#butchdeanverse

but i’ll pitch a question to you — in your au, how do you work with dean’s diehard commitment to his father? does he not have it, or is it rationalized in a new way with the new angle on gender?

YAY!! That is my favourite way to watch Supernatural! And I would LOVE to hear some of your theories hehehe

In answer to your question, in my butchdeanverse AU, I still see Dean as being very committed to her father, but more importantly to her family. I think that Dean being raised as a girl would only add layers to her feelings of obligation and duty to her father and her family.

On top of all Dean’s feelings and responsibilities from canon (being a caregiver to Sam, being a friend/soldier/son to John, being a fist in a fight and a place to put the blame when it all goes wrong) she has also been raised as a girl. And girls, more often than not, are raised to be obedient and submissive. Especially in the 80s. Especially by John.

So I have no trouble imagining a young, lesbian Dean who feels like it is her purpose in life to shoot what John says shoot, to look out for Sam, and to make herself “useful” however she can.

Of course, I think that her’s and John’s would be an extremely complex, extremely strained relationship. It would be like it is in canon, with the added feeling, from both of them, that Dean is constantly failing to be Mary; a feeling which is only compounded when she begins to understand herself as butch.

I actually explore some of this in my short fic, Kodiaks!

dean and sam, headed home from school in the snow

a single room and a phone call in the springtime of '97

Hey! It’s so wild that you ask this because this is exactly what I’ve been trying to figure out for the past few days! So here's how I see Cas fitting into my butch Dean universe:

Castiel still saves Dean from Hell, and he’s still a big part of Sam and Dean's lives. And I think he and Dean do love each other.

But what I’m trying to figure out now is his gender in this universe. Because, in canon, Cas sort of learns gender from Dean, right? That’s pretty much how he learns how to perform masculinity, I think. And I’ve been trying to imagine what his gender looks like if Dean is instead a butch dyke with a really complicated relationship with both womanhood and masculinity.

And I think I want Cas to come to understand himself as butch too, eventually. He'll still possess a human man, but I don't think he'll identify as a man himself. I think that, through Dean, he will fall in love with a masculinity that doesn't have anything to do with being a man. And I think he'll fall in love with womanhood, too.