#this is why i don't think you can claim dean is abusive to sam without it going both ways

[liamgallaghermpreg]

the thing about samdean is that it is mother/son as much as it is brother/brother

[eisforeidolon]

https://www.tumblr.com/eisforeidolon/751943165375856640/do-you-consider-dean-to-be-abusive-to-sam-i-read

You are totally entitled to your opinion, but this reply was a not so much, "no, I don’t think Dean was abusive" response. It was more a "look at all the times Sam is meaner and worse than Dean" response, which is what Sam fans get accused of doing in reverse. The thing is, Sam girls ARE overly defensive of Sam, but it is partially because the show narrative itself almost always sides with Dean, as in his choices end up being "right" even when they logically shouldn’t be. Or sam just has to "get over" things or he’s a "bitch, but Dean is allowed to be angry and hurt without the show shitting on him for it. Sam even gets blamed for things that he didn’t even do (this is by Castiel often, though. And he sucks, so … whatever). Sorry, but just some backstory on why Sam girls get sensitive.

I don’t actually think Dean is abusive. I think he’s damaged and dealing in the way he knows how. And, yeah, both brothers hurt each other a lot by lying, saying harsh things, etc. I actually think the times either have punched each other, the other hardly counts as anything serious. Nit the big fights, but the single- punches. I’m not saying they are right, but growing up fighting monsters, a punch is going to mean less to both of them than not trusting each other or things like that.

Also, in my opinion, I get people’s annoyance at the whole Sam trying to get Dean to talk about things on his time frame isn’t cool. But, it results in Dean knowing he can open up when HE is ready. He always ends up sharing with Sam in th end. But, as the show goes on, Dean shuts doesn’t Sam’s attempts to talk about how he feels. So he stops. Sam is a bit hypocritical in wanting Dean to talk when he wouldn’t, yes, but he’s also learned that after being shut down a few key times. In the late seasons, both are better at sharing with each other, so they get there in the end.

Sorry, if this comes off as combative, but I agree with your initial point that they have both hurt each other in many ways. I think whoever we identify with, we are always going to give more leeway though.

Can’t we all just agree to hate Castiel for blaming Sam for things he hadn’t done, betraying Dean, and generally sucking?

Honestly, I mostly avoid a lot of the brother vs. brother conversations just because it is so hard to address it in a way that will not be taken badly by one side or the other because there are so many biased, rancid takes floating around. People can get very entrenched and defensive, which is kind of a shame. Not just because that's not fun, but people being willing to give their faves more leeway? Can actually lead to all kinds of interesting speculation and meta about the characters' choices that I think often enriches the fandom.

The initial premise of the anon was regarding claims Dean is abusive by people taking Dean's worst behaviors regarding Sam in a vacuum. Since I don't agree Dean was uniquely terrible to Sam specifically because they've both got issues with control and yes, their lives are violent and they've both gotten physical with each other? I wasn't sure how else to address that without pointing out Sam's side of that equation existing. And I did want to use some specific examples to avoid having to come back later and add them in because 'Well, *I* don't remember Sam ever...'

I did see how that could come off as harping on Sam, but I didn't really see a way around it. I could have tried to reiterate more of Dean's various behavior which was not great - but given that was baked into the initial premise and punching people when you're angry is kind of ... obviously bad? If there was a more even-handed way to say what I meant, it was sadly beyond my abilities when composing the post. But my intention was very much just to point out that the context in which Dean's behavior occurs is a relationship that's kinda fucked up sometimes from both sides, not to imply Sam was worse or meaner to Dean than Dean was to Sam.

[angelsdean]

how is dean not the same as john. in the later seasons i mean. sorry but describing him as "not an angry man" is insane to me cause dean's number 1 of getting out his emotions is anger. i love dean as well but like. you know john tried to be better too right? like i dont really understand how you extend this huge hand to excuse some of dean's angry/bad tendencies (which imo makes him that mlre interesting: the fact that he is angry and he's sometimes not a particularly good person) but refuse to extend even a sliver of this to john? obviously i get that you're attached to dean way more than john thats like common sense for us deangirls but genuinely. cas died and dean did turn into his father. its a thing that happened. i love dean and i dont understand how you can call yourself a deanlover but... erase so much of him??? like you can say he has bad qualities. thats what makes him human. john and dean are much more similar than you claim and its genuinely confusing to me why you don't see that. not trying to start a fight or anything i genuinely would like to get a piece of your mind on this

