says, “We have a guinea pig? Where?” Show him the guinea pig Sam!!! He wants to see it!!! At most he passes as a human with autism. Cas doesn’t really observe humanity—he observes nature, as seen in season 7 “reading is fundamental” and “survival of the fittest”. Even the human acts he talks about in season 6 “the man who would be king” are from hundreds or thousands of years ago. He certainly doesn’t observe popular culture, which puts him at odds with Dean, who is made up of 90 per cent pop culture references and 10 per cent flannel. Metatron doesn’t seek to blend in with humanity so much as control it, which actually is the most apt example of ethnography for white people in the last—you know, forever. But of course the writers didn’t seek to make this analogy. It is purely by chance, and maybe I’m the only person insane enough to realise it. But probably not. There are a lot of cookies much smarter than me in the Supernatural fandom and they’ve like me have grown up and gone to university and gotten real jobs in the real world and real haircuts. I’m probably the only person to apply Englund and Leach to it though.

And yes, as I read this paper I did need to have one tab open on Google, with the word “define” in the search bar. 

Metatron has a few lines in this that I really like. He says: 

“The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”

“You’re going to have to follow my script.”

“I’m an entity of my word.”

It’s really obvious, but they’re pushing the idea that Metatron has become an agent of authorship instead of just a consumer of media. He even throws a Supernatural book into his fire — a symbolic act of burning the script and flipping the writer off, much like Cas did to God and the angels in season 5. He’s not a Kripke figure so much as maybe a Gamble, Carver or Dabb figure, in that he usurps Chuck and becomes the author-god. This would be extremely postmodern of him if he didn’t just do exactly what Chuck was doing, except worse somehow. In fact, it’s postmodern of Cas to reject heaven’s narrative and fall for Dean. As one tumblr user points out, Cas really said “What’s fate compared to Dean Winchester?”

Okay this transcript is almost 8000 words already, and I still have two more episodes to review, and more things to say, so I’ll leave you with this. Metatron says to Cas, “Out of all of God’s wind up toys, you’re the only one with any spunk.” Why Cas has captured his attention comes down more than anything to a process of elimination. Most angels fucking suck. They follow the rules of whoever puts themselves in charge, and they either love Cas or hate him, or just plainly wanna fuck him, and there have been few angels who stood out. Balthazar was awesome, even though I hated him the first time I watched season 6. He UNSUNK the Titanic. Legend status. And Gabriel was of course the OG who loves to fuck shit up. But they’re gone at this stage in the narrative, and Cas survives. Cas always survives. He does have spunk. And everyone wants to fuck him.  

Season 11 episode 20 “Don’t Call Me Shurley,” the last episode written by the Christ like figure of Robbie Thompson — are we sensing a theme here? — and directed by my divine enemy Robert Singer, starts with Metatron dumpster diving for food. I’m not even going to bother commenting on this because like… it’s supernatural and it treats complex issues like homelessness and poverty with zero nuance. Like the Winchesters live in poverty but it’s fun and cool because they always scrape by but Metatron lives in poverty and it’s funny. Cas was homeless and it was hard but he needed to do it to atone for his sins, and Metatron is homeless and it’s funny because he brought it on himself by being a murderous dick. Fucking hell. Robbie, come on. The plot focuses on God, also known as Chuck Shurley, making himself known to Metatron and asking for Metatron’s opinion on his memoir. Meanwhile, the Winchesters battle another bout of infectious serial killer fog sent by Amara. At the end of the episode, Chuck heals everyone affected by the fog and reveals himself to Sam and Dean. 

Chuck says that he didn’t foresee Metatron trying to become god, but the idea of Season 15 is that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all their lives. When Metatron tries, he fails miserably, is locked up in prison, tortured by Dean, then rendered useless as a human and thrown into the world without a safety net. His authorship is reduced to nothing, and he is reduced to dumpster diving for food. He does actually attempt to live his life as someone who records tragedies as they happen and sells the footage to news stations, which is honestly hilarious and amazing and completely unsurprising because Metatron is, at the heart of it, an English Literature major. In true bastard style, he insults Chuck’s work and complains about the bar, but slips into his old role of editor when Chuck asks him to. 

The theory I’m consulting for this uses the term metanarrative in a different way than I am. They consider it an overarching narrative, a grand narrative like religion. Chuck’s biography is in a sense most loyal to Middleton and Walsh’s view of metanarrative: “the universal story of the world from arche to telos, a grand narrative encompassing world history from beginning to end.” Except instead of world history, it’s God’s history, and since God is construed in Supernatural as just some guy with some powers who is as fallible as the next some guy with some powers, his story has biases and agendas.  Okay so in the analysis I’m getting Middleton and Walsh’s quotes from, James K A Smith’s “A little story about metanarratives,” Smith dunks on them pretty bad, but for Supernatural purposes their words ring true. Think of them as the BuckLeming of Lyotard’s postmodern metanarrative analysis: a stopped clock right twice a day. Is anyone except me understanding the sequence of words I’m saying right now. Do I just have the most specific case of brain worms ever found in human history. I’m currently wearing my oversized Keith Haring shirt and dipping pretzels into peanut butter because it’s 3.18 in the morning and the homosexuals got to me. The total claims a comprehensive metanarrative of world history make do indeed, as Middleton and Walsh claim, lead to violence, stay with me here, because Chuck’s legacy is violence, and so is Metatron’s, and in trying to reject the metanarrative, Sam and Dean enact violence. Mostly Dean, because in season 15 he sacrifices his own son twice to defeat Chuck. But that means literally fighting violence with violence. Violence is, after all, all they know. Violence is the lens through which they interact with the world. If the writers wanted to do literally anything else, they could have continued Dean’s natural character progression into someone who eschews the violence that stems from intergeneration trauma — yes I will continue to use the phrase intergenerational trauma whenever I refer to Dean — and becomes a loving father and husband. Sam could eschew violence and start a monster rehabilitation centre with Eileen.

This episode of Holy Hell is me frantically grabbing at straws to make sense of a narrative that actively hates me and wants to kick me to death. But the violence Sam and Dean enact is not at a metanarrative level, because they are not author-gods of their own narrative. In season 15 “Atomic Monsters,” Becky points out that the ending of the Supernatural book series is bad because the brothers die, and then, in a shocking twist of fate, Dean does die, and the narrative is bad. The writers set themselves a goal post to kick through and instead just slammed their heat into the bars. They set up the dartboard and were like, let’s aim the darts at ourselves. Wouldn’t that be fun. Season 15’s writing is so grossly incompetent that I believe every single conspiracy theory that’s come out of the finale since November, because it’s so much more compelling than whatever the fuck happened on the road so far. Carry on? Why yes, I think I will carry on, carry on like a pork chop, screaming at the bars of my enclosure until I crack my voice open like an egg and spill out all my rage and frustration. The world will never know peace again. It’s now 3.29 and I’ve written over 9000 words of this transcript. And I’m not done.

Middleton and Walsh claim that metanarratives are merely social constructions masquerading as universal truths. Which is, exactly, Supernatural. The creators have constructed this elaborate web of narrative that they want to sell us as the be all and end all. They won’t let the actors discuss how they really feel about the finale. They won’t let Misha Collins talk about Destiel. They want us to believe it was good, actually, that Dean, a recovering alcoholic with a 30 year old infant son and a husband who loves him, deserved to die by getting NAILED, while Sam, who spent the last four seasons, the entirety of Andrew Dabb’s run as showrunner, excelling at creating a hunter network and romancing both the queen of hell and his deaf hunter girlfriend, should have lived a normie life with a normie faceless wife. Am I done? Not even close. I started this episode and I’m going to finish it.

When we find out that Chuck is God in the episode of season 11, it turns everything we knew about Chuck on its head. We find out in Season 15 that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all along, that everything that happened to them is his doing. The one thing he couldn’t control was Cas’s choice to rebel. If we take him at his word, Cas is the only true force of free will in the entire universe, and more specifically, the love that Cas had for Dean which caused him to rebel and fall from heaven. — This theory has holes of course. Why would Lucifer torture Lilith into becoming the first demon if he didn’t have free will? Did Chuck make him do that? And why? So that Chuck could be the hero and Lucifer the bad guy, like Lucifer claimed all along? That’s to say nothing of Adam and Eve, both characters the show introduced in different ways, one as an antagonist and the other as the narrative foil to Dean and Cas’s romance. Thinking about it makes my head hurt, so I’m just not gunna. 

So Chuck was doing the writing all along. And as Becky claims in “Atomic Monsters,” it’s bad writing. The writers explicitly said, the ending Chuck wrote is bad because there’s no Cas and everyone dies, and then they wrote an ending where there is no Cas and everyone dies. So talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. Talk about giant craters in the earth you could see from 800 kilometres away but you still fell into. Meanwhile fan writers have the opportunity to write a million different endings, all of which satisfy at least one person. The fandom is a hydra, prolific and unstoppable, and we’ll keep rewriting the ending a million more times.

And all this is not even talking about the fact that Chuck is a man, Metatron is a man, Sam and Dean and Cas are men, and the writers and directors of the show are, by an overwhelming majority, men. Most of them are white, straight, cis men. Feminist scholarship has done a lot to unpack the damage done by paternalistic approaches to theory, sociology, ethnography, all the -ys, but I propose we go a step further with these men. Kill them. Metanarratively, of course. Amara, the Darkness, God’s sister, had a chance to write her own story without Chuck, after killing everything in the universe, and I think she had the right idea. Knock it all down to build it from the ground up. Billie also had the opportunity to write a narrative, but her folly was, of course, putting any kind of faith in the Winchesters who are also grossly incompetent and often fail up. She is, as all author-gods on this show are, undone by Castiel. The only one with any spunk, the only one who exists outside of his own narrative confines, the only one the author-gods don’t have any control over. The one who died for love, and in dying, gave life. 

