#so I would like to state that when I actually watch 1x13 of course I'm rooting for Cassie and think the episode is all about her

[elizabethrobertajones]

Has no one noticed the description of season 1 episode 13???? "Dean is contacted by his first love, Cassie!" CASSIE, CAS, OMFG! This is canon and I choose to believe! Coincidence? I believe it's foreshadowing!

I stumbled over to my askbox first thing after waking up and squinted at this like, oh, hon, don’t believe everything you read on the internet, until my eyes adjusted and put “season” and “episode” in the right order

But yeah, there’s a beautiful wealth of literature about Cassie and Dean, who are the only reason to watch that episode. 

(It helps, if you’re going to watch, to pretend that bit where Cassie, brilliant local reporter and apparently extremely smart cookie, who has gathered mountains of information on this case and has extensive personal ties to it, before she called in the Winchesters like an extermination service, has to sit there and watch Dean suddenly figure out her whole case for her, instead actually gets that win herself, at which point at least all the agency in dealing with the case goes back into the black woman’s hands, and Sam and Dean are just hired muscle and a fun hook up for our real hero. :P I figure that weird choice was an attempt to not make Sam and Dean pretty much passive observers through the first ¾ of the episode out of some misguided feeling the show had to be about them ALL the time, but in some cases you should prooobably stand back a little and wonder if that was not maybe the one choice you could make if you had to do EVERYTHING else the same to salvage the episode out of total infamy, and all it costs you is making your smart and interesting original character continue to live up to the most important character trait we know about her, aka that she is a good journalist, and not have that all unfairly robbed from her so the white guys can look smart and she’s reduced to a love interest with an infuriating deliberate passivity in the story)

Anyway my entire tag for the episode is either complaining about the rest of it or talking about Cassie and Dean and this parallel 

I think even if Cassie was called ANYTHING else it would still be an absolutely fascinating case study in Dean’s early emotional history, the way Sam teases him about it, the suspiciously similar lines in their argument to the way Dean and Cas talk (sadly without hooking up immediately after :P) and it just happens to be that way. I doubt it was more than a coincidence - this is in season 1, Buckleming, only episode more maligned by the show in its own text when being self-referential is Bugs etc etc - and this IS the show that in 3x06, a mere 10 episodes before Cas showed up, had Sam using a summoning spell that invoked the names of several angels, Castiel among them. Also the same show Jeremy Carver accidentally-deliberately (?) named three separate wives and girlfriends “Amelia” and even used the same career for the husband in 2 of those instances. I’m sure if Sam stuck around and married HIS Amelia he would have started selling ad time for radio whatever the heck that is.

Brains work in weird patterns and no one checks this stuff as far as I can tell :P

Anywho if it was Buckleming writing 4x01 (*shudder*) I’d maybe think picking “Castiel” was at least a sort of influenced decision, but as far as I can tell the show’s been so desperate to bury The Racist Truck Episode, Cassie has never been mentioned again and in general the writers clearly know not to go mining the episode for material to reuse :P The decision to use “Castiel” was because he was the angel of Thursday and that’s the day the show aired on at the time, and of course he was never originally intended too be a love interest and convincing arguments to explain narrative roles and at least why we CAN read him that way earlier aside, not strictly written as one until season 7 or 8. 

But now sitting over here with all that hindsight, it is a pretty excellent thing :3 I like to think of it as the way the show just runs to many loops around itself it’s not even always intentional, and tbh the fact it is basically a storytelling uroboros, the snake eating its own tail, is hardwired into the show’s DNA as the kind of narrative style used since the early days, but the way details come around again and again often feels almost like it’s unconscious and after a point certain things get absorbed into the back of the writers’ minds - lines of dialogue, characters, quirks they like to include and there’s only a chance they know they’ve done it before… I think season 12 serves as a good example of how the show looks once the writers are told to be AWARE of doing it and ENCOURAGED to go pilfer from anywhere in canon they like, taking advantage that the “we’ve been down this road so many times” mantra has left them free to use mirrored moments that can reflect 8 different episodes in 8 different seasons in like one line of dialogue, only now it feels like every episode and every moment was intentionally tuned to be doing that in a self-aware, meta way instead of how you suspect earlier iterations were just the same train rolling through the same town on its route like we were commuters along certain threads of the story. :P 

(Sorry this has turned into a treatise on why I love Dabb era so much) Anyway long story short if Cassie HAD been introduced in 13x01 the “omg I see what you did there” would be way more intentional, but as it is Cas just sort of FITS into one of these already established grooves in Dean’s character, right along with his issues with angels and faith that with hindsight make 1x12 and 2x13 look as if the writers somehow just KNEW it was about Destiel, and I’m not talking the “well yeah they were/probably were setting up for him to have an angel love interest all along, only it would have been Anna” type speculation, I’m talking about 1x12 and Roy LeGrange using dialogue 4x01 would nick and put in Cas’s mouth… 

Maybe my next ridiculous diagram should be “why everything before season 4 proves Destiel is real even though none of it was written intentionally to do this” :P