no no no you misunderstand. i am not erasing ?? his anger. he IS angry (it's just that anger for dean is rarely actually anger). i also think his imperfections are what make him interesting. i talk abt this a lot actually. about how i don't believe in flatting ANY character to prop them up as your fave. people being messy and flawed is good. the problem i have is people who do not look at dean w/ any nuance and just point blank go: he's angry therefore he's abusive and equals john without examining WHY he's angry, where that anger originates from, the fact that his anger most often is Not true anger for the sake of anger or violence. instead, his anger most often stems from fear and grief. especially during widower's arc. he's drowning in grief and as much as we love jack and can see in hindsight that he wasn't a threat at all, dean doesn't know that! we as the audience get the privilege of often knowing and seeing more than the characters! all dean sees at the time is a Very powerful being, who IS the son of lucifer, and who he believes manipulated his best friend and got him killed. he does have every right to be afraid and wary of jack. (and i'd argue he has the right to feel this way again with soulless jack, he IS afraid of him and what he might do and he's also grieving mary and that mixture of grief + fear is where his anger-but-not-really-anger comes from). like, because of the way dean was raised, because of growing up with the angry man that is john, the only emotion that was really expressed and "allowed" was anger. anger was justified. crying and sadness and fear, that's weakness in john winchester's household. but anger was powerful and masculine and good.

i also DO look at john with nuance as well. i've talked about how i don't like when people reduce john to a flat caricature or cartoon villain abuser. there's more going on, there's nuance, their dynamic is so complicated. john is Also, at first, drowning in his own grief. i think early on, john DID try, and was mostly motivated by a desire to protect his family, but he went about it wrong and imperfectly. however, where they diverge, is that john continued to let his anger consume him for the sake of revenge. he neglected his children, he put them in danger through his repeated neglect, and he did (based on various pointed insinuations) at one point or another physically abuse them, most likely dean specifically (the line abt flagstaff, also less "canon" but in the john's journal book john mentions how dean was particularly responsive to "discipline" and that john feels he's been too soft on sam)

the thing is, being angry doesn't make you a bad person. being angry is human. dean's anger imo, and the way we see it manifest--most often when what he really wants to express is grief and fear--is indicative of his internalized behaviors learned from john and past trauma that remains unresolved. this man has never had a chance to COPE or unpack not only the abusive and controlling environment he grew up in, but all the subsequent years of trauma INCLUDING his hell trauma. that's a lot. all those bottled up feelings are gonna turn into a lot of anger and frustration. he doesn't suffer perfectly. like you said, and which i agree, he is not perfect. he's flawed. he's human. but i don't think being angry and suffering imperfectly makes him a bad person. i feel too much empathy and compassion for him. i can see struggling and i want someone to help him. sometimes when people are in pain they'll say or do things they don't mean. and yes, they may hurt people in the process and those people are allowed to feel upset, but dean is also hurting. and i don't think he's a horrible person for not suffering the "right" way or not being a "good victim." and that's how i view widower's arc, as someone who is deeply hurting and suffering. it's not excusing his behavior but it's not villainizing it either. john gets similar feelings from me too, to a point. but john took things further and actively abused and neglected his young children and raised them to be soldiers and made them put aside their dreams and desires in the name of HIS revenge quest. he raised his children to live in fear and used fear and violence to control them. however, despite the fact that *i* don't particularly like john winchester, i know that his dynamic w/ his sons is nuanced and i know that dean both Loves and Hates him and that both those feelings can and do co-exist and i enjoy that duality.

dean's complicated emotions during times of intense grief and stress (widower's arc, losing mary, finding out chuck was controlling his whole life) are isolated moments but do not speak for his whole self. outside these high stress situations, where what he's really feeling is fear / grief / worry, we usually see dean to be very compassionate and patient and good with children.

this is getting very long now and i don't know if you'll take the time to read all of it but i'd like to conclude with saying my main issue with the "angry man in the house" phrase is the way it is used out of context to paint dean as becoming john and taking the place of the angry man in the house, when the original context of the quote is about being haunted by the angry man you grew up with, not becoming him. i talk more in-depth about all of that in this post.

also, just as an aside but, i generally have two "modes" of operating on this blog. one is fangirl mode where yea, dean is my blorbo specialest princess who can do no wrong<3 and then there's the other mode where i'm doing formal analysis of canon where it's more abt dissecting things and talking meta and looking at WHY characters are acting how they are. that's when i talk abt their flaws and motivations and nuance and context. also, people are often needlessly harsh or over-exaggerate things dean said or did in canon just to villainize him and in those instances yes i will go to bat for dean and "defend" him, usually by just, pointing out the nuances and additional context for his actions that many choose to overlook or misinterpret just to make dean seem worse than he actually was.

