Adieu les monstres! Adieu les saints!

I obviously can’t speak for him because I’m not writing the show, but let me tell you, I have lived my entire life as a bi person and didn’t realize that the attraction I had to the same sex made me a real life gay until this year. It’s not something I actively squished down either. I just didn’t think about it much until it hit me over the head that I was ignoring another side of myself. 

The reason I replied to this post in the first place (which I should’ve clarified) was because I didn’t agree with @postmodernmulticoloredcloak ‘s tags

the interpretation of him as repressed or in denial is getting more and more grating to me that boy knows his shit okay dean is bi spn

I don’t think it’s fair to say that Dean isn’t in some form of denial or that he isn’t repressing part of his identity (which is why I think it’s possible that he doesn’t apply bi/gay labels to himself-yet). I mean, performing!Dean exists for a reason. If denial/repression wasn’t an issue we would see a much more open Dean. 

My interpretation of Dean is that he’s muuuuch more aware than most part of the fandom seems to give him credit for, and as I always say that’s the tragedy of Dean, that he chooses to sacrifice emotional needs he knows he has for self-preservation and family-preservation, so to speak. And there’s also that aspect of self-deprecation @f-ckyeahfutbol has pointed out which I think it’s all connected, he self-deprecates because he knows he has emotional/sexual/whatever needs that make him a freak in the context of the cultural and mental frame he’s grown up in. So yeah I think he’s been quite self-aware since day 1. I see his journey more about self-acceptance than self-discovery tbh, while is Sam’s case there’s a process of self-discovery and Dean-discovery so to speak.

As an aside, I had a conversation with my partner when we were starting to date about when we knew we were queer, and they introduced the topic of conversation with “Well, that’s always the kind of thing you ask another queer person, isn’t it?“ We all have a... journey, and for ourselves we write a story about it.

I obviously can’t speak for him because I’m not writing the show, but let me tell you, I have lived my entire life as a bi person and didn’t realize that the attraction I had to the same sex made me a real life gay until this year. It’s not something I actively squished down either. I just didn’t think about it much until it hit me over the head that I was ignoring another side of myself. 

The implications of the scene are as follows:

Chuck has watched porn before.

Chuck has watched a lot of porn before.

Dean has a lot of porn on his laptop.

Dean saves pornography on his laptop.

Dean has more porn on his laptop that Chuck had ever watched before on one sitting.

Chuck watched all of Dean’s porn.

Chuck had finished watching all of Dean’s porn and had moved on to watching curling.

Further, Chuck masturbated to Dean’s pornography. This is implied not only by the body-language of the actors, but also by the game of curling playing on the laptop. Curling being a slang term for male masturbation.

Even further, Dean’s body-language implies that he knows that Chuck had masturbated to the pornography because that is what he has done to it.

But beyond the visual pun, curling is a very LGBT friendly sport. To the point that LGBT and curling associations are mutually beneficial for each other, existing in a kind of symbiosis. It’s the perfect sport for bisexual Chuck Shurley to be watching.

And I would be ready to bet real money on him watching the Bison Cup.

You know.

So, we know that Dean had a lot of pornography, and we know that Dean had the kind of pornography one doesn’t usually watch in one sitting. But what do we know about the content of his pornography?

Well, friends. The episode was written by Buckner and Ross-Leming who, as it happens, gave us a hint at Dean’s stash earlier on in the season, in The Bad Seed. To quote from an earlier post:

The show has been using pornography to signal subtext since pretty early on, and there’s always more to it than what the surface reading reveals. The Asian pornography has been shown in specific scenes, and since the new Carver era, the Casa Erotica has likewise been used to signal subtextual content.

You indicate that Buckner and Ross-Lemming don’t write in subtext, that in their episodes the subtext is more in direction and set design? I felt that was always the case with Adam Glass, not with the terrible duo. They write subtext. They write anvilicious, sometimes pretty offensive queer subtext, but they write it.

And Fortune Nookie is a great example of this. They wrote in Castiel finding a pornographic film and uttering the words, “What’s a Fortune Nookie?“ It’s a film title of both a straight porn film and a gay porn film, both pretty high profile. I’d say the gay porn film is the better know of the two. The set design then further aided the ambiguity, because the fact that the title is in Dean’s “last search results“ is dealer’s choice on how you interpret its being there.

This means, Dean had searched for “Fortune Nookie“ on his laptop, and in searching for ‘Fortune Nookie’ one is far more likely to search for the famous Chi Chi LaRue film than for anything else. That is, gay porn. Dean had evidently searched for gay porn on his laptop.