The French Mistake

Let’s change the channel. Let’s calm ourselves and cleanse our libras. Let’s commune with nature and chug some sage bongs. 

“The French Mistake” is a song from the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles. In the iconic second last scene of the film, as the cowboys fight amongst themselves, the camera pans back to reveal a studio lot and a door through which a chorus of gay dancersingers perform “the French Mistake”. The lyrics go, “Throw out your hands, stick out your tush, hands on your hips, give ‘em a push. You’ll be surprised you’re doing the French Mistake.” 

I’m not sure what went through the heads of the Supernatural creators when they came up with the season 6 episode, “The French Mistake,” written by the love of my life Ben Edlund and directed by some guy Charles Beeson. Just reading the Wikipedia summary is so batshit incomprehensible. In short: Balthazar sends Sam and Dean to an alternate universe where they are the actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, who play Sam and Dean on the tv show Supernatural. I don’t think this had ever been done in television history before. The first seven seasons of this show are certifiable. Like this was ten years ago. Think about the things that have happened in the last 10 slutty, slutty years. We have lived through atrocities and upheaval and the entire world stopping to mourn, but also we had twitter throughout that entire time, which makes it infinitely worse.

In this universe, Sam and Dean wear makeup, Cas is played by attractive crying man Misha Collins, and Genevieve Padalecki nee Cortese makes an appearance. Magic doesn’t exist, Serge has good ideas, and the two leads have to act in order to get through the day. Sorry man I do not know how to pronounce your name.

Sidenote: I don’t know if me being attracted aesthetically to Misha Collins is because he’s attractive, because this show has gaslighted me into thinking he’s attractive, or because Castiel’s iconic entrance in 2008 hit my developing mind like a torpedo full of spaghetti and blew my fucking brains all over the place. It’s one of life’s little mysteries and God’s little gifts.

Let’s talk about therapy. More specifically, “Agency and purpose in narrative therapy: questioning the postmodern rejection of metanarrative” by Cameron Lee. In this paper, Lee outlines four key ideas as proposed by Freedman and Combs:

Realities are socially constructed

Realities are constituted through language

Realities are organised and maintained through narrative

And there are no essential truths.

Let’s break this down in the case of this episode. Realities are socially constructed: the reality of Sam and Dean arose from the Bush era. Do I even need to elaborate? From what I understand with my limited Australian perception, and being a child at the time, 9/11 really was a prominent shifting point in the last twenty years. As Americans describe it, sometimes jokingly, it was the last time they were really truly innocent. That means to me that until they saw the repercussions of their government’s actions in funding turf wars throughout the middle east for a good chunk of the 20th Century, they allowed themselves to be hindered by their own ignorance. The threat of terrorism ran rampant throughout the States, spurred on by right wing nationalists and gun-toting NRA supporters, so it’s really no surprise that the show Supernatural started with the premise of killing everything in sight and driving around with only your closest kin and a trunk full of guns. Kripke constructed that reality from the social-political climate of the time, and it has wrought untold horrors on the minds of lesbians who lived through the noughties, in that we are now attracted to Misha Collins.

Number two: Realities are constituted through language. Before a show can become a show, it needs to be a script. It’s written down, typed up, and given to actors who say the lines out loud. In this respect, they are using the language of speech and words to convey meaning. But tv shows are not all about words, and they’re barely about scripts. From what I understand of being raised by television, they are about action, visuals, imagery, and behaviours. All of the work that goes into them—the scripts, the lighting, the audio, the sound mixing, the cameras, the extras, the ADs, the gaffing, the props, the stunts, everything—is about conveying a story through the medium of images. In that way, images are the language. The reality of the show Supernatural, inside the show Supernatural, is constituted through words: the script, the journalists talking to Sam, the makeup artist taking off Dean’s makeup, the conversations between the creators, the tweets Misha sends. But also through imagery: the fish tank in Jensen’s trailer, the model poses on the front cover of the magazine, the opulence of Jared’s house, Misha’s iconic sweater. Words and images are the language that constitutes both of these realities. Okay for real, I feel like I’ve only seen this episode max three times, including when I watched it for research for this episode, but I remember so much about it. 

Number three: realities are organised and maintained through narrative. In this universe of the French Mistake, their lives are structured around two narratives: the internal narrative of the show within the show, in which they are two actors on a tv set; and the episode narrative in which they need to keep the key safe and return to their own universe. This is made difficult by the revelation that magic doesn’t work in this universe, however, they find a way. Before they can get back, though, an avenging angel by the name of Virgil guns down author-god Eric Kripke and tries to kill the Winchesters. However, they are saved by Balthazar and the freeze frame and brought back into their own world, the world of Supernatural the show, not Supernatural the show within the show within the nesting doll. And then that reality is done with, never to be revisited or even mentioned, but with an impact that has lasted longer than the second Bush administration.

And number four: there are no essential truths. This one is a bit tricky because I can’t find what Lee means by essential truths, so I’m just going to interpret that. To me, essential truths means what lies beneath the narratives we tell ourselves. Supernatural was a show that ran for 15 years. Supernatural had actors. Supernatural was showrun by four different writers. In the show within a show, there is nothing, because that ceases to exist for longer than the forty two minute episode “The French Mistake”. And since Supernatural no longer exists except in our computers, it is nothing too. It is only the narratives we tell ourselves to sleep better at night, to wake up in the morning with a smile, to get through the day, to connect with other people, to understand ourselves better. It’s not even the narrative that the showrunners told, because they have no agency over it as soon as it shows up on our screens. The essential truth of the show is lost in the translation from creating to consuming. Who gives the story meaning? The people watching it and the people creating it. We all do. 

Lee says that humans are predisposed to construct narratives in order to make sense of the world. We see this in cultures from all over the world: from cave paintings to vases, from The Dreaming to Beowulf, humans have always constructed stories. The way you think about yourself is a story that you’ve constructed. The way you interact with your loved ones and the furries you rightfully cyberbully on Twitter is influenced by the narratives you tell yourself about them. And these narratives are intricate, expansive, personalised, and can colour our perceptions completely, so that we turn into a different person when we interact with one person as opposed to another. 

Whatever happened in season 6, most of which I want to forget, doesn’t interest me in the way I’m telling myself the writers intended. For me, the entirety of season 6 was based around the premise of Cas being in love with Dean, and the complete impotence of this love. He turns up when Dean calls, he agonises as he watches Dean rake leaves and live his apple pie life with Lisa, and Dean is the person he feels most horribly about betraying. He says, verbatim, to Sam, “Dean and I do share a more profound bond.” And Balthazar says, “You’re confusing me with the other angel, the one in the dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you.” He says this in season 6, and we couldn’t do a fucken thing about it. 

The song “The French Mistake” shines a light on the hidden scene of gay men performing a gay narrative, in the midst of a scene about the manliest profession you can have: professional horse wrangler, poncho wearer, and rodeo meister, the cowboy. If this isn’t a perfect encapsulation of the lovestory between Dean and Cas, which Ben Edlund has been championing from day fucking one of Misha Collins walking onto that set with his sex hair and chapped lips, then I don’t know what the fuck we’re even doing here. What in the hell else could it possibly mean. The layers to this. The intricacy. The agendas. The subtextual AND blatant queerness. The micro aggressions Crowley aimed at Car in “The Man Who Would Be King,” another Bedlund special. Bed Edlund is a fucking genius. Bed Edlund is cool girl. Ben Edlund is the missing link. Bed Edlund IS wikileaks. Ben Edlund is a cool breeze on a humid summer day. Ben Edlund is the stop loading button on a browser tab. Ben Edlund is the perfect cross between Spotify and Apple Music, in which you can search for good playlists, but without having to be on Spotify. He can take my keys and fuck my wife. You best believe I’m doing an entire episode of Holy Hell on Bedlund’s top five. He is the reason I want to get into staffwriting on a tv show. I saw season 4 episode “On the head of a pin” when my brain was still torpedoed spaghetti mush from the premiere, and it nestled its way deep into my exposed bones, so that when I finally recovered from that, I was a changed person. My god, this transcript is 11,000 words, and I haven’t even finished the Becky section. Which is a good transition.

Oh, Becky. She is an incarnation of how the writers, or at least Kripke, view the fans. Watching season 5 “Sympathy for the Devil” live in 2009 was a whole fucking trip that I as a baby gay was not prepared for. Figuring out my sexuality was a journey that started with the Supernatural fandom and is in some aspects still raging against the dying of the light today. Add to that, this conception of the audience was this, like, personification of the librarian cellist from Juno, but also completely without boundaries, common sense, or shame. It made me wonder about my position in the narrative as a consumer consuming. Is that how Kripke saw me, specifically? Was I like Becky? Did my forays into DeanCasNatural on El Jay dot com make me a fucking loser whose only claim to fame is writing some nasty fanfiction that I’ve since deleted all traces of? Don’t get me wrong, me and my unhinged Casgirl friends loved Becky. I can’t remember if I ever wrote any fanfiction with her in it because I was mostly writing smut, which is extremely Becky coded of me, but I read some and my friends and I would always chat about her when she came up. She was great entertainment value before season 7. But in the eyes of the powers that be, Becky, like the fans themselves, are expendable. First they turned her into a desperate bride wannabe who drugs Sam so that he’ll be with her, then Chuck waves his hand and she disappears. We’re seeing now with regards to Destiel, Cas, and Misha Collins this erasure of them from the narrative. Becky says in season 15 “Atomic Monsters” that the ending Chuck writes is bad because, for one, there’s no Cas, and that’s exactly what’s happening to the text post-finale. It literally makes me insane akin to the throes of mania to think about the layers of this. They literally said, “No Cas = bad” and now Misha isn’t even allowed to talk in his Cassona voice—at least at the time I wrote that—to the detriment of the fans who care about him. It’s the same shit over and over. They introduce something we like, they realise they have no control over how much we like it, and then they pretend they never introduced it in the first place. Season 7, my god. The only reason Gamble brought back Cas was because the ratings were tanking the show. I didn’t even bother watching most of it live, and would just hear from my friends whether Cas was in the episodes or not. And then Sera, dear Sera, had the gall to say it was a Homer’s Odyssey narrative. I’m rusty on Homer aka I’ve never read it but apparently Odysseus goes away, ends up with a wife on an island somewhere, and then comes back to Terabithia like it never happened. How convenient. But since Sera Gamble loves to bury her gays, we can all guess why Cas was written out of the show: Cas being gay is a threat to the toxic heteronormativity spouted by both the show and the characters themselves. In season 15, after Becky gets her life together, has kids, gets married, and starts a business, she is outgrowing the narrative and Chuck kills her. The fans got Destiel Wedding trending on Twitter, and now the creators are acting like he doesn’t exist. New liver, same eagles.