[adreamoverlife]

Hey ur post about gabriel and loki seems rad as hell but im kind of stupid. In your version what exactly is loki switching?? Is lucifer still in the cage in this version?

Hellooooo, Nah trust me you're not stupid, Just my writing brain always takes over while I'm making posts and makes them way more convoluted than they need to be lmao. I'm gonna use this as a jumping off point to explain more about this AU. So to answer your immediate questions, Loki switched places with Gabriel when he was supposed to be rescued in order to pretend to be him and Lucifer is out of the cage while Michael and Adam is still trapped.

And for a more detailed answer heres this:

So, this would happen in season 13 (I originally wrote this without thinking about Jack so I'm just gonna put him off the table for now.) Normal season 13 is Loki - Left Gabriel with Asmodeus and seemingly was playing mafia god in a few hotels before getting killed by Gabriel

Lucifer - Out of the cage and messing around on earth

Gabriel - Was in hell and then was rescued and brought to Sam and Dean

Michael - Still trapped in the cage with Adam

In the AU I Wrote up Loki - Took Gabriel's place in hell when the angel was supposed to be rescued and was taken to Sam and Dean under the guise of being Gabriel. For believability and to tie up a loose end he did still kill Asmodeus like Gabriel did in the show. While his main objective is to make Gabriel suffer it's also a little deeper than that. We know Lokis father had him chained to a rock with a snake dripping venom into his eye but he still speaks fondly of him, He doesn't just wanna destroy Gabs relationship with his brothers (because lets be real it's already dead as hell) but to prove that Gabriel COULD have had his family back and they COULD be happy together. Before eventually destroying it. It should be noted that whether or not Gab ACTUALLY could fix his family is a dubious claim at best, it's more about how Lokis forgiveness of his abusive family makes him toxic to everyone else. (I'll be referring to him as "Gabriel" when he's pretending to be him to other characters)

Lucifer - Still out of the cage but who was sought after by "Gabriel" in order to repair their relationship. This actually managed to tap into Lucifers softer side for a while before he mysteriously vanished after a late night convo with "Gabriel" in the bunker. Sam was the last one to see him before said convo. He is still alive and is most likely the one causing all of nature to start reclaiming the earth.

Gabriel - Was never saved from hell by Arthur Ketch but Loki had him put somewhere "better" aka somewhere he can watch what Lokis doing to his brothers. The idea that he might be literally trapped inside like a radio or tv station is really interesting to me and probably where he is. If Castiel can get turned into a clay figure why can't Gabriel be trapped behind a TVs glass screen?

Michael - Since the cage is canonically damaged by this point in the show I don't find it too impossible a powerful god like Loki could sneak in a wisp of his illusion magic. I imagine Michael and Adam are having their own kinda hell right now. And if Loki managed to break Michael out of the cage after winding him up a bit to cause maximum damage who knows. I'll have to think more on Michael specially.

I've written a few Ficlets for this but I haven't exactly given this au a beta reader so there might be a few plotholes or things im forgetting that happened in the actual season 13 but honestly I'm kinda just having fun with this idea. Hope its not too illegible lmao. If you have anymore questions please shoot me an ask

[shallowseeker]

I think my main takeaway I'd like to keep is this:

There's a lot of merit in being anti-destiny, anti-soulmate, anti-chosen-one, anti-Cupid, anti-mirrors/anti-parallels.

To me, that doesn't necessarily mean we poo-poo on characters labeled "soulmates," like Mary and John. To me, it means, we must be hesitant to believe such a claim in the first place. Because Heaven isn't reliable.

And perhaps, it is us swallowing the "soulmates" line robs Mary and John of choice.

///

Beware the mirrors:

Before we swallow literal snake oil directly sold from The Architects of a Heavenly Matrix (Gabriel, Zachariah, Chuck, etc.), we must first consider that these "mirrors" may be deeply, deeply suspect or even untrue objects of ridicule or manipulation directly imposed by the author.