So, the writers that gave us Chuck watching all of Dean’s porn also gave us a reference to a famous gay porn film in their earlier episode.

Ergo, Dean has gay porn and probably also straight porn on his laptop.

Dean and LGBTQ Characters 1

03.13 // 05.09 // 07.20 // 11.19

The burger date.

The scene in Andrew Dabb’s The Things We Left Behind, directed by one of the few people involved with the show that have come out and said that Destiel is not a thing that the show is doing (Sure, Jan). The scene between Dean and Castiel has been analyzed to death, and there were several comprehensive posts also comparing the scene between Dean and Castiel to the scene between Castiel and Claire in both composition and content.

But one thing that I don’t remember reading, that I feel is missing, was a comparison between the scene of Dean and Castiel at the diner and the scene between Sam and Dean in the bunker earlier in the episode. And I think this is crucially important.

I first started thinking about this in response to questions by Sam-girls as to why the scene of Sam preparing the grilled cheese sandwich for his brother Dean was cut out of the episode. There was a response by someone involved with the show (I want to say Jim Michaels?) that it was cut for time which didn’t satisfy the fans demanding answers, because there were so many other things that could have been cut for time in the episode. And I agree with these people, although do not share their upset over the scene being cut.

Because cutting the scene of Sam preparing the sandwich and having Sam deliver the sandwich to Dean brings the two scenes into sharper contrast, and we need to contrast the two scenes.

We cannot understand one without the other. We need both scenes to get the full impact of the other. Andrew Dabb, as I’ve discussed many, many times in the past, loves narrative symmetry and his scenes are always in conversation with and complementing one another. And these two scenes are especially dependent on each other, the first interpreting the second and vice versa.

So, what we learn from the first scene is that Dean hasn’t been eating for a long time. Sam doesn’t prepare food for Dean. Sam doesn’t concern himself with Dean’s eating usually. Dean is the big brother that takes care of his little brother Sam and makes sure that Sam is fed.

Andrew Dabb has written more about Sam and Dean’s childhood than just about any writer on the show, has established the canon of their childhood in which Dean took care of Sam, was parentified. It was in Andrew Dabb’s Clip Show that we saw Dean still take care of Sam as an adult, making sure that he got something to eat even when they had nothing to eat in the bunker. And this scene is in sharp contrast with what we have learned about the boys in the past. This is the first time we see Sam take care of Dean’s physical needs. That is how concerned Sam is for Dean. This is to emphasize how long it has been since Dean last ate, last concerned himself with food, how small of an appetite he has under the thrall of the Mark of Cain.

Dean is not hungry. He doesn’t seek out food. But he eats the sandwich that Sam has made for him – in order to avoid having a conversation with his brother.

The line that laid the foundation for Sam and Dean’s scene, which lingered over it, was spoken by Sandy the social worker just prior to the first shot of Dean in the episode [about Claire]: “She doesn’t need a friend, she needs a father”. We are meant to ask of Dean what he currently needs  – is it a father? Is it a friend? Is it a brother? Or something besides?

Sam, Dean’s brother, attempts to mother Dean, and that is the wrong answer. Dean doesn’t need Sam to be his mother. It’s a bust. Dean doesn’t respond but withdraws.

In the scene, Sam and Dean sit at the same table but there is a distance between them. Dean uses the Three Stooges film he’s watching to build and maintain a wall between them. While they are sitting down together at the same table, watching the same film, laughing together, they’re not actually connecting. There’s a disconnect between them. Dean is avoiding the exploration of his own inner feelings, his own dark thoughts, by escaping into watching a comedy, disguising his true thoughts and feelings into levity, which is what he does. We’ve known since the first season that when he’s really hurting, when he’s truly in pain, he will make a joke out of it. It’s how he deals.

There’s a disconnect between Sam and Dean while Dean eats the sandwich Sam prepared for him. Their conversation tends toward the trivial. Dean is not hungry. They are both dishonest – Sam telling Dean that he’s glad he’s feeling better when what he is is concerned for his brother, and Dean letting Sam think he’s doing better when he’s genuinely not. When, and we learn this in the other scene, what Dean is thinking about inside while he laughs on the outside, is that Sam will never be able to stop him when the moment will inevitably come that Dean Winchester needs someone to stop him. That is the subtext in the scene.

“Better than ever,” Dean tells to Sam. It is every inch a bold faced lie. Dean is not honest with Sam. Dean is not even honest with the sandwich while he greets it with “Hello, beautiful!” And Sam is not honest with Dean, his gaze lingering on the Mark of Cain, clearly worried but keeping it all inside.