I have to add an adendum: as of this morning, Sunday 11th, don’t ask me what time that is in Americaland, Misha Collins did an online con/Q&A thing and answered a bunch of questions about Cas and Dean, which goes to show that he cannot be silenced. So the narrative wants to be told. It’s continuing well into it’s 16th or 17th season. It’s going to keep happening and they have no recourse to stop it. So fuck you, Supernatural.

I did write the start of a speech about representation but, who the holy hell cares. I also read some disappointing Masters theses that I hope didn’t take them longer to research and write than this episode of a podcast I’m making for funsies took me, considering it’s the same number of pages. Then again I have the last four months and another 8 years of fandom fuelling my obsession, and when I don’t sleep I write, hence the 4,000 words I knocked out in the last 12 hours. 

Some final words. Lyotard defines postmodernism, the age we live in, as an incredulity towards metanarratives. Modernism was obsessed with order and meaning, but postmodernism seeks to disrupt that. Modernists lived within the frame of the narrative of their society, but postmodernists seek to destroy the frame and live within our own self-written contexts. Okay I love postmodernist theory so this has been a real treat for me. Yoghurt, Sam? Postmodernist theory? Could I BE more gay? 

Middleton and Walsh in their analysis of postmodernism claim that biblical faith is grounded in metanarrative, and explore how this intersects with an era that rejects metanarrative. This is one of the fundamental ideas Supernatural is getting at throughout definitely the last season, but other seasons as well. The narratives of Good vs Evil, Michael vs Lucifer, Dean vs Sam, were encoded into the overarching story of the show from season 1, and since then Sam and Dean have sought to break free of them. Sam broke free of John’s narrative, which was the hunting life, and revenge, and this moralistic machismo that they wrapped themselves up in. If they’re killing the evil, then they’re not the evil. That’s the story they told, and the impetus of the show that Sam was sucked back into. But this thread unravelled in later seasons when Dean became friends with Benny and the idea that all supernatural creatures are inherently evil unravelled as well. While they never completely broke free of John’s hold over them, welcoming Jack into their lives meant confronting a bias that had been ingrained in them since Dean was 4 years old and Sam 6 months. In the face of the question, “are all monsters monstrous?” the narrative loosens its control. Even by questioning it, it throws into doubt the overarching narrative of John’s plan, which is usurped at the end of season 2 when they kill Azazel by Dean’s demon deal and a new narrative unfolds. John as author-god is usurped by the actual God in season 4, who has his own narrative that controls the lives of Sam, Dean and Cas. 

Okay like for real, I do actually think the metanarrativity in Supernatural is something that should be studied by someone other than me, unless you wanna pay me for it and then shit yeah. It is extremely cool to introduce a biographical narrative about the fictional narrative it’s in. It’s cool that the characters are constantly calling this narrative into focus by fighting against it, struggling to break free from their textual confines to live a life outside of the external forces that control them. And the thing is? The really real, honest thing? They have. Sam, Dean and Cas have broken free of the narrative that Kripke, Carver, Gamble and Dabb wrote for them. The very fact that the textual confession of love that Cas has for Dean ushered in a resurgence of fans, fandom and activity that has kept the show trending for five months after it ended, is just phenomenal. People have pointed out that fans stopped caring about Game of Thrones as soon as it ended. Despite the hold they had over tv watchers everywhere, their cultural currency has been spent. The opposite is true for Supernatural. Despite how the finale of the show angered and confused people, it gains more momentum every day. More fanworks, more videos, more fics, more art, more ire, more merch is being generated by the fans still. The Supernatural subreddit, which was averaging a few posts a week by season 15, has been incensed by the finale. And yours truly happily traipsed back into the fandom snake pit after 8 years with a smile on my face and a skip in my step ready to pump that dopamine straight into my veins babeeeeeeyyyyy. It’s been WILD. I recently reconnected with one of my mutuals from 2010 and it’s like nothing’s changed. We’re both still unhinged and we both still simp for Supernatural. Even before season 15, I was obsessed with the podcast Ride Or Die, which I started listening to in late 2019, and Supernatural was always in the back of my mind. You just don’t get over your first fandom. Actually, Danny Phantom was my first fandom, and I remember being 12 talking on Danny Phantom forums to people much too old to be the target audience of the show. So I guess that hasn’t left me either. And the fondest memories I have of Supernatural is how the characters have usurped their creators to become mythic, long past the point they were supposed to die a quiet death. The myth weaving that the Supernatural fandom is doing right now is the legacy that will endure. 

References

I got all of these for free from Google Scholar! 

Judith May Fathallah, “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural.” 

James K A Smith, “A Little Story About Metanarratives: Lyotard, Religion and Postmodernism Revisited.” 2001.

Cameron Lee, “Agency and Purpose in Narrative Therapy: Questioning the Postmodern Rejection of Metanarrative.” 2004.

Harri Englund and James Leach, “Ethnography and the Meta Narratives of Modernity.” 2000.

https://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/mel-brooks-explains-french-mistake-blazing-saddles-blu-ray/

[orionsangel86]

“I Think It’s Time For Me To Move On”

...And Other Things That Have Destroyed Me This Weekend...

So there is this common trope within love stories which generally happens at the end of the second act in which everything goes wrong and we all think that the lovers are doomed to failure. Its pretty much standard in every Jane Austen novel, every romantic film every made, every single bloody love story. Go ahead, name one. I guarantee you the break up moment is there.

Within the epic love story of Dean and Cas, there have been many break up moments, and all have had their emotionally devastating impact on the relationship and the show...

But THIS was a different level. 

(For a nice summary of Destiel break up moments and understanding of this trope, @tinkdw​ wrote about it here.)

I didn’t think that there would be another moment within Dean and Cas’s relationship that could hit me this hard. The mixtape in 12x19, the wrapping of Cas’s body in 13x01, and the return of Cas in 13x05 are moments that I consider to be the very top of the scale in making this pairing undeniably romantic. Moments that pushed it beyond a platonic interpretation. These three moments have been the things I cling to when the show has otherwise made me doubt any conclusion to the DeanCas story, and since there hasn’t been another one of those moments since 13x05, until now I have been somewhat nervous that the story was dropped, or being forced back behind a platonic screen. 

15x03 has ripped that screen away. 

Emotional meta under cut...

This entire episode was an emotion fuelled dramatic roller-coaster that killed off three characters including our beloved witch queen in a scene that almost stole the show and practically canonised the SamWitch ship. Rowena’s death should have been by far the most torturous moment for viewers to endure, and it was extremely torturous and had me sobbing on a plane 3 hours into a 7 hour flight. That incredibly heartfelt moment between Sam and Rowena will probably go down as one of the top tear-jerking moments on this show. It was tragic in the best way - the way Supernatural is famous for.

But lets not gloss over the fact that in an episode where THAT should have been the climax, where THAT should have been the emotional highlight and end point, instead we get a further MORE dramatic stand off between Dean and Cas that pulled focus and ripped all of our hearts out just as violently as poor Ketch in the first act (a very clever and smug piece of meta foreshadowing there Mr Berens).

On a meta level, this is HUGE as a writing choice because they MUST know how this looks. This was the climax of the third episode of the finale season. The way Supernatural has always structured itself since Carver era is that the first three mytharc episodes of each season establish the direction of the story and set the foundations for the character level focal points and dramatic key notes to come. 

That the writers have chosen to end the foundation episodes with a DeanCas break up moment that was more dramatic than a Spanish Telenovela has just stunned me and left me reeling because I just can’t see how else this can go. This break up scene absolutely DEMANDS a huge reconciliation of the sort that will be part of the A plot of the season - the FINAL SEASON. Guys. Part of the reason I have been so quiet and so disillusioned with the show during late season 13 and season 14 was because they pushed any Destiel plot into non existent territory - it became kinda irrelevant and Dean and Cas just acted like friends (homoerotic friends yes, and sometimes like an old married couple, but it was mostly played as an afterthought imo), so for this to suddenly be brought to the forefront of the emotional story again is excellent news for us. 

The thing is, like with those huge moments I listed above, the break up scene is basically undeniably romantic when you break it down to its components:

1. It’s only Dean and Cas. 

Once again we have another scene of high stake emotions that excludes Sam. In a platonic reading of the show, it makes zero sense for there to be such a hugely disjointed relationship between Cas and Dean and Cas and Sam given he has known them both for so long now that if they were all “just friends” then surely Sam would also feel the impact of Cas’s choices as heavily as Dean. In a platonic reading, Dean comes across as an asshole, Sam comes across as being weirdly uncaring about his friend of 10 years, and Cas comes across as not even bothering to get Sam’s opinion before leaving. A romantic reading makes sense because quite literally THIS IS A ROMANTIC BREAK UP.

2. The words spoken. 

“Well I don’t think there is anything left to say.”