Not mirrors of truth, then, but funhouse mirrors. We err when we view our precious side plots as black-and-white revelations of truth. Most importantly, mirrors aren't one-to-one recipes for figuring out what characters mean to each other.

///

The very concept of soulmates is Thee Antithesis of Free Will.

As a fandom, we are so willing to believe Mary and John weren’t "in a real relationship" and had no agency.

Why?

Because a Cupid told us so, and we don't think the Cupid had reason to lie, so we believe him.

Yes, they had rocky moments and John for sure had post-death idealization of Mary. John heavily decayed as a character so did Dean, but that doesn’t mean there was no goodness or love to begin with. You can become a bad person.

I think it's a little unfair to assume that they didn’t fight like Hell to choose each other and dodge the machinations. It's also a little unfair to assume that they didn’t choose each other, just because they, like all marriages, weren't perfect or honest with one another. If they had been perfect, don't you think that's actually more suspect?

Oh, but Heaven told you so? Right. Heaven, which feeds you a regular diet of cupids and soulmates and other bullshit. Hmm.

///

Are you Team Free Will?

By the time we finish watching SPN, words that imply destiny should send us running for our goddamn lives. So, how did TFW lose?

SPN feels forever unresolved because:

Dean will dies after placing too much focus on Revenge, the corrupted, unfair past

Cas dies after placing too much stock in Jack’s Destiny, the idealized, inevitable future

Sam’s mistake was probably falling prey to Chuck’s illusion, the corrupt future, and losing Hope

Perhaps, they jointly screwed up when they lost their hero-ness and didn’t trust they they were Enough on their own, without Fortuna's luck.

///

An alternative to mirrors?

Anyway, I sort of see all the mirror stuff as Chuck making fun of his characters or trying to misdirect them, or at worst, trying to tell them who they are instead of letting them discover it for themselves.

I know fandom loves its mirrors, but I like to remind myself that these mirrors can contain false, toxic messages to mold you to take on a role and to perceive things a certain way.

But importantly:

You are not one-dimensional.

You are not one archetype.

You do not have a sole purpose. You do not serve a sole cause.

You are multi-faceted and beautiful.

You can care about many things and people in your life.

You are worthy, even in the throes of the storm, even in the midst of turmoil, and even tangled up in the ugliness of war.

You can make the worst mistake of your life.

You can be an abuser and victim, and that doesn't make you a caricature; it makes you messy and human.

You can doubt who you are and go full-blown existential crisis and lose your way.

But you can start trying to be good anytime and you should always keep trying to fix it. That's hope. That's the whole point.

[remythologise]

Am I the only one who's super uncomfortable with the implications from the last two episodes? So Cas comes out and is immediately sent to superhell and then in the next episode his family who in earlier seasons would do absolutely anything to bring him back now all of a sudden (after he's come out) decide to not bring him back (despite having the ability) and allow him to suffer forever. I don't believe the writers are intentionally trying to be homophobic but...

Dude absolutely everything about the episode has shitty implications, not just Castiel. Let me bring in another anon ask onto this one too so I can address them together:

Apologies if you’re tired of talking about it, but I frankly can’t stop thinking about how they even fucked up Michael’s story. Michael’s whole “found family” arc and his relationship with Adam and him coming to terms with the shittyness of his family and realising that he’s not bound by the part God has ordered him to play. All those things, all those things that are such core themes of the show and that parallel the other main characters, and they burned it all to the ground (plus Michael fucking dies anyway). Like, they really did that, they really just trashed literally everything they claimed their show was about.

It is absolutely remarkable how this show managed to make me physically ill in the course of 42 minutes, by the simple act of bad writing. Let’s go character by character and where they currently stand in the show, in order of Most Upsetting to Least Upsetting:

1. Castiel - his love is currently unreciprocated in canon text, he has spent his entire life serving Dean and loving him and thinking of himself as a ‘tool’. Self-hating, self-doubting, self-sacrificial but loving until the end. Tells other characters in 15.18 that they aren’t tools, and that they deserve love. Does not get this told back. Has been sent to eternal suffering (according to the text about the Empty) because he admitted his gay love. If you rewatch the show, it is literally painful to have him on screen because of how tragic his character is DESPITE how fucking generous and loving a character it is. I can’t even put into words how upset it makes me.

