#jensen might have wanted to blaze of glory or something dumb but like...

[zmediaoutlet]

can i ask you what you think of dean leaving the body of sam in the cave in season 13? i always hated that narrative choice of castiel stopping him to get him back and dean going along with it 😭

Jensen hates it too, lol. But I love it, because it says something interesting about the character.

(nb: if you hate it because Cas is involved and somehow that means that destiel is real then I can't help you. He's a character in the show, you gotta just accept it. But with that said--)

There's a super melodrama version of the show -- and the show is a melodrama already, so this would be cranking the melodrama to 11 -- where Dean does indeed stay with Sam's dead body and the tears trickle down his face and then he... what. Makes a deal? Shoots himself? Sobs all night and then just wastes away there like a big ol dork? Certainly there are shades of that in Dean, but it's kind of the... most boring part. Because what also exists in Dean, and makes him an actually-interesting character to watch, is a deep sense of responsibility, that overcomes even the things we'd think should be most important.

If he were the big drama queen of the above paragraph he wouldn't even 'let' Sam go on hunts. Sam would be in a crystal tower somewhere (braiding his Rapunzel hair, I guess) because Oh No, What If Something Happened To Sammy. But Dean accepts that something might always happen to his brother every time they step foot on a hunt, and it happened to be vampires this time but every other time it could've been a ghost or a demon or, fuck, getting hit by a car. Stumbling unluckily backward into rebar. Anything. What I love is that Dean does almost forget himself but it truly only takes half a reminder for him to remember -- wait, this is a job. This is what has to be done. They swore to help people who weren't strong enough to help themselves, and that doesn't change when one of them is dead. He will do the job and save this idiot girl who slowed them down in this cave anyway and Sam won't be any more or less dead by the time he does it.

Anyway, he already did it once. Red Meat (beloved by wincesties everywhere) had the exact same scenario. Sam was dead and Dean had to escort civilians to safety and he was obviously, obviously going to come back, and fix it if he can and maybe die if he can't. You can see in the camp when they get there that he's dead inside, and he's all set to go trudging back to the bloody dark but then Sam shows up with Lucifer, anyway. (And thank god, bc it provides some of the coolest scenes in s13 as a result.)