#dean + equalizer

[the-mpreg-guy]

on a realer note i do think people forget that a huge part of the destiel equation is that cas won’t stay. like yeah we focus a lot on the fact that dean won’t ask him to, but cas never sticking around is a huge factor there

[deancasforcutie]

Cas' fluster when Dean tells him how aesthetically gifted he is

if Dean heard "still beautiful still Dean Winchester" he would simply be more blushy and adorable and unable to words than ever

[shallowseeker]

1. Jack isn't really holding back here. His anger definitely gets the better of him. Poor gas station clerk.

2. Cas immediately moves to restrain him. (Cas has rightfully determined that now's not the time for a lecture.) Meanwhile, Jack: "get out of the way, angel-dad!" (who it's okay to be rough with, because we're more equal in physique). And symbolically, it's a crotch/waist hit, too, which symbolizes Jack overpowering Heaven-Father, which is a big warning sign within a family unit:

3. Earth-Dad Dean gets Jack's attention with an equalizing force. (Humans use tools to become powerful enough to take on forces bigger than themselves, after all.) This seems to snap Jack out of it.

But importantly, it's not even symbolically at the level of stun gun. It's like a little whoopin' or even a foghorn blared, just enough to get his attention. (It doesn't phase him.)

4. Next, Jack first looks to Cas, appealing to him, like "you approve of my violence, don't you?" But when he doesn't, Jack looks to Mentor-Dad-Sam, and Sam gets to deliver a voice of reason. Meanwhile, gas station guy is shaken to hear about Maggie.

Throughout all this, Sam mostly stands around yelling and acting shocked! Whereas Dean and Cas simply...aren't. Much like in Tombstone, when Cas somberly asks, post-security-guard shooting, "if this has happened before." Cas and Dean seem generally more acknowledging of the danger Jack's power poses.

5. Ashamed at his violent overreaction, and at being wrong, Jack rushes out. Dean thinks Jack's needs to be alone to stew. Perhaps, he’s right. Jack tends to need space to process, akin to Dean and Mary.

But maybe Cas's instincts are more on the money here, that Jack is fragile and needs to have the support of people around? It’s hard to say, since Lucifer finding him was very unusual, unfortunate happenstance.

Again though, Cas and Dean seem to be more on the same page in terms of not reeling from shock, but immediately acting to respond.

were you the one who called dean shooting jack to get his attention a spanking because I can't stop thinking about that lol

I did! In this instance, it's only the visual of pulling a gun on your child that's bad IMHO. Because Jack is unleashing angelic, overpowered rage on an innocent minumum-wage-gas-station-worker! Cas moves to full-body tackle Jack, and Jack throws his angel-dad across the room.

Only then does Dean pull the gun and give him a lil' whoopin'!

[shanastoryteller]

The boy with the demon blood is always watching him.

His gaze had been alternatingly reverent and despondent before Lucifer’s rise. After, it’s cold, appraising, and only when Dean isn’t looking. It reminds Castiel of the few times that Michael has set his eyes on him and it makes the place on the back of his back itch where his wings would be. Lucifer’s vessel should not remind him of Michael. It’s not right.

They’re sitting in a diner, a cup of coffee in front of him that he has no intention of drinking, Dean is in the bathroom, and Sam is staring at him again, lip pulled back just enough that Castiel can’t tell if it’s a grimace or a snarl. He is not well versed in humanity, but he wishes for this to stop. It’s distracting. “What is your problem?”

“You,” Sam says bluntly, which Castiel had not expected. “I don’t trust you.”

“Because your judgement in this area is without reproach,” he says, surprising himself. It’s just that Dean is predictable. Understandable. Sam is not. It’s frustrating.

That look on his face is almost a smile. “Exactly. I trusted you in the beginning. You’re an angel, a being of good, who brought my brother back to life. Why wouldn’t I?” He shakes his head, a faint look of disgust on his face that Castiel is used to seeing there.

He thought Sam’s self recrimination was wholly centered on his role in releasing Lucifer. He does not know what to do with the realization that some of it is directed towards him. “I am still all those things.”

“No,” Sam says. “You’re the good soldier who left my brother to rot. I tried to save him and couldn’t. I nearly destroyed myself doing it. You could have saved him and didn’t. You could have prevented all of this if you’d pulled him out before he broke the first seal. But you didn’t, and then you left him there for another ten years, letting Alistair sink his claws into him.” He leans forward. “My brother was only useful to you broken. I’m not going to forget that again.”

Anger rushes through him. Dean is often frustrating. Sam is infuriating. “I was following orders.”