Sam returns to being Dean’s brother by teasing him, asking him whether he needs some alone time with the sandwich, as he makes some obscene sounds of pleasure acquainting himself with it. This is also in contrast with the other scene.

They sit together. They laugh. They share a picturesque broment. And everything about it rings hollow. Everything about it is a lie.

In the other scene, Sam doesn’t ask Dean whether he needs alone time with Castiel. Sam can tell that he does, and agrees basically to work the case on his own to let Dean have the time alone with his friend that he clearly wants and needs.

Everything in the diner scene is an inversion of the scene between Sam and Dean.

Where Dean had avoided Sam’s company in the bunker they shared together, Dean seems to have dropped everything the minute Castiel called to get to him. Where Dean pretended for Sam, he has no artifice with Castiel. He tells his honest thoughts, he shares his feelings. They don’t laugh at something outside of themselves, but share humor between them. They connect.

Dean is hungry. He’s really hungry. He’s not pretending to be hungry to avoid a conversation. He’s hungry to a point that he does something he knows will look very strange to the normal, every-day on-lookers in the restaurant. He lies neither to Castiel nor to Castiel’s sandwich. It is Castiel that attempts to avoid having a real conversation with Dean initially, making small-talk on the ketchup. It’s Dean that insist they have a real conversation about what’s bothering him. It’s Dean that insists on a real, genuine, honest connection between them.

Dean looks at Castiel and tells him, “Hell, yes” in tones that have more want in them than his dishonest “Hello, beautiful” had had previously.

Dean is interested in how Castiel is doing, not feigning interest. He wants to know how Castiel is doing where he had no interest in how Sam was doing, where he avoided his rather obviously hurting little brother earlier.

I want to emphasize this: the fact that Sam actually made a sandwich for his big brother Dean whose nutrition he has never felt responsible for in his life means that Dean had not been eating, had not been hungry, for long enough of a time for Sam to have paid attention to it, for Sam to have become worried about it. This same Dean eats two sets of burgers and fries, the epitome of a hungry, hungry hippo.

The contrast is of utmost importance.

They have a normal conversation, and then they have a deep, emotional conversation, and the question lingering over all of this is whether what Dean needs is a friend and a confidant over a brother at this moment – or whether it is something else besides that he needs. Unlike Claire he does need a friend absolutely, of this much we can be certain.

Castiel sits on the same side of the table that Sam had occupied at the bunker, but where Dean had been turned toward his lap-top his entire body is open and facing his friend, leaning toward him like a dove huddling for affection.

Where Sam did not ask Dean how he was doing but spoke what they both knew was a lie about Dean looking better, Castiel asks directly. And initially, Dean does lie. It’s a reflexive lie, it’s his instinct. But where Castiel doesn’t press him but merely gives him space, he does fess up to the truth of what he’s feeling.

Where it was dark in the bunker, it’s very bright in the diner. Where Dean was wrapped in dark tones, he’s now shed his dark cloak. Where he avoided Sam’s gaze, he looks Castiel directly in the eyes, his gaze firm except for when the bashfully look away. We cannot understand the full impact of one scene without the other.

And don’t mistake this contrasting of the scenes for a competition for Dean’s affection. This is not a Dean-off. The scenes are contrasted to highlight the theme of “Love… and love” in the narrative, of what we were told over and over during the tenth season. Dean loves both Sam and Castiel. Both Sam and Castiel love Dean. These things are truths that we hold self-evident. But they are not one and the same, love… and love.  

Sometimes a girl needs both a father and a friend. And sometimes a guy needs both a brother and… that very loud negative space.

Everyone is talking about the parentage of Rey, the force sensitive girl from the Episode VII. The popular theories are that either she is the child of Luke Skywalker – and there are many, many parallels between them – or that she is another child of Han and Leia’s. She does look so much like Leia and especially Padme that it seems likely she is of the lineage.

I’ve been trying to work out the math, but I think it’s possible she might actually be Ben Solo’s child. She’s probably around 17 in the film (the actress is slightly older), which would make Han, Luke, and Leia too old for her parents. I’m not sure how old Ben Solo is supposed to be, as the actor looks rather younger than his years, but I would like to draw attention to two things.

First, in the flash-back we see of the Knights of Ren, the night that something happened between Kylo Ren and Luke Skywalker which lead Kylo to possess Luke’s lightsaber, he’s already a grown man. And in the scene Rey, who was taken away from someone, was around five years old. Assuming that Kylo Ren’s corruption to the Dark Side took a while, he might well have fathered a five year old child by this time. In fact, his turn to the Dark Side may have started around the time of Rey’s birth.

