#*dean

Well, technically, it's supposed to give you "what your heart desires."

— Supernatural 2.22 All Hell Breaks Loose // 14.13 Lebanon

ass. it was ass. 

they had a perfect opportunity to bring dean’s bigger relationship arc with his father full circle. the constant forgiveness of john and the idolatry of him (like, as a god figure. chuck--you know, the final boss and big bad of the entire series-- was a mirror for john, and it was solidified as such in season 4 with cas and dean both being their father’s little “soldiers” and connecting over that...which is why cas bringing up the “daddy’s blunt instrument” line in his love confession was so huge, because it was an acknowledgement of that...but i digress) even after everything we know he did to dean and sam was wrong and unnecessary.

i just. okay. supernatural’s themes with family are central to the show, and are tackled in a lot of different ways. one of them (i’m thinking season 6, because it’s the one i most recently watched), was acknowledgement that someone might be family/a blood relative, and not be family, despite how much sam and dean might want them to be.

i’m talking about dickwad samuel campbell, here, who sided with crowley that season and was just overall not adamant about sticking on sam and dean’s side. all he wanted was to get mary back--he didn’t care about her sons because he barely knew them. so, in both directions, family wasn’t family. you can even go so far as to bring adam into this, because despite sam and dean being blood family, he chose his mom over them and wasn’t quick to trust them. also they forgot about him after a while which may just be the writers’ faults but alas. 

anyways, i think what i’m trying to say here is that john was treated like family and held in so high a regard because sam and dean grew up with the importance of “family” being hammered into them (by...john himself). dean has this same glorification going on with mary, which amara tried telling him was Wrong when she brought mary back because she’s Just Some Gal. they never gave this same “wrongness” of glorification to john, and in fact brought him back and had sam and dean forgive him despite all the shitty things he put them through/did to them.

they also showed jack beginning to glorify sam and dean (and even cas, in a way) in the show by having him make decisions based on what they would think is “right” and not really by his own volition. dean should have been able to see the pattern, to see the idolatry where it began by seeing himself in jack, here. (feel the need to clarify that this is NOT dean’s fault it’s the writer’s fault for not going into it.) they even mirror dean with jack multiple times quite heavily, so this is not a crazy comparison to make. 

dean has also expressed with ben that he doesn’t want to be john. before bringing john back in Lebanon, he admitted to himself and other’s that he didn’t deserve what john put him through. dean...dean would 100% try to fix his parenting methods to be Better, not only because he learned from john but because he learned from how he acted with ben. and krissy. and claire. and i could name like 10 other kids at this point but i’m not going to because you get the point.

in character dean winchester also wouldn’t have said it was okay for jack to die for them. this was influenced by chuck, surely (haha), but that they would put this in the show and then not give a real apology or redemption arc for this was...Not Good. i like to think that dean would be more understanding of jack and more forgiving, like... i LIKED that he baked jack a cake for his birthday, but i would have expected more than just that. cakes are almost...bribery? like when my parents want me to forgive them for something, they buy me something and never actually fully apologize. this felt almost to that caliber, except . DEAN WOULD HAVE TRIED HARDER. 

he is good with kids. canonically. he thinks his dad was a bad parent, canonically. he wanted to fix this in himself, canonically. ergo, dean and jack’s relationship should have foiled dean’s relationship with john, but it didn’t. so, i reiterate: