deancas hq

Jack’s ideal Heaven? A memory of his TFW hunting trip *clutches heart*

It’s dazzlingly bright and optimism-imbued e.g. 14x06, portraying Jack’s internal/personal perception of his family on Earth: his awareness of them - how he witnesses them and knows them as they work a case in Dodge City, one of the fave key locales of Jack’s daddy Dean.

Let me point out—

Wanek and Co continue the quite overt onset arrangements of TFW’s ever-shifting inter-relational dynamics (since S12) with some drinks distinctly placed on the Impala’s hood.

EDIT: 4 drinks are scattered - with 1 at the table in proximity to Sam and 1 that is Jack’s - in that the 2 drinks in the same cup holder are the closest together (oddly enough, one can mistake the two cups for one in this frame —> interpersonal closeness. Literally.)

Sam’s in his element, tip-tapping away by Skipper’s entrance (nautical themes evoking ships, wow Wanek).

Dean and Cas, meanwhile, are ready for map time with Jack the newly minted hunter.

Back on Earth, TFW drink to Jack’s memory in the kitchen, (Dean’s) Heart and Home, and D/C take up the close frames of intimate familiarity as they bond.

Oh hey, two beers! Interpersonal (romantic) bonding connotations (as established since S9).

Throughout S13 (and carrying over into S14), we observe that Sam, Dean and Cas unequivocally occupy their roles as Jack’s three paternal figures. Of course, in 14x08 Sam is emotionally distraught after Jack’s passing. Dean, struck with grief, leaves the room out of self-guilt re: his harsh derision and mistreatment of Jack after his birth. Yet, the nature of TFW’s individual relationships with respect to Jack maintain characteristic differences. Cas, the picture of narrative spouse-coded support, is empathetic yet firm, and he asserts to Dean that he should become the man Cas knows he can be. Strong. “Jack needs you,” he says, and in this context, Cas retains his consistent narrative place as both Jack’s immediate father and Dean’s emotional anchor and stability in death’s aftermath as a spouse, while Dean and Cas both possess specific emotive bonding moments with Jack (14x04 hunting trip, 14x07 trip) but oh my gosh I digress—

In his Heaven, Jack perceives Dean and Cas as a unit/partnership, with visual narrative depictions of them once again set apart from Independent Sam doing his business in the background.

Aka the Dean and Cas of Jack’s Heaven, juxtaposed by their living counterparts on Earth (narratively independent from Sam altogether), nudge audiences with their existence and directly call back to Sam’s very similar 13x21 dream sequence, where Dean and Cas seemingly are, you got it, a partnership:

In both Jack and Sam’s subconscious reconstruction of their perceived family, Dean and Cas are represented in a textual deep friendship. Dual partnership. Subtextual heavily coded romantic relationship.

Looking at such (increasingly tangible) visual/storytelling patterns e.g. 14x07’s certain physical boundaries between D/C the unit and Sam—

—I’ll no doubt keep watching with wide (unsurprised) eyes, because under the relevant overarching theme Love and…Love -> one of these things, my lovely friends (complete with significant physical interaction and spousal stability by touch), is not like the other.

Two’s company, three’s a crowd.

Dean’s being driven around by other people alongside Sam taking the Impala in 14x08 -> he’s choosing to step back and finally relinquish control by giving his loved ones free reign.

(as opposed to 13x15, where Dean was coerced to give up the driver’s seat to the MoL - good catch @thetwistedwillow(?) or was it @castielslostwings / @coinofstone pointing this out? We thought that was just a Michael!Dean metaphor. Well, plot relevance wasn’t the sole reason these visuals were narratively implemented, but character relevance.)

#i saw an interesting idea that while the show was supposed to be about sam #dean was a more interesting character and jensen was a better actor #so obvs sam took a back seat #but the finale was basically trying to shoehorn sam back into the lead position #like he was originally supposed to be #and it just…. didn’t work #supernatural #spn

First of all kudos for the url…

The idea was that the story was ~about the two brothers~, which I suppose would share screentime in a fairly balanced manner, but Sam was intended to the the point-of-view character, the “filter” we would experience the story through.

