i know we have said this 1 million times before but how does a character as psychologically complex as dean winchester exist on a cw show…how does a character like that exist anywhere besides a dostoevsky novel. his delicacy literally makes me feel like i’m shattering into pieces
#he was an accident #a freak of nature #i’ll give some credit to kripke but most of the credit should go to jensen #he’s the one who fell in love with dean and wanted to give him the world - @laurelwinchester
That’s not even a lie, Kripke gave an interview where he specifically said it was what Jensen Ackles brought out in his potrayal of Dean Winchester that started to inspire their writing of the character. He specially mentioned how he brought to life the “screwed to hell psyche” that would inform that kind of character. It was something they didn’t expect at all. This isn’t the original one, which was done about mid-way through Season 1, but he saying something similar here in this 2008 interview.(Shame the current writers decided to make sure they erased that and do their damnedest to bring Dean back the stereotype he never really ended up being in the first place)
“For Dean, we were looking for Han Solo. We were looking for devil-may-care, charismatic, a little rough around the edges, a little edgy, says things that are not always the kindest thing, as long as they’re funny. And that was really what we started out with……
….For Jensen, the level of emotion and totally flawed, screwed-to-hell psyche that he brings to Dean, we really are enamored with. This idea that on the surface here’s this Han Solo devil-may-care persona, but when you really scratch beneath the surface, you see that anyone who has that persona has it because they are just so messed up, and that you would have to be so screwed up and damaged to be the person who always jumps first off a cliff.
So, he really brought Dean to life in a really three-dimensional way…
What I love is the way Jensen brought so much truth and importance to the role, I mean it’s in the writing that Dean has been through hell since childhood, but with Jensen he made sure all of that was put under the microscope. Everything that Dean goes through matters, becomes important, because Jensen makes it so through his acting, it’s in Dean’s body language, in this facial expressions, as well as the way he expresses himself. Nothing is throw away, nothing is brushed off, instead everything Dean does via Jensen is laced with meaning, and it’s been like that right from the start.
In the pilot episode, when Sam tells Dean he can go hunting alone, and Dean says back “yeah well, I don’t want to” that right there is when Dean is immediately more than just the cocky older brother. It’s a throw away line, and yet it’s quoted in posts all across tumblr and is a defining Dean moment thanks to Jensen’s delivery. It contains all these layers that were yet to be pulled back, it forces you to ask questions and want to know him more, what did he mean by that? What’s beneath the surface?
It’s also why often the show was so frustrating, because all of this extra meaning was not always picked up by the writers, sp we were often left hanging, wanting more.
For all his good looks and leading man qualities, Jensen didn’t just turn up and look pretty, instead he plays/played Dean as a character actor would, focusing heavily on the character inside and out, his mentality, his likes, dislikes, dress sense, everything and made him real.
Dean Winchester ought to be a joy to write, if you are a capable writer, and in the early days you had the likes of Ben Edlund and Raelle Tucker just relishing the opportunity to explore the character, it’s a shame the current set of writers don’t see it that way at all.
#there’s really just something About dean that elevates him #he’s beyond all other characters on spn and most on other shows too and like. it makes no sense and it’s not intuitive but it Is #and that’s why a show like spn is treating him so badly. they don’t know what the hell to do with a character like that #the reason the writers hate him is that they dont understand him. and probably bc theyre all classist #same goes for fandom #and theyre doing their hardest to stomp out that Spark but they can’t really. they can try but they can’t erase the seasons #that cemented him. made him. that made him so important to me and so many people #the dean they created semi by accident and by jensen’s influence can’t be taken from us no matter how badly they’re writing now #because we know him. because he’s touched us #and yes this is turning sappy but i mean it #this whole thing is depressing as hell but the comfort is that as the audience we can do what we like with what we’ve been given #and what we’ve been Given is one of the most wonderful heart-wrenching and evocative characters IMHO of all time #for all that he was intended to be kind of the opposite of that #it’s poetic really #i don’t think they could have created dean winchester if they had tried to #text #meta: dean #(sort of. as usual) - @tenderdean
excellent tags!
So much all of this. Even the “been through hell since childhood”, a lot of what they ended up writing in those early seasons I think was inspired by Jensen’s performance first. I don’t think they’d actually given that much thought to the details besides John Winchester was a kind of abusive hardass. I think a lot of the Dean the caretaker they got from Jensen’s performance itself, even in the pilot you get a sense of it, at least I did, from the scene on the bridge. he’s angry, he pushes Sam against the bridge, but then he’s very quiet and almost kind of sad when he talks and immediately I was hit with the idea that Dean is used to taking care of Sam and he understands and is sad that Sam didn’t know their mother, even though he is angry to hear her seemingly dismissed.