2. Jack - his entire life is being a tool for the Winchesters and the world, and doubting he is really loved by them. At the end of the narrative, he is indeed just a tool used to prop up the world, and never allowed to simply be a kid. He goes out without Dean ever really resolving that talk where he goes ‘thanks for doing this so Sam and I could be free’ and ‘you’re not really family’. It’s so fucking bad. WHY didn’t they do a Buffy style thing here with Buffy’s sister, where it was about how the narrative was setting him up to be a weapon and plot device but he/The Winchesters reject that? He was just a fucking kid. The only reason he is not above Cas on how painful it is to rewatch his character is Castiel has more fucking screentime, and at least Jack is not eternally suffering. He did have some good times as their child... if nowhere near enough. It makes me physically sick to think of how Jack was just a plot device, in the end, and not allowed to be a kid. I thought that was the point of 15.17 Unity. Oh, and - COMPLETELY FORGETS ABOUT HIS LOVE FOR HIS DAD, CASTIEL. His most important relationship in the show done dirty. Christ. His farewell speech was appallingly written. They have so many opportunities to make this ep meaningful and create a lasting impression on viewers and the lasting impression I have is bile. 

3. Dean - spends the whole episode grieving Cas and wanting him back then just suddenly forgets he exists and moves on as soon as it’s possible to revive him. Is totally fine and relatively unemotional about sacrificing his son, and seems pretty happy he and Sam made it out despite Cas and Jack metaphorically sacrificing themselves. Everything we have learned to say about ‘family don’t end in blood’ is textually erased and everything about the Winchesters sacrificing themselves has been rendered to lie on Cas and Jack’s shoulders instead. It’s like... Man. Rewatching the show, he is an abusive asshole to the man in love with him, doesn’t really care about the son that adores him, and is happy sacrificing others for he and Sam to be happy. I now hate this show.

4. Sam - same as Dean except maybe, AT A STRETCH, we can imagine he called Eileen offscreen. Both Sam and Dean do not check in on their friends. This was like. The ultimate bi!bro win, in the most upsetting way possible where they make it clear Sam and Dean only care about each other. In a way that totally undermines the previous episodes and even parts of THIS episode. Not to mention the Winchester ethos of saving their found family and Cas and Jack not just being temporary tools to them. At least on rewatch he’s not abusive to his love interest and son though! But I have no fondness for him now.

5. Michael & Lucifer - everything the anon said. It’s like the back half of the ep wanted to screw us even on this. Jake Abel’s incredible acting deserved better. There was also no narrative reason for it, and the flashbacks to explain the ‘plot twist’ were so fucking bad. Fuck, even LUCIFER got done dirty - both of the characters regressing to try and win their dad’s approval. There was no need for this, it made no sense, and it did nothing even in terms of contrast to Sam and Dean.

6. Chuck - his ending was fine on a relative scale to this mess but the editing was so bad dude it made the whole scene laugh out loud funny. Like embarrassingly bad shit. You know what saved this? Castiel, of course, and Dean telling Chuck that he isn’t who he thinks he is. Even the scenes with the boys standing up to Chuck were just so ... embarrassing and poorly shot.

Also like, most upsettingly, as a whole - Supernatural. All fifteen years of show canon and characters and fan investment. Nothing sums this up more than the montage, which by the way guys, the editors got really emotional over and thought was good. So please don’t say that was intentionally bad. It was just so fucking bad, like random scenes and a song that didn’t work. Really upsetting capstone to the series that was not only poorly made as a mockery of what greatness Supernatural once achieved, but undermined every part of the emotional found family narrative, the Winchesters trying to save the ones they love, and just made the characters point blank unlikeable. I cannot believe one episode soured the whole show for me, but it really did. Barring a fix-it miracle on 20, I don’t think that can be undone.

[elizabethrobertajones]

Regarding Lily and her relationships with angels. I've only seen the ep once, so I may just be forgetting an explanation, but did Lily ever actually say who her daughter's father was and what happened to him beyond the fact he's human? I feel like a few things could have occurred (and please correct me if I'm wrong): a) Lily said she summoned an angel but I don't remember a timeline w/ respect to when her daughter was born. Could Ishim have taken her husband(?) as his vessel? 1/2?