“I think it’s time for me to move on”

From Cas’s perspective at least, name one time in a piece of media where such language has been used for a platonic breakup sincerely? There have been heartfelt break up songs that use these exact words. (I should know I’ve spent the last 24 hours listening to them all).

That last line in particular is so heavy. It’s the last line of the episode and nothing about it is platonic. This is relationship terminology my dudes. “I need to move on, and get over you.” This is Cas’s bloody Adele song. My heart breaks for him, but if I was his sassy and fabulous best girlfriend right now I’d be sitting him down, sipping a cocktail, flipping my hair and telling him “Babe, you’re too good for him. Good Riddance. Let’s go out, have some cocktails, something pink and fruity. No dive bars for us darling. I’ll take you to Heaven... the fun one in London.”

In all seriousness though, from Cas’s perspective, this was him admitting defeat and giving up the fight for love. How anyone can possibly say Cas isn’t in love with Dean after this, well I just don’t know what show you are watching. This is the face of a heartbroken man who has just accepted that his love is unrequited. 

3. The many faces of Dean Winchester

On the other end of the scale, Dean was mostly silent after his poisonous words “And why does that something always seem to be you?”

Forgive the terrible gif quality I’ve no time for fancy gif work!

Look at his face here. He knows what he said was fucked up and he immediately regrets it. The way he swallows around that regret and then turns away.

and after Cas says that devastating final line and walks away? We get THIS reaction from him:

The jaw clench as he looks down. The sorrow on his face as he realises he has well and truly fucked this up. LOOK

Finally, he looks up, makes himself look up and watch Cas leave. If that isn’t the face of a broken man I dunno what to tell you. Anyone who thinks Dean is totally heartless and uncaring right now needs to reassess because this is NOT the face of someone uncaring. This is the face of someone who has just lost everything. Again. 

4. The FUCKING MUSIC

Seriously. The sweeping heavy drama of the low strings that come in right after Dean says that horrid line, that carry the weight of the look of horror and heartbreak on Cas’s face as they amplify the emotion there. As they blend seamlessly into the slow and subtle version of the Winchester family theme behind Cas’s heartbreaking speech and Dean’s stubborn stoic face hiding a multitude of emotion, until the violin dominates as Cas says “I think it’s time for me to move on” and the Winchester Theme swells to its climax, ripping all our hearts out just like poor Ketch as Dean watches Cas walk out of his life surrounded by darkness. 

I MEAN.

A friend on Twitter reminded us all of this point about the importance of this theme via @justanotheridijiton​ here which is essentially:

“The Winchester theme is not simply an aural marker to let the audience know when and how Sam and Dean love each other (any Supernatural fan knows that is the baseline of their relationship), but to provide narrative information, especially when the image and dialogue are incomplete or inconsistent with the true situation...  Seasoned fans will recognize the theme and its history of being paired with images indicating deep emotional bonding and a desire to do the right thing by the Winchester code. Here we trust our ears over our eyes to reveal the truth.”

So here is yet another key indicator that any surface read that this is actually an ending between Dean and Cas and that Dean really is just an angry asshole is utter bullshit. 

Honestly, this was PAINFUL, but it was painful in the best way. It was 13x01 levels of pain, but this time it was Cas choosing to walk away which makes all the difference. Dean’s greatest fear isn’t his loved ones dying on him after all, but of his loved ones choosing to leave him. This was exactly the kick up the ass Dean needs in order to win Cas back, classic love trope style. 

Hence my excitement at what is to come. Yes we won’t see Cas again until 15x06, but in the meantime I fully expect a good helping of angst and wallowing from a depressed Dean who has to deal with the fact that he has just lost the love of his life and it is all his fault. That he just pushed away the one person who promised they would always stay by his side. That has got to hurt. 

So yeah, this episode emotionally destroyed me, and I’ve only really covered the primary reason, let alone all my feels over SamWitch, Rowena’s death, Belphegor’s taunting of Cas over his deepest fears and then having to suffer through smiting a creature wearing the face of his son until his body was nothing but a burnt corpse... I wonder if Bobo had a bet going in the office over how much he could hurt us all? He was certainly enjoying scrolling through the Supernatural tag on Twitter and liking everyone’s reaction tweets including some brilliant Destiel related ones. I do love Bobo. Our Angst Goblin King. 

If anyone had asked me a few weeks ago what my thoughts were on the chances of getting explicit canon Destiel by series end, I would have said somewhere in the realms of 30-40%, considering it a battle of wills between DabbBerens and CW studio execs who I still feel are against it in general. I would have considered everything that happened after 13x06 as the writers getting a big NO on Destiel from the network and therefore having to pull back on any Destiel related plot points (purely my own speculation on BTS matters of course).

Now I am wondering if Dabb kept fighting the network? If he managed to wear them down into begrudging acceptance? I’m currently up to around an 80% chance of textual canon DeanCas if we continue on this path. If Dean is clearly shown to be mourning and hating himself over Cas next episode, and if this DeanCas dramatic plot line continues to be a focal point of the emotional story arcs... well...

I’m side eyeing 15x07 a lot right now. Only in my wildest dreams would I think that they might actually introduce an old boyfriend for Dean in a “coming out” episode, but the placement, timing, and potential is all there and I’m kind of once again donning the clown mask because I’m just in awe at everything that they are doing. I guess we’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, I’m gonna paint my face in red and white and wear my rainbow wig and listen to break up songs on Spotify whilst trying to shove my heart back into my chest where Bobo Beren’s gleefully ripped it out with his hands like the demonic angst goblin he is. Wish me luck, I’m not sure I’m gonna get through this season with my emotions intact.

[the-winnowing-wind]

The Breaking of Narrative Promises and the SPN Finale

Though I have been out of fandom for nearly a decade, as a “The writers betrayed their fanbase” from a Dean/Cas POV during the finale stalwart, here are just some thoughts I have!

I feel that whether writers owe their audiences is a complicated prospect, though ultimately, I think writers do owe their audiences, but that the lion’s share of the upset now, comes more from a feeling of being *promised* something rather than *owed* it.

As viewers watch a show, the narrative makes certain promises to them, and more, and more, especially in these bigger properties, there’s a tendency to want to pull the rug out from under the audience and then come back with, “Oh, well, we never said this would happen.” Wrong, in my opinion, sometimes, the text says, ‘this will happen’ and when it doesn’t, there’s a rightful feeling of betrayal.  For instance, Castiel’s love declaration is kind of a narrative promise that there will be a resolution. There doesn’t *have* to be a resolution, but the abrupt nature of it, the gravity of it, followed by Dean’s death, and then resurrection in a Heaven where we understand he *could* see Cas, are all narrative indications of a resolution. An audience member watching it, whether they ship Dean/Cas or not, might reasonably think, he’ll probably see Cas now. For some, the lack of that follow through is a shrug, and for others, it’s a stab in the heart, but the narrative sets up sign-posts towards a scene, regardless. And when there is all that set-up, and all the reason to include it, and a very simple way to give a very tidy ending to a thread dangling, and it’s simply not done, of course, this leaves the sensation of an unfinished slap in the face. The feeling is not that the scene just couldn’t exist because of the way the story was going, no, the scene is perfectly primed to exist the way the story went, it could fit right there, in any 30s Dean is driving, the echoes of it are so loud, they are yelling. It’s far more unnatural for it to have been carefully excised instead, despite what the story, the story the writers wrote, is offering. And, in my opinion, interrogating the reasoning for that is important, whether it matters to the writers or not. Why is it that 30s of a scene that would create such a narrative and audience relief just had to be removed?

I think there’s a difference between being owed, a more self-involved prospect, and promised, a more dual relationship. Because I don’t think it’s fair to say the writers have no part in this outcome. Many people, I think, would have, at many times, turned the TV off and walked away from the show, as it’s true it is in their power to do, except that whenever they were on the brink of doing that, the narrative promised them, *maybe this time.* Not even, “maybe this time it will be canon.” But “maybe this time they’ll talk,” “maybe this time a conversation will carry from one episode to the next,” “maybe, this time...” And one could, again, say, ‘Well, no one ever said that for sure’ -- but I don’t think that’s true, because when I watched the show, the text said it over, and over, and over again.

It said “Cas defied Heaven for Dean,” it said “Cas fell for Dean,” it said “Cas went evil for Dean,” and all of those are signifiers of a storyline, of something that will develop and unfold, but it just never really did. But even as I was like, “Oh, okay, this will never actually mean anything.” the story was still promising that it might. And that’s not me reading into it, that’s just what the story was saying based on the situations it was creating. I don’t think it’s absurd to feel promised a storyline from what the show is telling me is a storyline. But ultimately, that’s how I felt, so eventually, I realized it was all empty moments, but they’d never accumulate. So yes, I turned the TV off and I left.

But at the final moment, on your last episodes, when regardless of owed or not owed, you again, promise your viewers, *maybe this time it will mean something* and then slam the door in their face.

Yes, that is what I term, one last betrayal for the road.

[mittensmorgul]

I’m rewatching 14.07 (yes, the tnt loop skipped 8 seasons to show 3/4 of s14 randomly out of sequence. I know, it’s a head-spinner), and noticed two things that I may have pointed out before, but feel even more important now going into s15:

(well, the second bit feels important, the first one is only relevant to s14, aside from giving context to Dean’s mental state in s15 re: free will and being manipulated)

1. Dean’s ~wavy vision moment~ was “activated” by Rowena saying the word “archangel.” As if that had been the code word Michael had planted in him to begin broadcasting, and the broadcast itself only lasted a few seconds. Sort of EXACTLY the way Naomi had communicated with Cas in s8. Yes we know how the whole situation with Michael ended up, but I feel this is one more factor to remember in the guilt Dean now feels for what happened to Jack, and the ENTIRETY of the life-long manipulation (the “we were always in Chuck’s maze, doomed to never escape his manipulation” feeling that Dean expressed at the end of 15.01) that Chuck has subjected them all to. I don’t think Dean doubts HIS OWN CHOICES, but learning your entire life had always been a series of Choose Your Own Adventure books with a limited number of choices set down on the whim of the author is the sort of thing that shakes him to his core-- especially given his own sense-of-self as “just a guy” who just wanted the universe to leave him in peace. THE IRONY that he’s essentially the symbol for Human Free Will in the face of God in-narrative, and yet has now learned that no matter what he ever chose, Chuck would find a way to force him back into action in order to preserve the order, that Chuck would deliberately keep inventing circumstances to push Dean to make choices that he never otherwise would’ve in the name of saving the universe AGAIN, that Chuck would deliberately break creation over and over again until it eventually broke HIM... heck that’s painful to him. Learning his entire identity was forged in Chuck’s eternal tests for him... especially when he’s fundamentally found himself at peace with his life and what it’s made him. YIKES.