The way Jensen would play some of those scenes about being Dad’s golden boy(as Sam called him I think in Bugs) or his response to Sam’s comment in uh…the one with Max, was it Nightmare?…Max’s father is abusive and at the end Sam says maybe there dad wasn’t so bad afterall, a little more tequila and a little less hunting they might have had Jack’s childhood and Dean gives this meaningful pause before he says “All things considered” and these things really gave the idea that it actually wasn’t a GOOD thing to be Dad’s “right hand man” so to speak and that maybe there were things that happened that Sam didn’t know about, because Dean protected him from them. That was just season one of course as things got more fleshed out there was even more of that.
I don’t know if Jensen was actually thinking specifically of what may have happened but he obviously instinctively knew that these are the sort of experiences that made Dean, Dean. Jensen knew how to give a lot of weight to what was NOT written and to fill silences with meaning.
Hmm, I do have to say I think all the writers never really fully knew what to do with Dean but I think saying the currect writers didn’t know at all what do with Dean isn’t putting it justly.
Bringing Mary back was a great idea in terms of exploring Dean’s character and furthering his character development, better than anything before. I think they tried as hard as they could to give us really good writing for Dean but they truly weren’t talented enough to bring out moments that would have been absolutely fantastic to watch. They did give us these moments where Dean is dealing with his mom being a flawed human being but it always feels like they’re hitting a wall.
But the scene where Dean confronts Mary about what her death put him through, in my opinion, is one of the greatest moments of exploring Dean’s character in the show. It gives us so much of Dean’s pain and truth he’s never been allowed to express before and you have to give it to these writers for giving us that.
You have to consider that these current writers are in a much different position than the writers were at the start of the show. Those old writers had so much to work with and explore and give us but all of that was allowed to be just surface level stuff. They were building his character.
These current writers have to write for an already built character, they have to push in deep and pull strings of emotions and feelings out. There’s no more surface writing for these writers to do, Dean character is already there and they have to figure out how to pull new emotions out of Dean that have been established as hard to see.
I think seeing the current writers as hating Dean isn’t seeing the whole truth. When you’re at the stage of writing they are, it isn’t about what can we add on to Dean’s character, it’s more about what can we put in his way to give us things we haven’t seen before. Notice Sam isn’t as affected by Mary’s flaws. Dean was very affected. Mary was put back in the story so that the writers could explore Dean’s character. Amara gave Dean’s mother back FOR DEAN. Cas was killed so they could explore his character. Even before the Dabb era, they had Cas be Lucifer’s vessel and that itself let them pull a little bit more character out of Dean.
Yeah, I think there’s things Dabb didnt completely understand about Dean’s character (wtf is with John in the 300th ep) but saying they’re bad writers or that they don’t like Dean isn’t putting the work they put in justly at all.
We really don’t know what happened with the finale but it’s clear something happened. I wish we could have seen the original product because his writing for Dean is much much better than what we saw. Like in “The Prisoner,” Dean and Sam are burning Charlie’s body and Dean tells Sam he wished it was Sam that died instead. You might need to see the scene to understand but that was such interesting writing and nothing even close to what that finale was. And Dabb, in his pre-era stuff did so much poking and prodding. Cas bringing up how if he went to heaven he might kill himself. The date in “the things we left behind,” Cas telling Dean he doesn’t think Dean’s a bad role model was such a good little thing that gives us something we haven’t seen before. The episode itself dealing with Cas’ emotions about being a vessel and what it did to his vessel’s family. It’s never a large amount of stuff but saying that they don’t know how to write about Dean because of the finale is dumb. They obviously had an agenda about Dean’s character that would’ve passed through that wall they always smack into but things were majorly fucked with script wise and editing wise, and it really sucks.
This is correct but also most of this post was made pre-finale so I don’t think that’s what OP is talking about when they say the writers don’t quite understand him
hmmmmmm I see.
All this made me realise how desperately I wanted to see Jensen’s portrayal of Dean’s reaction to Cas’ truth, whatever that might have been, it was something new to learn about Dean and we just didn’t. And it’s not that Dean reacting to the speech was lacking, it’s that it wasn’t his answer, his thoughts, it was mostly shock. I think we got robbed, but Jensrn also got robbed giving us something new about Dean. And while that scene with Sam was acted well, even amazing as always, those are things, feelings we’ve seen before. We never got to see what Dean was thinking of experiencing differently or maybe even for the first time. And that, to me, is the biggest tragedy of the ending.