Or, could Ishim have shown up in his vessel, but Akobel takes Lily’s husband as his vessel for her protection? I don’t remember them saying a lot on Lily’s feelings for Akobel other than the protection thing. I know when reading his “crimes” said he had broken their sacred oath by laying with a human and fathering a nephilim. But, we know that the nephilim thing is a lie cooked up by Ishim. Could he have also been lying about Akobel sleeping with Lily due to his jealousy? 2/3

It’s also possible Ishim wasn’t lying about their relationship, just the nephilim. A new thought occurred to me though. I don’t discount the oath - the fact it was read as a “crime” proves it exists. However, if Akobel was truly there for protection and nothing else, but the lies spread by Ishim saying they had a sexual relationship - that could definitely pave way for how the other angels interpret Cas’ relationship with Dean/make a precedent.

Hi! Sorry I didn’t answer this last night - I was reeeally tired and out of it, even for me :P

Lily never explained who Mr Sunder (if that was his name) was - before getting to your headcanons - I had assume he died at some point which was why she was a single mother… I don’t know the exact rules but in the past being a widow was actually a fairly good social position for a woman, grief aside. She may or may not inherit everything directly, but generally if her husband was kind and/or rich she’d be provided for, and it was one of the ways to be single but not have society breathing down your neck QUITE so much. As an academic, AND a mom, Lily had her work cut out for her without needing to bother with the husband part too :P So I think it makes more sense in the society that even if she had a fairly exceptional social standing anyway, with being, well, a woman of letters (lowercase although I have my suspicions that a lot of questions are answered about 9x11 and the MoL’s detailed angel lore they couldn’t possibly have known :P). If she had a child out of wedlock AND was an intellectual, well, actually, I don’t think she’d get as far as having that professor job, 100 years ago >.> I’m fairly sure single mothers were still getting thrown in asylums in the 1920s. So that all adds up to me as widow. (And if people thought she had married Akobel/actually DID marry him to keep up appearances, then as a widow it’s not weird to remarry, but she’d have choice)

Anyway, I really like the idea that Ishim possessed her husband. They never say as much but it would add a whole extra layer to it. Especially his entitlement to her love and to her daughter as a part of that. I’m now imagining that Lily and her husband worked together on stuff and he volunteered for some experiment which called an angel down - idk, maybe going at it from the vessel direction? And Ishim happened to be the angel connected to her husband (just like if you’d done this to Jimmy some time before Cas happened to him, as part of the bloodline of Cas-vessels, perhaps it could have specifically summoned him? :P) 

It would also explain in more emotional detail why she said that summoning him and looking at him for the “first time” felt like looking into the divine - angels look like regular people from the outside, and there was nothing magically altered about Lily yet at that point as far as we know - the whole thing about her being “powerless” when Ishim comes for her daughter suggests she only started applying her research afterwards to get revenge. If she did a summoning and Ishim popped up in a summoning circle and she’s never seen an angel before, we’d have a meeting like Dean and Cas, where he didn’t know what Cas was, and he looked so ordinary (yet so NOT ordinary) but it wasn’t until Cas spread his wings for Dean (that sounds wrong) that there was any proof… Even knowing she PROBABLY summoned an angel, in vessels they look fairly underwhelming on first glance. But Lily sounds like she immediately knew… 

So, imagine she and her husband are working on the spell and suddenly Mr Sunder is bathed in white light and a moment later he’s looking at her like he’s never seen her before, moving and talking as a different being - that way angels hold themselves above humans and look at them as if they’re another species (and Ishim was great at that :P) 

Also, I like this image, where Ishim comes in:

You have May there as well, clutching her doll that her father gave her and looking terrified of him as well. Obviously there’s a lot of extenuating circumstances for why she’d be terrified of Ishim, but @chiisana-sukima made a great addition to this post about Ishim, about domestic abuse:

https://chiisana-sukima.tumblr.com/post/156851184446/there-was-a-moment-when-ishim-throws-cas-down-and

I think it’s really horrifying but if he was possessing Mr Sunder, then the way that he’s treated Lily’s family, that she needs protection from him (and I think we can trust Lily here as Ishim had a “true colours” sort of reveal which means I think we can assume most things we learned from him were a lie, so that would include Lily and Akobel’s supposed relationship, that Lily claims was just because she needed protection. Akobel genuinely cares for her, probably thought Ishim was a total dick anyway so was happy to do this for her, and when Ishim confronts him, with hindsight Akobel is like “who are you to tell me about shame” or something, because HE knows what Ishim did before we do…) Anyway, the daughter looks horrified, and there’s this connection where the father is specifically mentioned to the doll, and then Ishim kills her and we see that by the doll being dropped… Yeah, there’s a lot of really really horrifying implications and metaphor about a father turning abusive on his family… 

And yeah, I agree that the whole thing shows that angels can either make up or assume a lot of things. Honestly it would take like one angel to spread the rumour that Dean and Cas have a thing but in a way that just suggesting Cas has broken their taboo is enough to get the angels muttering to each other. Ambriel said that the *nicest* thing they say about Cas is that he kills angels. Mirabel reminded him of the angel fall, while Ishim had some really pointed looks at Dean and Sam in the diner, and of course compared Dean n Cas directly to how he felt about Lily. 

