#look at what he did to dean across the entirety of his era as showrunner and how much he altered the show itself

[septembersghost]

i’ll say this once publicly and never again

andr*w d*bb is not some secret crusading hero, he has had intense disdain for and disrespect towards dean from the very beginning of his tenure with this show in S4, he has done everything in his power to destroy his characterization, relegate him to a secondary role, treat him like a useless fool, villainize him for his rational reactions, and strip him of his character traits. look at the entire storyline with jack for the most abundant evidence of this. tell me it didn’t exist to shame dean for his feelings. to shame dean for not reacting in the “correct” way. to shame dean for being a “bad” parent (do not get me started on the implications with that and how it’s much worse because of dean’s frequent caregiver role in the narrative and his parentification, so not being the “good” role model/parent for jack and some of the events that follow gets us really into the weeds with medea-like undercurrents and was setting fans up to hate him). I saw people wish death on dean all season. pull up comments throughout S15 and you’ll see so many “he’s so mean to (insert jack or cas or sam here), i can’t stand him, i hope he dies” comments. the internet was especially overflowing with death wishes after 15x17. please look at “the hero’s journey” when he stripped the winchesters’ inherent skills away and attributed all of their smarts and strengths and capability to divine intervention, thus rendering their status as skilled warriors inert. and now we know that wasn’t accidental. they were setting it up. make him seem damaged, broken, wrong. tell him his remarkable resiliency and abilities were never actually his. reiterate that he’s too poisonous, too angry. then tell him...he’s actually done everything for love. force him to pay penance (to watch cas die, to get beaten to a pulp by god himself, take your pick.) and once he is thoroughly trampled under the wheel of that guilt, instead of giving him resolution and love in return, put him back where he started, entirely defined by his caretaker role, entirely defined by the person he gave everything for, and tell him he’s right, that’s all he ever was or had, he deserved to die bloody and scared. (i beg of you, do not twist his death into dying for love, for sam or for cas, because that’s even worse. he deserved to live for love, he died for nothing.) there’s so much to unpack here with ideas about sin and ideas about sacrifice and ideas about the use of feminine-coding leading to, essentially, a fridging, that if i tried to enumerate them, this would become a dissertation, and it’s already too damn long.

the finale was the last chance to crush dean and make everything about sam, who is, in d*bb’s mind, the real protagonist. this is not news to us, he has slighted dean many times. (d*bb could also never keep the lore straight. dude introduced a multiverse - a. multiverse. - into supernatural). and you may say, why did you watch his era, then? and i’d say, i still watched it for dean, because i could never leave him behind. i watched because i believed in and cared about the story. i watched because i could always find some meaning there. so i guess this was the reward for that decision.

this was always the intended ending. the details of getting there may have slightly changed, but the destination didn’t. jensen has told us this. there’s a reason it didn’t sit well with him from the very beginning, and it had nothing to do with cas (as is quite obvious given jensen’s enthusiasm for the confession scene), it had to do with the fact that they were gutting a character who he spent 15 years pouring his heart and soul into, going above and beyond to define him and nurture him and bring him wholly to life, who he considers part of himself, who he’s referred to as his “first love” and his “best (imaginary) friend,” and they told him, “here’s the ending, take it or leave it,” and they told him, when he expressed serious unsettled concerns, “you’re too close to this/too emotional,” until he had no choice but to accept that this was happening, that dean’s entire arc was going to mean nothing and that he just had to deal with it. 

he could reciprocate to cas ten different ways and he’d still be dead. reciprocation actually makes his death even worse and even more malicious and disgusting and even more hollow but let’s not go there.

any version of this story that ended with its traumatized, battle-scarred, compassionate heart never being allowed the time to heal or recover, never being allowed to live, being impaled in a frankly, ridiculous, gratuitous way (that thing was only there to kill him, it served no other function, and suddenly dean forgets what a great tactician he is? i guess because his skills weren’t “real.” and suddenly dean, who we know, without question, wants to live now. wants to keep moving forward. has reasons to choose life. wants those sacrifices to mean something. dean winchester. gives up?) is unconscionable. any version of that which tries to tell us he could only find peace in stepford heaven is abominable. it doesn’t matter who's there to greet you when you’re dead at 41 with your whole life having been ripped away from you. they’d be there to greet you if you lived another fifty years, too, and that would be much more satisfying. and there are other implications - dean is taken forever. that light is snuffed out and leaves a chasm of loss in his wake. to the point where we know people are going to die because he’s dead. because sam lives a half-life until the day he too is dead and they can be together. 

think about the real world implications - we don’t have literal monsters to fight here, but this story was never about that. it was always about overcoming all the hurt and the fear and the shadows of our inner demons, really. they said - don’t bother. it doesn’t matter anyway. all that fighting and bleeding and trying so hard and loving so, so much. it doesn’t matter. but we know that’s not true. we know dean’s life was precious. we know dean’s life mattered irrevocably. we know he should have been allowed to live. to imply, in any way, that those of us who identify with him are just too broken to find peace and enjoy freedom and give love and be accepted is, again, unconscionable. we only have this one life. that’s all we know for sure. no one is too broken to love or to live.

this is on d*bb and s*nger and everyone else who signed off on this idea before j2 even walked into that writers’ room in july 2019. there’s weird, questionable stuff going on with the 11 missing shots and different dubs and knowing takes were changed or cut, whatever else, but we were always going to end up here. with a man who has probably been planning to do this to dean for years. who likely thinks it’s edgy and subversive. one of the other writers literally tweeted that, “it always had to end for him like this” and defended it as the “right” ending. this is how they viewed him. this is all they believe he was capable of or deserved. there’s nothing wrong with holding them accountable for it