And secondly, his grandfather also fathered children at a young age, with an older woman, which eventually lead to his turn to the Dark Side: romantic love, fear of loss, etc. Carnal knowledge was forbidden to the Jedi for a reason. Also, it does not seem as though Luke has engaged in carnal knowledge, sequestered as he is like a monk.

5.06:

Behind Sam: a poster of a magician that ran away as a child to join the circus.

Behind Dean: a rainbow wig on a stiff in a suit.

Dean complains about Los Angeles, his first and main objection being guys in skinny jeans that wear sun glasses inside.

Castiel tells Dean that he looks like a lumberjack.

Dean works the case in a leather coat and skinny jeans wearing sun glasses inside in an outfit we have never seen him in before.

There are people in this fandom that keep and keep spreading misinformation  that has no basis in reality which a lot of people seem to take for the truth just because it has been repeated often enough.

The series creator Eric Kripke has never called Dean Winchester straight. In a round table interview in Comic Con in 2013, in just one of many, he spoke of his thematic of unstated homoerotic subtext in his work, paralleling the brothers Sam and Dean to the characters Sebastian and Miles from his new show Revolution, which was the topic of the interview, and he called Sebastian and Miles straight guys. He did not call Dean Winchester a straight guy. At no point did he call Dean Winchester a straight guy. He has never called Dean Winchester a straight guy in any recorded interview in the last eleven years. Eric Kripke has, however, confessed on his own twitter account that he used Hellblazer, Good Omens, American Gods, and Sandman as his inspiration for The Pilot episode. These influences have something in common.

The two other show runners have never commented on Dean Winchester’s sexuality at all. Sera Gamble described the show as the epic lovestory of Sam and Dean.

It also falsely claimed that all the writers either think Dean Winchester is straight (which is naturally unverifiable but extremely unlikely), or that all the writers have in fact said that Dean Winchester is straight.

The only writer that is quoted on having described Dean Winchester as heterosexual is Ben Edlund – according to Jensen Ackles’ 2013 Jus in Bello convention appearance. This claim was made in reference to the same scene (8.13) that Ben Edlund himself, in his own words, describes on the DVD commentary of being a romantic comedy kind of fluster and that Dean and Aaron could come together, agreeing with the director Phil Scriggia that there’s potential for love in all places for him.

Robert Berens approves of fans thinking that Dean likes both dick and vag in French.

Robbie Thompson once tweeted “Destiel isn’t canon? ;)” and has since deleted the tweet.

Cathryn Humphris thought Nick the Siren was based on “Dean’s perfect mate”.

Adam Glass is of the opinion that you’re free to interpret the story as you damn well like.

That is all we know about the opinions of the writers even tangentially related to Dean Winchester’s sexuality. And this is only a small handful of writers. Not one of the writers currently writing for the show has ever called Dean Winchester straight, not once, not anywhere that can be verified.

In the interest of not falsely presenting the evidence, I will also add that the director Guy Norman Bee has stated on twitter that Destiel is not the story. He was, however, not commenting on Dean Winchester’s sexuality.

Dean complains about Los Angeles, his first and main objection being guys in skinny jeans that wear sun glasses inside.

Castiel tells Dean that he looks like a lumberjack.

Dean works the case in a leather coat and skinny jeans wearing sun glasses inside in an outfit we have never seen him in before.

he must hate it

did he hated that water…

or what?

Now, let’s pretend for a moment that this isn’t a tv show. If this moment was happening in real life, if one of my friends said they hate cucumber water, but later ended up drinking it, I would think, maybe they secretly like cucumber water, maybe they were just thirsty enough to overlook the fact that it was cucumber water and just drink the damn thing.

Except this isn’t real life, this is a TV show with a limited amount of time to tell a story each week. And there’s a very specific reason this little “Dean ends up doing everything he previously claimed to hate” subplot happened.

Also, even if this was real life, you know why I could not buy that Dean is just thirsty and ~forcing himself to drink cucumber water?

Look at the first gif: when Sam pours himself water, that’s precisely what’s in his glass: water. Just water.

By contrast, look at when Dean pours himself water. There’s a cucumber in his glass. There’s no way a cucumber could’ve made its way into that glass without someone putting it there. The someone who put it there is Dean. So he clearly likes cucumber water enough to want to add even a little bit more cucumber.

Who are reblogging and replying to my Bi Dean posts trying to tell me I’m delusional.

*sighs*