This is only doubled down on when Dean’s next ~wavy vision moment~ keyword is “shaman.” Yes, they’re looking for a solution to Jack’s issues, but with the context of later episodes, it’s like Michael was waiting for Dean to seek out help regarding HIM, you know? Making Cas’s entire experience with Sergei suspect as another direct manipulation because Michael had been alerted they were going there. In this respect, Michael (ironically the one who was so bitter and cynical about God for this EXACT REASON) himself became the Manipulator of the Story. But like all other “pretenders to Chuck’s authorship,” he really didn’t understand the story or his own role in it as an entirely disposable character. His POV was so skewed he couldn’t see his way beyond his own bitterness to see the actual writing on the wall, and isn’t that hilarious?

*spends five minutes extrapolating out that thought into every possible meta level, because the story itself is urging us to examine the narrative and how we relate to it, as well*

2. This was also Rowena’s moment to join TFW in the “Jack is a direct mirror to each of us club.” Obviously it’s not a 1:1 parallel. Her own power hasn’t been “stolen” from her and her body’s not literally at war with itself in a catastrophic cascade of organ failure as a result, but like Jack, this essential part of herself has been locked away, so she’s effectively been “hobbled” in a similar way. 

And like the rest of TFW, it took her literally ONE conversation to go from “let the evil spawn of satan die, the sooner the better,” to “the wee ailing nephilim” she’s pushed to call every witch she knows (even the ones who aren’t speaking to her) to ask for help or advice over. 

The love each of TFW has for Jack is clear to her, and she’s heartbroken by Jack’s apparent fate by the end of the episode. This episode sets up all of their emotional investment going into 14.08-- from Rowena’s newfound attachment to Jack, to Cas’s beginning to understand what it means to love a child as a parent through his observations of Dean-- and how Dean has bonded with Jack in this way, how Sam has put Jack’s wellbeing so heavily onto his own conscience and how “failing Jack” feels like he’s failing HIMSELF due to everything set up in s13 between them. But most importantly-- and the slowest to come to this realization when it was almost literally too late to truly let Jack fill that spot of “son” to him, is Dean. For the first time, probably ever, Dean allows himself this freedom to just accept Jack for who he IS, and fully acknowledge that he DOES care, that he does love Jack like a son, free of the bitter baggage he’d associated with father/son relationships since he was a child-- since even BEFORE the fire, if his Heaven Memory from 5.16 is anything to judge this by.

So there you go, this was the beginning of the agony to come in 14.20, and TFW (including Rowena now) has been set up for emotional devastation.

[elizabethrobertajones]

Hi, what would you consider like the top 10 episodes that had a lot of dean&cas moments? I'm currently trying to show my boyfriend some of the strongest scenes so that he can understand why I believe in dean&cas.

Ow.

Strongest scenes… Honestly, the destiel vids that came out after season 9 stringing together the 9x18, 9x22 and 9x23 Metatron being a dick to Cas stuff really do so much of the work… That or a supercut of Dean reacting to Cas’s death in season 13.

6x20 is pretty much top of the list for a whole episode, and I think in terms of just being really good Dean n Cas romantic episodes, 7x17, 8x07, 9x06, 11x18, 12x10 and 13x01 are really good especially for being pretty much twisted all around their relationship is a really intense upfront way, where the romance is kinda “how can you not see this???”… them being intense about each other also includes 4x16 but idk about how much romantic subtext is involved, as for me at least the romantic subtext kicks in at 6x20 and then while it’s not absent it doesn’t really get explored until Cas comes back from the dead and really into Carver era. There’s a bunch of other stuff which I think is really important but it depends on if you’re looking up scenes on youtube so I can suggest, like, the Burger Date in 10x09 or Cas’s speech about watching Dean murder the world in 10x22, or if you’re actually settling in for episodes and getting a more holistic experience of Destiel in the narrative and how it’s a fundamental part of the later storytelling and characterisation in the show :P

[awed-frog]

Hi, love your writing! 3 questions: what is your favorite thing about deancas and their dynamic, and when do you think they realized they were in love? Do you think either have any idea the other feels the same?

Hi there! Thank you so much! So, those are some meaty questions - let’s see.

What I love about Dean and Cas’ dynamic is that it was both fate and free will that made it happen, and since I’m a big believer in both, that really works for me. Like, the fact they even met is completely absurd, on a DESTINY LIVES HERE scale, because angels hadn’t gotten involved in people’s lives for generations, and so many dominos had to fall exactly the right way (or, well - the wrong way) for Dean to end up in Hell and out of all the angels who’re left up there, Cas is the one who got him out? And yet at the same time, there was never anything forced in it - Dean had been constructed, narratively speaking, as someone who would never be talked into even being friends with an angel (see his issues with faith, religion, and trust, also his fear of flying - and I’m now wondering, of course, if all of that was put there from the beginning because they had this vague idea that Sam would end up with a demon which meant Dean had to end up with an angel, but who knows), and Cas, for all his love for humanity, didn’t really understand the first thing about it and was engineered to follow orders and shut up, so - to me, that’s the very best of love stories - some kind of magic, of pull, making these two characters from very different worlds meet for the first time but after that, it’s all up to them and nobody’s forcing them to be together - not narrative structure, not fear, not lack of other options - they just learn how to be with each other and why they want to be with each other, and it’s mostly very beautiful to watch.

As for when they realized something wasn’t quite right - my headcanon’s always been that Dean had to come to terms with his own feelings at the end of S6, when Cas died, because Dean had been acting weird all season, but I’m not sure he’d fully understood why Cas’ apparent betrayal mattered so much to him, and when he looks down at Cas’ corpse and just mutters, You child - I think that’s when it hit him. And, of course, part of what cuts so deep, and one of the reasons Dean basically gives up on ever getting Cas back when Cas becomes God, is that Cas has gone where Dean can’t reach him - that he’s boxed Dean back into that position he hated growing up, because by becoming his own Father, Cas also sort of became John - the guy who thought he knew everything and expected Dean to obey and shut up - the guy who was mostly untouchable because he was older and stronger and Dean’s dad, and what can you even do against your own dad? And Cas knew how Dean felt about all of this, and still, he chose the John way, and that was devastating for Dean, but - despite all of this, Dean must have told himself, at least he’s not dead, and the fact he was still justifying Cas, forgiving Cas, like he’d done for the entire S6, after a life that’s taught him giving second chances to people is Dangerous - yeah, that’s when he realized he was fucked, I think. And as for Cas - I don’t think Cas’ extrememely self-aware (angelic nature and all that), so I’m going to say - the crypt scene, when he went against a direct order from Heaven because - I don’t know my ass. That’s when Cas started to piece it together, and the thing was so new and terrifying that he fled, which makes sense, because Cas’ been observing Earth for millennia and he’s seen what loves does to people - it makes you trust the wrong person, it hurts, it turns you weak and unfocused - and all of those are inconvenient problems for a normal guy but deadly mistakes for a soldier, which Cas still considers himself to be. He can’t fight well if he’s worried about Dean all the time, and he can’t fight smart if his reasoning is clouded by feelings.

And the main question now is, of course, do they know? 

What I think is, they do and they don’t. They realize the other person has done things which only make sense if Big Feelings are involved, but, on the other hand, they both live in a world where sacrificing yourself for allies and strangers is commonplace and the done thing, and that makes it easier to listen to those other voices instead - self-doubt and guilt and self-hatred telling them, day in and day out, that they’re simply not good enough, not worthy of being loved by anyone, and especially not by this other special person [the Righteous Man / a damn angel, wings and all]. 

I think Cas gave it his best shot in S9, and I include the fanfiction gap in that - they were so sad and resigned when they separated the next morning - I think something happened that night, not necessarily Something, but we can logically assume they shared a motel room, and we know Cas was very nearly suicidal and Dean all beaten up, so I believe that some kind of Gesture happened - maybe Cas tried to come clean about his own feelings, but did it badly and Dean could pretend not to understand, or maybe there was some kind of physical contact that was interrupted and never picked up again - who knows. But after that night, after that disastrous ‘date’ complete with winking over beers a few weeks later, Cas suddenly gets very focused about becoming an angel again, and I think that (among other things) was him giving up on the hope of a ‘normal’ and ‘human’ relationship with Dean and trying to get back at something he used to be half good at (being an angel) instead of clinging on to something he felt was very bad at (being human). 