He realizes too late that he’s only confirming Sam’s assertions. To his credit, he doesn’t appear at all satisfied with the admission. “That’s why you and Dean get along, you know. Two good little soldiers in a pod that rebelled too late and are suffering the consequences.”

Sam has not spoken of Dean like this, has not been anything but accommodating and sorrowful to his elder brother since killing Lilith. His description of their actions sounds too much like Lucifer for Castiel’s comfort. They’re nothing like him. It is Sam who is the devil’s foil. “What are you, then?”

“An idiot,” he says. “You and Ruby are the same, manipulating us both to start this stupid apocalypse. I know you let me out of the panic room, Castiel.”

He goes very still. There are several defenses available to him, but all only confirm Sam’s assertion that he’s a good little soldier that rebelled too late, that he was as Ruby. Perhaps this is where so much of Dean’s frustrations around his brother come from. He is not right, but it is difficult to find the words to prove him wrong.

“If you were going to try and deny it, that would have been the time to do it,” he says dryly. “If you hadn’t, the apocalypse would have been averted. I can’t kill Lilith if I’m dead and even if one of you had done it, it still wouldn’t matter. Lucifer can’t puppet a corpse. Over before it begins.”

Castiel means to choose his next words carefully. Instead, he says, “You have not told Dean.”

Sam shrugs, looking at the window, his eyes tightening in pain. “He needs something – someone – to hold onto right now. It can’t be me, so it’s you. But I’m watching you, Cas. Manipulate my brother again, and I’m not going to care how useful you are in averting the apocalypse or what it’ll do to Dean to lose faith again.”

“Why can it not be you?”

He looks over at him, startled. It’s nice to be able to be the one to put him off balance for once. “What?”

“Why can Dean not hold on to you?” he repeats. Despite every attempt from heaven and hell to prevent just that, it seems to him that Dean is holding onto his brother more tightly than ever.

Sam’s expression shuts down, but not before Castiel sees the tidal wave of grief there. “You didn’t know him before hell. You don’t know what you took from him by leaving him there.”

He’s back on uncertain territory. It’s the only kind he ever seems to be in with Sam. “Is he very different?”

Dean does not appear overly different from an outside perspective. His personality and priorities seem roughly the same as they were reported to be before hell. Traumatized, perhaps, but it’s not as if Dean is any stranger to that.

Sam laughs and Castiel flinches before he can think not to. “Our father’s words haunted him, you know. That he had to either save me or kill me. In some ways, selling his soul for me was a relief. Not only was it a complete rejection of that order, but it meant that if I did have to be killed one day, he wouldn’t be the one to do it. Not that he ever would, because people have tried to manipulate him into it before. Me included. So I guess you can take some sort of pride in it, being the one who succeeded.”

Castiel regrets starting this conversation. He thinks that Dean cannot possibly still be in the bathroom and wishes he would return. “You are not dead.”

“If you’d left me in the panic room,” Sam says. “I would be.”

That is likely true.

“It was perfect,” Sam says bitterly. “Me, strung out on withdrawal, alone and isolated and hallucinating and dying. Dean with all of his worst nightmares confirmed. Except he’s faced that before and it still didn’t end with me dead. He needed a push. He needed a way to save me or kill me that wouldn’t be his fault, his hands, that he could drink and hide from. And leaving me to detox alone in that room did that, gave him an out that he told himself he could live with.” He tilts his head, mocking and sharp, and Castiel would very much like to stop seeing Michael in Sam Winchester’s face. “But you never wanted me to actually detox. Not with Lilith still alive when I’d need years of training to be strong enough to kill her without it. You didn’t want me clean. You wanted me twisted so far around that I’d be easy to control.”

Zachariah had wanted that. Castiel hadn’t known. He was just following orders.

Dean might accept that explanation. Sam never will. He believes blindly following orders to be a weakness. It’s difficult to argue against it when he’s right. If Castiel had not followed orders he did not understand, they would not be here. But following orders is all he’s ever done.

“I should have known better,” Sam says. “That’s on me. Dean played his part too, but he’s got enough to deal with right now.”

“You intend to let him continue blaming you,” Castiel says. Dean’s mistrust and anger hurts him. It’s easy to see. Here he has the information to rid himself of it, at least partly, but he’s keeping it to himself.

His mouth twitches into something that’s almost a smile. “It’s me or him. He went to hell for forty years for me. I can spare him this.”

Castiel tries to imagine Dean’s reaction if he uncovers how close he came to Sam’s permanent death, how it was something he chose and could have prevented and did not because of actions and assurances that Castiel gave him.

Sam is an abomination. He is, also, human, and no amount of demon blood down his throat is going to change that.  

“Before hell, Dean might have forced me to detox, but not alone,” Sam says softly. “He never would have left me to die alone.”

