#he has very rigid aggressive beliefs and won't listen to advice he just rushes off and gets eaten with extreme prejudice

[elizabethrobertajones]

1x02 - Dean vs Roy

Everyone gifs the bit in 1x01 where he gets thrown over the hood of the car as the definitive start point to prove Dean's always kinda been like this since the start... I still get very amused by this instance...

DEAN Roy, you said you did a little hunting.

ROY Yeah, more than a little.

DEAN Uh-huh. What kind of furry critters do you hunt?

ROY Mostly buck, sometimes bear.

DEAN passes ROY.

DEAN Tell me, uh, Bambi or Yogi ever hunt you back?

ROY grabs DEAN. SAM looks on.

DEAN Whatcha doing, Roy?

I'm gonna quote me from 2 years ago because nothing really substantially changes about this moment except that I always wanted a gifset of it and had no idea the power to make it was in my hands the entire time...

Pfft Dean. Dean Dean Dean. We are two episodes in and you are making things weird and uncomfortable.

Yes, let’s posture about hunting monsters and make fun of the guy for only hunting deer and bears (to be honest Roy seemed to be paying zero attention to Dean’s attempts to assert himself as alpha male hunter of the group), and then when he grabs Dean to stop him standing in the bear trap, he gets really up in his face instead of actually looking around to assess the danger. Nope, you are way too in deep in whatever game you (and only you) were playing there… I mean, I don’t even think this is like sexual tension or whatever, except that Dean had a weird reaction to Roy from the start because of him being a competent woodsman, and Dean is… not. And then he sort of assumes because he’s been angling for a fight that this is Roy snapping and asserting dominance over him, so the feathers go up and Dean’s like I’m just going to stare you down with all this weird one-sided chemistry between us boiling over. And Roy is totally oblivious because he’s the bigger guy.

Dean is basically a small yapping puppy at this point in the show.

I suppose you could fill in some more blanks about missing father figures and how Dean's both going into the woods to search for John (but also knows before they even get there that he won't be there and it's going to be another job) and reacting to Roy this way because as a competent hunter (in his own field, which pisses Dean off because he knows that's nothing compared to hunting the actual, dangerous monsters, which makes him a hero and Roy a dude who shoots Bambi on his weekends...) Roy is kind of the John mirror in the party in a way. A bad one, to Dean.

Of course Dean's reaction is immediately to try and usurp his place - because Dean has now taken on the burden of being the hunter John never really was, the one who puts "saving people, hunting things" as his top priority, talking Sam out of going on the same revenge mission that he's lost John to already...

... But in that way where Dean does this sort of thing, of course there's a ridiculous amount of  momentary tension (pretty much all radiating from Dean's side of things) towards this guy where you can't tell if he wants to kill him or fuck him.