#unrelated note I fuckin hate the word chassis

[an-android-in-a-tutu]

But just like generally the lobotomy arc and Cas’ selective amnesia bothers me a bit because I feel like it never reaches some kind of resolution. I feel like in a lot of ways it just sort of exists to retcon that Cas was always a special boy and while he is the specialest boy to me I don’t like that and I think there’s juicy character stuff to be had there if you just break down into it!

Like, I feel like if you’re going to reveal that a character has a past that even they aren’t aware of you have gotta use that to kick off some kind of identity crisis. Either you give Cas back his memories bc this is magic world and lobotomies can be reversible if we say so, and have him realize that he’s an entirely different person than he always thought he was and he needs to reconcile who he’s become with the memories of who he was, or you don’t but then he still has to figure out how to come to terms with the parts of his history he’ll never know and grapple with what this means for his idea of himself going forward.

Cas is kind of, arguably he’s a character who relies a lot on other people for his self-perception, like he defines himself according to how other people see him, and he can have a tendency to be self-deluding. So when you take a character like that and you tell him. Hey, your sense of identity is actually literally constructed by an outside force. Like this is how you see yourself but it’s fake and was created for you by someone else so you could better fit a role. That’s something isn’t it? Doesn’t that feel like a starting point to get him to maybe confront a whole lot of identity issues?

Like the whole “came off the line with a crack in his chassis” thing has the potential to be compelling to me, not because it actually means that Cas was special or broken from day one, but because it runs directly counter to the other narrative we have about Castiel which is the minute he lay a hand on Dean’s soul in hell he was lost/Castiel was a good soldier until he met Dean narrative. And the tension between those two opposing ideas is never really confronted or resolved!

We know which one Cas prefers, “I loved the whole world because of you” and all, he very much sees Dean as having changed him and made him better and that makes sense, because from his perspective that is very much what happened. Even if he rebelled before he can’t remember it, it doesn’t really change this version of events or make it less meaningful to him.

But! I still feel like that would be fascinating for him to confront and work through. Because I don’t think either of those narratives are fully true or that one is more accurate than the other. I think those are just two ways that angels try to explain Castiel. Either he was broken and/or special all along and is rebellion is an expression of that or he was a normal angel once before he was corrupted into what he is now.

But like Castiel, like any angel, was kind of just a person. A person who kept having their agency stripped away until he ended up in the right place at the right time and managed to escape the system that was doing that to him long enough to get solid footing and push back, and Sam and Dean helped him do that, and it had to be in that time and place with those people in order for so much to come of it, but that doesn’t mean that was the first or only time it happened, or the only way it could have happened.

And I think it would be cool for Cas to have to figure out who he is if he’s kind of always been a person, because he does kind of view himself primarily by his utility and he does kind of have a hard time separating himself out from Dean, and that’s one reason why I think that’d make a valuable character arc for him because if he was always kind of a person, and he wasn’t an automaton that first came to life when he touched Dean’s soul- for one thing if Dean didn’t create him then maybe Dean isn’t God and doesn’t have to be obeyed like he is.

Which is why I think it’s kind of cool that when Cas first breaks out of the angel brainwashing he takes the tablet and runs from everyone Including Dean, but this is Supernatural so that kind of arc isn’t allowed to happen and Cas gets punished for that obviously.

Anyway long story short this is why Meg should have lived so she and Cas could have their hot girl summer and find themselves on like a fun road trip.