He searches for something safe to say, something to extricate himself from this conversation. What he settles on is, “You and Dean’s relationship confuses me.”

Sam laughs again. Castiel doesn’t flinch this time. “He pushes me to leave and then blames me when I do,” he says, exhaustion leaking into his words. Sam often looks tired. Castiel has never wasted time wondering precisely why. Perhaps he should have. “It never occurs to him that if he just stopped pushing, I’d stop leaving.”

A self fulfilling prophecy. The apocalypse was supposed to be like that, except that in the end heaven and hell had needed quite a lot of work to get it started. Destiny isn’t as easy as Castiel had been told it would be. “Why are you telling me this?”

It’s that cold, assessing glance again. Comparatively, it’s almost comforting now. It’s better than the grief. It must be exhausting, mourning a man who’s right in front of him. “So you know to watch yourself, Cas. I’m looking properly now. And I see you for exactly who you are.”

It’s not an idle threat, not from Lucifer’s vessel, not from the man who killed Lilith, but there’s a shiver down his spine that’s not quite fear. He’s a low ranking angel, all things considered. Like a god on earth, but celestially insignificant. He is to take orders, to follow his father’s will and his brothers’ guidance and never stray from this well trodden path.

No one has ever seen him before.

[lambmotifz]

“wincest isn’t canon!” dean winchester canonically thinks that “little brother” is a synonym for “wife”

[woundlingus]

If Dean Winchester was an animal he’d be one of those cats who screams and sticks it’s paw under the bathroom door when you’re taking a shit because he gets that much separation anxiety and he HAS to come sit in bathroom with you but the second you open the door he immediately stops giving a fuck and leaves.

[flying-ham]

love love LOVE when I’m watching a late season spn recap and they use an out of context soundbite from the early seasons

[soullessjack]

i don’t think there’s enough media where the main “heroes” actually suck so so so bad it’s embarrassing. like for all their reputation Sam and Dean and Cas are known bullshitters and cringefail losers who make things worse. nobody but them even takes their big bad arcs seriously it’s just like ohhhh. You were mentally ill again? Big whoop. Jack hallucinated for like.A. Week straight and all it did was bully him and tell him he’s deranged . His bitch ass BURNT A MAN ALIVE just cuz he was ovulating or whatever and then he tries to gaslight mary into thinking that’s a normal thing to do. But the whole show is like hmmm well the power of family and love makes them worthy or whatever . the worlds in danger you’re getting the neurotic white boys with daddy issues again. Good luck with that lol

[angelsdean]

dean and cas love and trust each other unconditionally. they give and they forgive easily. there is never a debt to settle. never a score to keep. i'd rather have you, cursed or not. i prefer trusting, less dumb less ass. i'll go with you (again and again and again). i forgive you, i need you. of course i forgive you. of course i wanted you to stay. i've got you. i love you. etc etc. they are best friends first and foremost. they can talk to each other and be real. they know when the other is lying about being "fine" and they call each other out on it. and then they listen. they get angry sometimes, and miscommunicate often, but they are always approaching everything with the desire to understand, to work together. they worry. they make bad choices sometimes out of a desire to protect the other. keep each other out of a situation and out of the loop. take on the burden for the other. all these flaws and wrong choices are still rooted in love and care. they care SO much. that love and care is at the center of everything they do.

[incesthemes]

there is interesting johndean subtext and insinuations across kripke era, usually through an antagonist insinuating parent-child sexual violence in order to exert dominance over dean. this type of mockery exploits that ambiguous relationship between john and dean and reminds dean that he never had a normal relationship with his father, and that makes him gross and wrong. it doesn't actually matter in the end whether john was sexually abusive to dean. the core of their relationship was damning enough: dean was made to take the place of john's wife—to comfort john and raise sam—while simultaneously being his son. the codependent nature of their relationship implies the incest that underscores their dynamic. again, this is regardless of what literally occurred between dean and john because there is enough doubt toward the nature of their relationship that multiple antagonists can use it against them.

sonwife, brotherhusband—dean is stuck in a liminal space between family and lover and is unable to put his feet firmly on just one side and instead has to accept both together or abandon both together. he doesn't get to have a relationship with his family without it being simultaneously incestuous. he plays the role of wife to john and mother to sam as mary's replacement; he therefore becomes more than a son and transcends the boundaries of the familial into the incestuous. it's baked into the dynamic and he can't hope to escape the liminality in which he's stuck without abandoning his entire family altogether.

this ambiguous relationship is further acted out with sam, where people perceive them as lovers rather than brothers; where their mutual devotion trumps, neglects, and disallows any other close relationship outside each other; where their physical closeness is viewed through an unusually sexual lens despite no literal sex acts between them taking place on screen. once again dean is stuck in a liminal space, paralleling the ambiguous and uncertain relationship he had with john.