It makes sense on paper: Sam is a character in a situation we can relate to (college student living a regular life), whom something happens to we can sympathize with (he loses his girlfriend tragically) and who - while he knows about that world having grown up in it - has distanced himself from the world of the supernatural, so we, the audience, who enter into that world for the first time as we watch the show, “enter” that world together with Sam as he re-enters it.

Dean, on the other hand, is a character who’s always been in that world, so he can’t be our “guide” into entering it. He also has a lifestyle we can’t really relate to, because the audience in front of the tv is obviously closer to the college guy than the rebellious nomadic monster-killer. He doesn’t have attachments other than to this mysterious missing dad, and is a generally mysterious person himself, so Dean is sort of an object to discover and decode rather than a subject to identify with.

Enter Jensen Ackles and Dean is suddenly a magnetic character who exudes a vulnerability that people can, indeed, relate to.

Enter Sera Gamble, Raelle Tucker, and John Shiban (I’d say the authors who most explored Dean in s1) and they do write Dean in a way that’s interesting and touching.

(Sera Gamble is a weird case, because she can do utter disasters but also write really good things, one could argue she’s the one person who most drove Supernatural from Kripke’s original idea to what we actually got, she’s the one who most drove the story away from ‘urban legends’ to religious themes & co, and while I haven’t seen the Magicians I know that she’s both the person who built a very interesting story and destroyed it.)

Dean and Jensen have carried the show all along both because Dean ended up a more compelling character and also because Dean has the strongest (narratively and emotionally) relationships. All the most interesting side characters have relationships with Dean, with a few exceptions (and again if a side character has a relationship with Sam, their exchanges with Dean are still more interesting, just think of Ruby!).

Crowley was supposed to be “associated” to Sam in the Carver era, to balance Dean’s association to Cas (s7 ends with Crowley making a cruel speech to Sam, the scene in the church where Sam almost turns Crowley human, Rowena using Sam to kill Crowley…) but Crowley ends up having a massive arc with Dean and a love triangle with Dean and Cas, which is why the Carver era is so unbalanced towards Dean XD (Then the writers did their best to make Rowena a “Sam character”, but at that point she was quite her own character with her story with Crowley and all, so it wasn’t really a narrative-supporting arc.)

Mary was both Dean’s and Sam’s mother, but her relationship is with Dean. Jack was presumably supposed to be associated to Sam more, too, with Sam taking him under his wing while Cas is dead and Dean blames Jack for it, but the relationship between Dean and Jack is the one that immediately stands out and gets developed.

So, a truly neutral non-shipper that’s relatively new to the fandom legitimately asked why I ship Destiel, when I said I tend to see it in a different perspective than most shippers and have, even, gotten some shippers angry at me in my opinions. It’s not the first either. Sometimes shippers, sometimes nonshippers. It turns out to be a very long discussion with a lot of interest/prodding going on, so what I’m doing is copy-pasting and partially recomposing it into a giant schema of “how we got to Destiel where we are today.” I’ve said I’m gonna do my own Destiel meta in bulk again, well - here’s the core of it. It covers some production/writing/ratings level fiascos that tilted us in this direction too, some of which I’ve covered in the past.

WARNING: If you are an EXTREMELY BITTER STAN that almost, or DID, burn out during S9’s fuckery, please just… stop here. I’m not here to deal with someone being triggered. In the end, it’s just an analysis, and technically an opinion, if well-corroborated. You can have yours, but please don’t go ape on me for mine. Respectful conversation and discussion, even if critique, is welcome. I just know this is a sore topic and I HAVE pissed off Destiel fans with my bluntness on it before.

If you ARE going to entertain it, please read this giant, enormous, entire thing before making any decisions, because there’s a journey on both sides of the screen, including my level of interpretation of it as well. We all grow. This isn’t a timeless bubble.