And Dean - Dean did see that flirting, because he’d tried very hard to tell Cas the truth in S8 - in fact, he’d come very close to that I love you he’d never said to anyone before back in that crypt - and Cas had just - walked away, just as he’d ignored him in Purgatory, just as he’d made clear, time and time again, that he was mostly busy with Important, World-Changing Things Dean, a mere human, could not hope to even understand. And that’s why I think Dean turned down Cas in S9 - partly because he knew he was no good for Cas, that Cas deserved a full shot at a human life away from all the shit Dean’s would always be mired into, but partly also because to Dean, this was Cas suddenly wanting him back after years of keeping him at a distance, which, to Dean, translated not as an I finally realized that weird thing in my stomach was love and man, human bodies are trippy, but as an I’m scared and alone and I don’t know who else to turn to so suddenly you don’t seem so bad, which, to be fair, is not the ideal foundation for any relationship. And next, of course, Dean got infected with the Mark of Cain, and became even more determined to stay the fuck alone, because messy death ahead and all that, and then in S11 Cas was even lower than he’d been when that suicide angel had tried to kill him, and, again, depression’s not a good place to start a new relationship from, and thus the seesaw went on and on and on, and now - I don’t see that much has changed, to be honest - they’re both so in love with the other it physically hurts to have them in the same scene together, but they’re both so low on self-esteem they keep seing each other as a disappointing second choice - Cas probably thinks Dean wants to find himself a Busty Asian Lady and have kids, and Dean knows Cas longs to be forgiven by his brothers and get his wings back, so - it’s an impasse. As I said in other metas, I believe the only way out of this is the intervention of a third party, but that, of course, would make the whole thing textual, and who knows if they’re ever going to go there. So, well - personally, all I can do is pretend to be angry at all of this when I’m really just deeply, profoundly sad, and keep writing my silly stories - my hiatus fic, for instance, is precisely about all of this - how Cas’ temporary death will force both of them to take a hard look at their own feelings and decide what to do, once and for all.

[tinkdw]

Chuck and Amara - the ultimate Destiel expositions

Ok so I can’t help but think of Austin Powers and Basil Exposition while writing this whole post cos thats where I learned the term as a 10 year old….

Anyway! 

After writing quite a few pieces on Mary as a catalyst for the emotional growth of Sam and Dean I thought about Amara which in turn made me think about Chuck and then came an absolute lightbulb moment (for me). Chuck has already been shown as the narrator and expositional over-voice in Swan Song and alongside this and how I view nearly all Amara’s dialogue in season 11 my brain went to….

Chuck has always been important to Cas’s story obviously and it’s clear that Mary is important to Dean (and Sam’s) story. Going back I’ve noticed so many exposition moments for the bond between Dean and Cas and I realised when noting them down that Chuck often exposes Cas’s side of the story and Amara Dean’s. By exposition moments I mean something that’s not between the two of them but a parallel or an interaction with a different character that exposes their feelings towards the other. This is key on screen because you can’t know what’s going on inside a character’s mind like you can in a book, this has to come another way so you get expositions or self-aware moments like Dean’s praying/longing scene or interactions with other characters like Metatron’s multiple scenes with Cas.

With hindsight I feel like Chuck is a character exposition of Cas’s feelings for Dean and Amara a character exposition of Dean’s feelings for Cas. 

Below the cut : How I believe Chuck & Amara reveal Destiel exists in S11.

Rewatching season 11, knowing Amara is herself the catalyst for Mary’s return this makes me even more certain that Amara is our exposition narrative of Dean’s feelings for Cas and Chuck just fits overall due to Cas’s angelic / humanity arc and as a parallel as Cas’s father like Mary is Dean’s mother.

1. Amara as an exposition of Dean’s feelings for Cas.

Once Amara has met Dean she immediately feels his reticence. Lbr most of this is absolutely the fact that she’s trying to control him, he sees her as evil and well, she’s attempting to end the world! So it’s not without reason. However…she (and therefore the viewer too) also notices quite a few other moments where something else seems to be going on with Dean. Perhaps the term could be ‘pining’… 

1. Amara is a key component of Cas’s downwards mental spiral through Ambriel and her own words and actions, especially in 11x10. The words expendable and weak are used and Amara tells us that Castiel reeks of fear and self-loathing. This is only starting to be resolved in 12x10 and 12x12, a whole year later when Dean (and Sam but mainly Dean) makes it absolutely clear that he is a valued member of their family and cared for. Amara is absolutely key here in this whole arc, which is still not complete.

2. Love hurts. Ok so this isn’t actually Amara but for the purposes of exposition and the narrative it totally works, especially in an episode all about love and given that she actually SAYS “who I am doesn’t matter” it’s clear that the information she’s giving us is what is important. I know others have written loads about this so I won’t dwell too long. Let’s just say subtext abounds. 

 Amara: I understand Dean. 

 Dean: Is that right? 

 Amara: the longing in your heart, I feel it too. 

 Dean: Well that’s touching. Consider that you don’t have a heart. Qareen. 

 Amara: Who I am doesn’t matter. The real question is who are you? 

 Dean: What do you mean who am I? 

 Amara: You’re a mystery. I can see inside your heart. Feel the love you feel. Except it’s cloaked in shame (pause).

Then she moves on. 

Amara: When it comes to this, you can’t help yourself, so why fight it. Just give in. 

 This whole scene I was just… ????? 

The term longing when the whole fandom went crazy over this regarding Cas in season 10. And the exposition Dean gives us about his bond with Amara in the same episode:

Dean: Something happens and I can’t explain it, but to call it desire or love…it’s not that.

So…. the love and longing the ‘love monster’ can feel in Dean’s heart… is canonically NOT towards Amara. 

Plus the end of this scene with Amara is such foreshadowing for the real Amara’s discourse during the ‘rescue’ scene (point 5)… they both know.

3. The attempting expelling of Lucifer.

Ok so theres a whole heap of other stuff going on here. Cas’s cute happy face upon realising he’s seen Dean briefly I just have to include for *reasons*

But regarding Amara’s expositional value here (and Lucifer’s too). They BOTH notice when Dean calls out for Cas… 

 4. Which leads to the longing scene. So again this is one sided, Cas is in the scene albeit comatose. But its through Dean’s longing that Amara can locate Dean (by directly touching his heart pffff). And here, she’s using it against him, holding Cas hostage and telling Dean this directly to lure him out. AND IT WORKS.

5. The rescue scene. “Where are your thoughts?” Dean is willing to put himself in harms way to save Lucifer / Cas. And then this gem:

What is she referring to exactly? She then offers him ‘bliss’, this isn’t what she’s talking about here, what he wants, but its compensation, a recompense because he can’t allow himself to have what he wants, its a way out.

6. By season end Amara has made it clear that she cares for Dean. It’s a large part of why she is redeemed in the end, Dean ‘humanity’ Winchester has taught her that she doesn’t really want to destroy the world. Writers referring back to Metatron’s most famous line here, and Metatron finally gets his ‘redemption moment’ *cough*, sorry but until this point Metatron has been the biggest exposition character to Cas’s feelings for Dean so….double layered call back? 

She also I believe understands how important Cas is to him, hence she expells Lucifer from Cas’s body rather than easily just annihilating Lucifer inside him. *Ok ok yes of course they can’t get rid of Cas and Lucifer for story purposes but my shipper goggles won’t allow me to just gloss over this one* ;)

7. So given what Amara textually tells us she knows about Dean, much of it hinges around ‘why doesn’t he let himself have it all, he’s holding back’ etc. She sees Dean’s picture of Mary and brings Mary back. This for me narratively speaks out that she is bringing Mary back not as a mother as such because she doesn’t really understand that concept! But what does she understand? That Dean is holding back from ‘something’ and she feels his mother could help with that… pffffff this is what I’ve been thinking all season 12, that Mary is the catalyst for his and Sam’s emotional growth, not just a ‘mother figure’. Now as her ‘mother figure’ role is being more and more deconstructed as is performing!Dean this is making more and more sense to me.

2. Chuck as an exposition of Cas’s feelings for Dean.

I’ve mentioned Metatron above and he is absolutely key in the exposition of Cas’s feelings but that’s been meta’d a lot so I won’t go into it, suffice to say I feel his part in season 11 and particularly with Amara are a great call back to this.

As a Dean mirror Chuck is really interesting but I’ve noticed a few times where his screen time really emphasises what’s going on between Cas and Dean.

This parallel from 4x18 (thanks @super-sootica!) and 11x23 shows the evolution of their relationship with a directly paralleled visual shot with Chuck’s expression in the background. 

source: @super-sootica.

At this point Castiel is still an Angel with a capital A and mainly a tool to the Winchesters, they don’t particularly like him and he doesn’t really see them as much more than a mission….yet. This scene in 4x18 is actually hilarious when rewatching with hindsight of years of relationship growth. 

“I could go with you…”

This is a startling contrast. Cas is willing to die with Dean for no benefit. 

In between we have Season 5 Castiel/Cas: desperately searching for God as he thinks he can solve their problems. 

Versus Season 11 Cas: When he does eventually meet him in 11x23 completely ignores God and puts his faith in DEAN back at the bunker “what do we do now?” is directed at DEAN not at Chuck. 

Then at the bar Cas ignores Chuck completely and his only question when the sun is ‘fixed’ is “And Dean?”. The contrast between his actions towards Chuck and Dean are what makes this even more obvious here that Dean is his primary concern.

I also like 5x01 when Chuck tells Sam and Dean that Cas is dead. The difference in the way the brothers deal with this is startling and is fantastically continued throughout the series. Again in season 11 specifically we are shown a true difference between their relationships, “it’s not an IT Sam its CAS!”. 

This contrast between how Cas used to have faith in his father and now does in Dean and the contrast between Sam and Dean’s feelings towards Cas really emphasise their feelings towards each other without them even having to interact. It’s the contrast that is key here.

These Chuck scenes in season 11 are great at exposing the evolution of Cas and his emotions since the last time we saw him.

So why is this relevant…

S11 ends with Dean USING HIS WORDS AND TALKING ABOUT FAMILY. About how Amara thought she knew what she wanted but actually she wanted something else. That this is what she NEEDED if not what she WANTED (*this is my whole Mary/brothers arc right here*).