in the end, sex (and sexual violence) is just a symbol of this codependency and uncertainly incestuous dynamic. sex acts in kripke era end up being symbolic: misinterpretations of sam and dean's relationship; accusations of sexual violence; literal, on-screen sexual moments between the brothers and someone else. it's a literary device that highlights the incestuous themes of the show. dean hand-picks women for sam to fuck because it allows dean to be symbolically part of sam's sex life. henricksen accuses john of raping dean because it is a symbol of the unhealthy, codependent relationship dean had with his father. the samulet stays on during sex because sam is symbolically integral to dean's sexual gratification (seen too in the way both dean and cassie in 1.13 appear to kiss the amulet at least once in the dark room). sex is used to signify more than what's literally on the screen, and the connections between the literal sex acts and the blurred lines of dean's familial relationships allow for a reading of incest between both john and dean and sam and dean.

it never mattered whether johndean or samdean had a sexual relationship in the canon because that was never the point. the point is the liminality that permeates the narrative. sam, dean, and john all stand upon a threshold between acceptable and taboo. the point of it all is the doubt and anxiety, the are-they-aren't-they that is never answered. the absence of incest within the text invites the understanding that the incest was, in fact, always there.

[calibrationneeded]

Sometimes I’m normal and other times I remember Dean’s canon daughter and how Sam never got hounded for killing her by the fanbase but Dean is still treated like mayor of cunt city for mistreating Jack. Obviously two wrongs don’t make a right and Dean was very much in the wrong for how he treated Jack, but the fact Sam is seen as better than him for it despite doing arguably the same thing rubs me the wrong way. And this isn’t so much a dig at Sam as a character but rather a commentary on how the fanbase kind of puts him on this weird pedestal.

He killed Emma. Sam made up his mind about Jack in the same amount of time he made up his mind about Emma, but chose to kill her and empathize with Jack. Dean didn’t have an obligation to Jack, he didn’t know him when they first met, but Sam had an obligation to both Dean and Emma as a brother and an uncle.

I know he acted to save Dean, however- as a sibling, I know that if I were to kill my hypothetical niece or nephew to save my sibling that they would hate me forever, and that is a fact that would alter my idea on how to approach the situation.

Often Dean is viewed as this huge piece of shit for his behavior towards Jack in the beginning, because “how dare he assume the antichrist and son of the guy who killed Cas would be not great” but meanwhile Sam gets off with not so much as a mention to the fact he killed a young girl because she was a monster.

Where are the lines drawn? What makes a monster a monster? Are they less of one when you see yourself in them? Or was Dean in the wrong because Jack became a more important character. Hell, maybe it all ties back to the fact that Supernatural seems to hate women, who knows.

[unlimitedhearts]

Dean Winchester and Shawn Spencer would be making out sloppy style before the SPN/Psych crossover episode even got through the cold open send tweet

[sweetpapercroissant]

it’s very very interesting to me when fandom looks at dean, the guy who consistently sacrifices his own life to save/bring back sam, and goes ‘he’s so scary so mean he’d kill anyone and destroy the world to keep sam chained to him’ meanwhile sam, the guy who actually did sacrifice the world to save dean and said with his whole chest he’d do it again zero hesitation, gets the ‘poor baby <3 he wants to be free from dean so bad someone save him’ treatment

[sammygender]

it is SO funny to me when people say things like ‘by the end of the show sam and dean’s relationship is a lot better!! they’re not constantly fighting anymore!! :)’. girl that’s because sam mostly stopped ‘fighting against dean’ (striving for autonomy or questioning him) and let dean become sole arbiter of narrative, decision making, and morality🙏

[jackandclairearesiblings]

SPN season 16 except Sam goes back to school and get shell shocked by the change in atmosphere and vibes

[lambmotifz]

i know wincesties might not like this but that samdean interaction from provenance where sam says “yeah you’re right, part of this is about jessica. but not the main part.” and dean asks “then what’s it about?” and sam doesn’t answer — that wasn’t about incest. it was about sam feeling like he’s cursed and not being able to explain it to dean. it kind of mirrors their interactions from s4 where sam struggles to explain to dean how he feels about having demon blood in him. also it’s the only interpretation that makes sense here considering everything that happened to him earlier that season. sam doesn’t want to hook up with anyone because of jess, and then later in that episode he tells sarah: “look, it’s hard to explain. it’s just when people are around me — i don’t know, they get hurt…i had a girlfriend. and she died. and my mom died too…i don’t know, it’s like, it’s like i’m cursed or something.”