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castiel’s greatest hits + text posts (14/?)

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castiel. » cornflake girl.

The narrative deconstructs each of these aspects of his personality. We get told that he doesn’t like these things because it’s a Manly Thing to do, or an American thing to do.

He loves his car. The car is the only possession of the Winchester family that survived the fire that killed Mary and destroyed their house and all their belongings from their life before the tragedy. The car became the only stable element in their lives. It was the only thing they could call a home in a life of homelessness and motels. It’s where Dean and Sam grew up. Yes, Dean likes to drive fast and is proud of his big sleek car, but the car has a sentimental value that goes way beyond it being a big fast car.

Classic rock is the music Dean associates to his parents. He’s heard the story from John, how his parents bonded over Led Zeppelin. It’s a story that stuck with him, to the point it’s what he uses to prove to Mary that he is her son and is telling the truth. We could argue that Led Zeppelin are associated to romance and seduction in his mind, to the point the siren uses that in their (successful) seduction of Dean.

Unhealthy meat dishes are one of few memories of Mary he has. He remembers her meatloaf (and was heartbroken to learn that it wasn’t handmade) and of course the Winchester Surprise, a horrible concoction that Dean tried to replicate only to incur in John’s anger. Not even counting in the issue of Dean’s history with food scarcity, there’s an aspect of comfort inextricably tied to Dean’s relationship with food.

Comfort is also the fundamental thing Dean seeks in sex. It’s established that the casual nature of his sexual encounters is an obliged choice, and he actually longs for more stable relationships. The “adiós” is a bug, not a feature. Dean’s relationship with sex is actually very complex, it’s repeatedly suggested he’s into kink but also seeks gentle relationships with “safe” figures (think of the blonde waitresses that “smell like food”), and that’s easily explainable with the multiple emotional needs that Dean presumably projects in sex. Dean wants to fall in love (the siren is a dark mirror for Dean, representing what Dean is afraid of being for other people). Dean falls in love easily and gets attached easily, which is a problem for him. It’s also established that he has difficulties hooking up with people when he’s going through pericularly traumatic periods of his life, which makes his sexual activity pretty inconsistent, and proves the strong connection between sex and an emotional aspect.

Because it’s a joke.

From the writers’ perspective, saying that Dean wore panties and liked it is equivalent to dropping an anvil on a cartoon villain’s head. The anvil ceases to exist the moment the joke is complete. The cartoon character goes right back to being the person he was before the anvil dropped.

The writers (many of whom admit to not actually watching the show) didn’t conceive of Dean Winchester as a real person, but instead as a cartoon foil.

They took the idea of an alpha male — the leather jacket wearing bad boy they were jealous of in high school — and they thought it would be hilarious to make gay jokes about him, to emasculate him. To drop anvils on him.

Of course the point of the joke is that the character isn’t in on it, so doesn’t see the anvil coming. The writers expected the audience to be in on the joke, sneering along with them when the anvil hits, forgetting the anvil exists the moment the joke ends.

But the joke doesn’t translate from the writer’s room to the screen, because Supernatural is not a Looney Tunes cartoon.

The cartoon foil is played by a real person. The actor has to come up with real motivations for why a person would behave this way. Reasons besides “the writers think it’s momentarily funny for him to behave this way.”