He ‘saves’ Chuck (Cas parallel) from Amara (Mary parallel) and her misguided attempt to ‘kill’ Chuck in order to make the world a 'better’ place as what she wants for it is what she believes is best ie. as she’s been telling us and Dean all season 11, that it’s bliss and he should really want what she’s offering, she knows what’s best for him, kind of like a MOTHER might say, kind of exactly how Mary is justifying working with the BMOL, ridding the world of the supernatural FOR SAM AND DEAN, to give them a ‘better’ world.

And as an aside, through all this? Our narrative exposition that he is not under her spell pretty much every time we see them together after the first time at the angel smiting? The way they show us this is pretty much all through Cas. Dean calling for Cas, Dean asking 'what about Cas?’, Dean trying to expel Lucifer from Cas, Dean going to Amara as a diversion to save Lucifer/Cas, Amara PICKING UP ON DEAN’S LONGING FOR CAS AND USING IT. 

Oh and since 12x01 I can’t help but laugh and parallel Amara’s little shocked/computing look when she realises Dean called out for Cas despite her bond with him v Mary’s look during the reunion hug… cos this is the point where Amara really figures it out (as she then uses Cas to draw Dean out) …. 

source: @pondlifeforme

Yeah, other people noting Destiel is my fave. Meg, Balthazar, Crowley, pretty much any angel knows to get to Cas through Dean etc etc etc.

SO, LONG POST THANKS FOR GETTING TO THE END WITH ME!

I’m also picking up on how @elizabethrobertajones has pointed out that SPN often mirrors season openings with season endings and remembering Mary pulling a gun on Cas. Dean stepping in the way to to stop her from shooting.

Dean “whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” *inserts self in the way*…..

Which is totally where I see this season going towards the end (read 12x19 or later).

So while I’m very Destiel positive (obviously, as I can read it in SO MUCH subtext it seems to me that it’s no accident…. Although whether they follow through on it is another matter, IMO it’s endgame but I know nothing). I am also interested in this arc, this paralleling and mirroring with Cas and Mary and the whole supernatural/monster BMOL arc and how this will work out for Crowley and Cas and Dean ultimately as he is the one more on that side, what I’ve come to term “team grey area”.

But given Chuck and Amara are involved in the narration of their story and I think of them as the ultimate shippers cos you know, God and his sister ;) I’m not too worried for Cas. If anything it will just give us pain re: Mary’s story (though I really hope she doesn’t die and does redeem herself) and hopefully really establish Cas as family because “family doesn’t end in blood”.

Thanks to @godshipsit @castielsmoon and @super-sootica - please anyone do give your opinions, I love a debate :)

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

Always happy to bleed for the Winchesters

There are many things to talk about in 12x14, so of course I’m choosing to start from the things that were not in the episode, namely Cas and Crowley, as you do. I’m kidding, this is actually about the Alpha vampire and the British Men of Letters. And Cas and Crowley. And everyone else.

Something that got my attention about 12x14 was the season 7 feels. Actually, all of season 12 hasn’t been scarce in its season 7 callbacks and references, especially in regards to Cas, but The Raid in particular had some interesting bits. @charlie-minion in this post has pointed out the parallel between Dean’s softened attitude towards Mary at the end of the episode with Dean’s attitude towards Cas in 7x01 when his body starts to drastically fail under the pressure of the Leviathan. Several people have also pointed out the parallel between Dean’s conversation with Jo in 7x04 (Hunters are never kids. I never was) and Dean’s line I never was when Mary tells him he’s not a child. And of course there was the Alpha vampire, whom we’d last seen in 7x22.

Now: why bringing back the Alpha vampire? Well, other than plot reasons (someone they’d need to use the Colt to kill) and extradiegetic reasons (the dangling thread of the Alpha vampire’s promise to “see you”), I think there are other subtextual/structural reasons. Partly related to the character’s role ins season 6 (the parallels between Samuel, Crowley, Cas, Mary, the British Men of Letters...) and partly, I suspect, related to the Alpha vampire’s role in the final portion of season 7.

My question is: can we see the British Men of Letters as a Leviathan parallel, and the process of taking the BMoL down as a parallel to the spell to send the Leviathan back to Purgatory?

The British Men of Letters don’t really seem to have much in common with the Leviathan in terms of goals and motivations, but if we look closely there are some things they kind of have in common. The professionalism in their organization, for instance; the Leviathan were different from regular monsters because they organized as a corporation, the BMoL are different than hunters because of their organization as some kind of corporation, too. There are some kind of territorial issues regarding the United States; the Leviathan’s plans were to subdue the human population of the United States (the demons could have Canada) and once the US were done, they could extend to other countries, the BMoL’s current plans are to eliminate monsters from the territory of the United States, and I guess that their intention is to do the same with other countries with “monster problems”.

There are also things that ping my radar like the fact that the tablets arc started in regards of the Leviathan, and Metatron was introduced, although only mentioned, in 7x21, and now the BMoL seem to have assumed the “meta” role of Metatron in the narrative, their reports and communications thus working as an equivalent of the tablets.

Speaking of the tablets - the Alpha vampire’s role in 7x22 is exactly connected to the instructions on the Leviathan tablet. 7x21 Reading Is Fundamental, 7x22 There Will Be Blood and 7x23 Survival Of The Fittest all feature the research for the way to get rid of the Leviathan; in 7x21, Kevin translates the Leviathan tablet:

Cut off the head, and the body will founder. Waste not thy time nor your breath upon the Leviathan herd. Point thy blade at the heart of their master, for from him springs all their messages. Leviathan cannot be slain but by a bone of a righteous mortal, as light and good as the Leviathan are hungry and dark, washed in the three blood of the fallen: a fallen angel, the ruler of the fallen humanity, and a father of fallen beasts.

One of the most interesting characteristics of the Leviathan is that the Leviathan - despite being referred to as a “they” as plural - is an actually one monster composed of different parts. That’s why hitting Dick Roman sent all the rest to Purgatory along with him - technically, Dick wasn’t one Leviathan among others, but he was the head, the most important part of the Leviathan as a whole.

I am wondering if season 12 is going to frame the “old men” in charge of the British Men of Letters as some kind of narrative equivalent of Dick Roman, minus the dick jokes (Mr Ketch seems to cover the homoerotic part efficiently...).

I am also wondering whether the “seduction” Ketch is operating (relatively successfully on Mary, not on Dean) could be paralleled to the effect of the Leviathan’s corn syrup, in a way - making the hunters docile and useful to the BMoL’s ends, via manipulation instead of chemicals.

Basically, a whole “reverse Leviathan” situation, with an organization of humans trying to eliminate monsters instead of an organization of monsters trying to make humans into food, and so on - so, why not a “reverse Leviathan tablet” situation, where the creatures involved in the spell to take the Leviathan down are victims of the BMoL instead of contributing to defeat the Leviathan?

So let’s get back to the Leviathan tablet, the Alpha vampire, and the rest.

The spell inscribed on the tablet requires the bone of a righteous human coated in the blood of a fallen angel, the king of hell, and an alpha monster. The events of collecting the bloods does not really follow that order (Cas is the first - in an episode that emphasized how the angels see Cas’ relationship with Dean as something that has corrupted him... anyway. um. let’s not digress - then the Alpha vampire also gives them his blood, then it’s Crowley’s turn) but the tablet itself gives us this specific order: bone of righteous human plus blood of fallen angel, king of hell, alpha monster.

Now, let’s put the bone of sister Mary Constant aside for a moment and focus on the creatures that give their blood for the spell: Castiel, Crowley, and the Alpha Vampire.

Basically: the last time we saw the Alpha vampire he was part of a “trio” along with Crowley and Cas. What if again he’s part of a “trio” in the narrative along with Crowley and Cas? More specifically, people who’ll get in trouble because of the British Men of Letters? And maybe, that Sam/Mary/some combination of characters will have to consider killing because of the British Men of Letters?

Let’s make a “you’re living my life in reverse” mental experiment and reverse the order on the Leviathan tablet. Alpha vampire, Crowley and Castiel.

The Alpha vampire comes first. In 12x14, he shows up, to fight against the British Men of Letters. Sam, though, sides with the BMoL, and kills him.

It’s not a difficult choice for Sam. The Alpha vampire is a monster, he’s killed many people, turned many people into monsters, and now he kills people who were in the BMoL base to do their job and didn’t have blood on their own hands. Sam allies with Mick, and the Alpha vampire dies.

What if the next big choices Sam (and Mary, and Dean, and everyone) has to make regard Crowley and Cas?

I mean, it’s pretty obvious that the whole “let’s get rid of all the monsters!!” attitude at some point will have to clash with the fact that some monsters are not evil and in fact some are family. But I expect, in particular, a progression that goes from the Alpha vampire to Crowley and Cas.

I mean, many people have been talking about this kind of issue in relation to Cas, but there also Crowley to put in the picture. Because, while Cas is seen as family by both Sam and Dean (and seemingly Mary, although of course she could rationalize eliminating Cas for the greater good) but Crowley does not possess the same status for the Winchesters. So, I can see Dean and Sam defending Cas from Mary and the rest, but can you see Dean and Sam defending Crowley?

Mary has made it clear what her perception of Crowley is - touch me and I’ll kill you - and Sam, while seemingly more chill around Crowley, does not like him any more. I can see a conflict among the Winchesters arising where Crowley is concerned. Dean, as much as he acts like he doesn’t care, does care for Crowley. It’s super complicated, it’s layered in layers of guilt and shame, but Dean has shared something with Crowley and Crowley does have a place in Dean’s virtual family table. (Maybe neither of them really realize it, definitely not Crowley, so I can see a storyline where things get clear for everyone involved.)

Sam has never tried to hide his feelings of aversion for Crowley. He’s worked with him when needed, but he’s never shared moments with Crowley except the one in the church, that was totally one-sided from Crowley’s side. Sam has acted chill towards Crowley lately because of the various circumstances they’ve been in, but Sam has never really stopped hating Crowley, hasn’t he? He’s never forgotten Crowley for the various things he blames him for (some of which definitely understandable...), including trying to steal Dean from him.