(The whole taboo in angel society thing is making me flip out because FORBIDDEN LOVE Aaaaah… but also just Cas’s resistance to breaking the taboo - we’re shown that even after all of his rebelling against Heaven and so on through the years, how he’s picked humanity (and Dean) over and over and over, and doesn’t seem to be following their way at all any more… but when he’s confronted with a Nephilim his response is immediately falling back on his angel rules, and of course we then immediately get another story showing how he’s obeyed them unthinkingly in the past, and how it’s now some internalised thing he’s never REALLY questioned, and that apparently all this time he’s been carrying around the assumption that humans and angels are NOT MEANT to have sex? Like yeah the OTHER angels think he and Cas are doing it and probably have been since like, season 4 at a worst estimate, but this tells us that Cas himself has been suffering away under this rule the entire time we’ve known him… Yikes. Talk about a hurdle to overcome… But one they’ve shown us in the text, and one that is ALREADY being questioned when it comes to nephilim… which I suppose now will be code for how Cas feels about sleeping with humans :P (I already have talked about how I think Cas will eventually change his mind because of the set up of him starting off adhering to this absolute rule but beginning to change his mind.. That’s the direction character growth lies in, so…))

[eisforeidolon]

It looked like Dean was impaled through the liver, and given the abuse it’s taken minutes to live before bleed feels accurate. Some gauze want gonna stop internal bleeding. Also, I’m pretty sure the script made mention that the nearest hospital was miles away so an ambulance was not feasible. It wasn’t passive suicide, it was Dean understanding he didn’t have much time left, and not wanting to die w/out telling Sam everything he needed to tell him.

Pretty sure you're right about the hospital, anon. As to the anatomy, I know there were speculative discussions at the time, but I honestly do not have the specific knowledge to say. However, I don't think you actually need to have more than the most basic grasp of anatomy to understand that a giant metal bar slamming through a cavity packed with vital organs would realistically be fatal in many if not most cases.

To some extent I wonder if part of the problem is that they've been bamboozled by tv injuries in general and Supernatural's in specific? We see Sam and Dean shake off everything from being thrown into walls, knocked unconscious, violently choked, to Sam wandering around fighting werewolves after being gut shot. Those kind of injuries only slowed them down when the script said so. Add that on top of the shippers' consistent attempts to claim a rebar is 'just a nail' ...

Except if you accept the whole Chuck was masterminding their lives in minute detail all along and the luck nonsense? It's pretty clear surviving those kinds of injuries would obviously be part of that. So with him out of the picture, there's no more superhuman healing, and it's a dire injury in reality. Which both Winchesters know, but Sam is trying to deny until Dean forces him to face how bad it is. Similar to how Dean tried to deny how hurt Sam was at Cold Oak. Similar to how Sam tried to deny Dean was dying after being stabbed by Metatron. Where in both cases the supernatural and/or Chuck was directly involved in them coming back anyway. Again, the whole point is that's over now.

But they want to ignore that aspect to headcanon it was Chuck forcing Dean to stick with Sam without his twue lurve Castiel and so he immediately tried to die as soon as he could once Chuck was gone! Personally, I headcanon that the only reason the Winchesters kept forgiving Castiel's myriad constant betrayals is because Chuck forced them to, and that's why Dean immediately stops giving any fucks about the angel once Chuck is neutralized. Which is also likely not the author's intention, but at least it isn't directly contradicted by the following scenes.

The writers could just as easily have shown both Winchesters in fright wigs dying at an old age, or dying together, and it would have had exactly as much to do with whether or not Castiel was around. But because Dean died earlier to give the bittersweet ending the writers were going for? They can ignore all the actually extant narrative reasons it happened that way to believe if he'd come back just one more time he totally would have admitted he was totes devastated and *dramatic sob* in lurve with the angel!!! LOL, no. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