If Sam were in the circumstance of having to kill Crowley, I am sure that he would do it without really hesitating - I don’t think his feelings for Crowley have really changed since the time he used Rowena’s demon-killing instrument to try and kill him, especially if killing Crowley were presented to him as something rationally justified. Dean and Cas, on the other hand - I doubt either of them would willingly kill Crowley.

So I expect the story to go towards a place where Crowley and Cas find themselves in some sort of similar situation to the Alpha vampire - of course, in the case of the Alpha vampire the situation was completely different, because he was indeed a monster and choosing to kill him instead of letting him kill Mick was an easy decision. But if Crowley and Cas gets targeted by the British Men of Letters, if it’s decided that the Colt will have to be used against them, who will make which decision?

A reversal of “always happy to bleed for the Winchesters”, maybe? With the Winchesters sacrificing something/themselves (not necessarily lethally) for Crowley and/or Cas?

[awed-frog]

Why was Dean acting like an ass to Cas in season 6?

Don’t worry about it, though. We’ve all been there, and especially me. 

So, I won’t get into this a lot because season 6 has been discussed so much - some meta bloggers, like @elizabethrobertajones, even have weirdly specific tags for it (hers is ‘we don’t talk about season six’, which I always assumed was a veiled threat and, as it turns out, she thinks it was a very romantic season and we don’t discuss it nearly enough). 

There are various theories about how this season was built, and one of them is that it was supposed to turn Cas for good - to make him into an enemy and then eliminate him from the show, if I remember correctly, so the general consensus seems to be, Why wasn’t Dean more of an ass to Cas in season 6? This was a narrative centered on misunderstanding and miscommunication, and from Dean’s point of view, Cas was acting like a demented Callahan type for no reason, which, given angels were (they still are, but back then it was particularly noticeable) the most powerful creatures Dean’d ever encountered, was incredibly dangerous, not to mention unpredictable. Dean should have wanted to take Cas out just to be on the safe side, and if it had been anyone else, he would have done it. But, of course, deep bond and stuff. Even after Cas’ done the unforgivable and hurt Sam, possibly for good (protect Sam: remember that’s Dean’s genetic imprinting, and he steamrolls over both friends and enemies to get that done), Dean still has enough empathy and affection for Cas to come clean about his own feelings, and to try and help Cas, or even save him, if he can. That, I think, is unprecedented?

Something that doesn’t come up a lot as a reason why Dean was so awful to Cas during this season (and therefore, what I’ll focus on here) is how Dean constantly refuses to see Cas for what he is - not a human being, but an unknowable, alien, otherwordly creature. 

Now, from Dean’s perspective (at the beginning of season 4), angels are not monsters, or things he hunts, or things that exist in the real world; they are, instead much more close and personal than that. They are a cherished memory of his mother, and they are, therefore, an emotional concept which symbolizes peace and being safe and thinking that things could, one day, be alright. This is thrown into particular sharp contrast if we compare Dean’s religious beliefs to Sam’s - we know that Dean doesn’t believe in God, and therefore angels, and that he doesn’t pray. So, for him, angels really are this intimate, childish thing he’s allowed himself to cling to all these years: his mother’s voice, full of love, biding him goodnight. And when Cas shows up, it’s painfully clear that Dean takes his very existence personally, and he’s not at all happy with any part of it. Cas is important in the narrative because he sort of ‘pushes’ Dean out of his comfort zone; he challenges him, and makes him feel out of control in a life where Dean’s fought so hard to be in control at all times (because someone had to be). In a way, I wouldn’t be surprised if Cas’ overt sexual aggressiveness was planned for exactly this reason - because Dean’s been written as bi from the start, and yet this is a part of himself he keep a tight rein over, and Cas’ behaviour very nearly shatters all that. We’ve seen Dean’s uncomfortable with being flirted at, and he’s uncomfortable with anyone being too close to him (in every sense) and Cas, in this sense, is a nuclear reaction. All those secrets Dean’s fought so hard to protect from his brother and Bobby and everyone else - now there’s someone who knows them. All of them, including what he really thinks about himself and the shameful things he did in Hell and how they made him feel. And the fact Cas was always in Dean’s personal space was partly meant, I think, to symbolize this intrusion into Dean’s mind and soul. 

(It must have been terrifying, really.)

And the thing is, out of all the possible responses Dean could have to this gobsmacking, life-changing revelation (that God exists and angels exist and one of them saved him from Hell and is now following him around), what Dean chooses to do is extremely revealing: he starts treating Cas like a human. 

He finds Cas a nickname, treats Cas in the usual way he reserves for potentially threatening human opponents, like cops (ie, a mixture of flirtiness, short fuse, sarcasm, and being an insufferable little shit), pretends they’re equals (for instance, by forcing Cas to drive around in the Impala instead of allowing Cas to take control and fly him around) and even tries to make Cas fit more snugly into what Dean considers the ABC of humanity (getting Cas laid, teaching him to lie and so on). The thing is, Dean can’t admit to himself Cas is this awe-inspiring pillar of light and whatever, because that would mess too painfully with the way he sees the world, and himself; and so, he generally doesn’t. 

(He still doesn’t, by the way, hence that infamous it/him debate with Sam in season 11, but now he’s got very different reasons for thinking of Cas as a dorky human instead of an immortal Lovecraft thing he can’t even see the true face of.)

I think what hurts the most about season 6 is that, on the whole, Dean’s irrational and suicidal and pig-headed unwillingness to see Cas for who (or what) he really is mostly succeeds. Look at the season 5 finale: Cas knew what Dean had in mind would never work, just like Bobby did, and yet he went along with it anyway, and he acted very ‘human’ about it. Instead of being his usual angelic self - commander of a garrison for time untold, unflappable warrior, you name it - Cas is happy to do what Dean asks of him, and he even makes his actions as Dean-like as possible (‘assbutt’ - really?) before being annihilated. But the problems begin when Dean finds out Cas is not, after all, dead - not because he wanted Cas to die, but because his resurrection highlights how rigged the game is. Remember how bitter he was about all of it? With Sam dead, Dean was forced to see that he’s human, and Cas is not. He’s the one who’ll grieve for Sam for the rest of his life, while Cas, who already has a smile on his face, because normal emotions don’t apply to him or whatever, will fuck off and do his thing in Heaven and everything that happened between them - stuff that would have caused an unbreakable bond of friendship between two human beings - are already forgotten.

And then when Cas does come back, things get worse, because, again, Dean is having a lot of trouble pretending Cas is anything other than what he actually is: an alien creature who moves to its own music. First there’s this thing that Cas did bring Sam back but a) he didn’t notice his soul was missing and b) he never bothered telling Dean about it (he let Dean grieve for Sam’s death for months, and who does that?); also he never even checked how Dean was doing after that whole ordeal (that Dean knows of, anyway) and he clearly thinks Dean’s too stupid, or something, and won’t understand Heaven politics, won’t be able to help at all…the list goes on and on. If Cas’ journey in seasons 4 and 5 had brought him closer and closer to humanity (in both senses), season 6 is about Cas swinging in the other direction, and Dean hates it, because Heaven and angels and God - that’s not something he can come to terms with, yet. And I don’t know how much Dean’s aware of the issue, though he must have done some serious thinking about himself and his place in the world while he was at Lisa’s, but the issue does come up - at key moments, and a lot.

(“What happened to you, Cas? You used to be human, or at least like one.” - this, for instance, was a weird thing to say, and definitely not something either Sam or Bobby would ever say about Cas.) 

During the ALL THE FEELS season finale, Dean tries to humanize Cas one last time, despite all the shady things’ Cas done all season, and despite the way he hurt Sam: “No, Cas, it’s it - it’s scrambling your brain (again: as if Dean could ever hope to understand how an angel thinks, or how it sees the world). Listen to me. Listen, I know there’s a lot of bad water under the bridge, but we were family once. I’d have died for you. I almost did a few times. So if that means anything to you - please. I’ve lost Lisa, I’ve lost Ben, and now I’ve lost Sam. Don’t make me lose you too.”

Cas’ answer, of course, is the very worst thing he could have said - both a refusal of the highly significant thing Dean is offering (“You’re not my family, Dean.”) and a demand for Dean’s servitude (“So you will bow down and profess your love unto me, your Lord. Or I shall destroy you.”) - this after two years spent learning Dean and fighting at Dean’s side and understanding what family means to him and how losing his free will is the very worst thing Dean can imagine. 

Ouch.

It’s no surprise, really, that at the beginning of season 7 Dean is sort of ready to accept the truth. While he fixes the Impala (always a sure sign of grief), he curtly tells Sam, “He’s not a guy, he’s God and he’s pissed.”

(Thing is, Cas was not ‘a guy’ before his unfortunate gorging of souls either.)   

So, well - sorry for the novel, but this is, to me, a key aspect of their relationship and one of the reasons I find their bond so fascinating - because what normally happens in the ‘lucky girl meets alien prince’ trope is that the fact the prince’s not human is a plus. Literature is full of young women enjoying the riches of King Frog and begging to be turned into vampires so they can be cold and happy with their beloved forever; instead, Dean wants none of it, and Cas sort of agrees, which makes this story very Tolkien and more heartbreaking than it has any right to be. And, full disclosure, I’m generally a Cas!girl, so I’m sometimes not overly enthusiastic with the way the Winchesters treat him, but, to the screenwriters’ credit, there’s usually a reason for things to happen as they do. Dean’s not always at his best, but he’s a very damaged person, and he’s been through a lot. And, well, you need some drama to keep things moving forwards. My hope for the rest of this season, and for the next, is that their relationship keeps evolving on healthier, more open grounds, and the drama focuses on things less frustrating and soap-opery than miscommunication.