#character develop

2/2 I’m the heart to heart anon! Like I would love if there was a moment where someone sat them down to air their grievances the way Sam and Dean did for Chuck and Lucifer in s11, bc it actually worked and was incredibly promising

HI nonnie!!

I’m on the run and have a busy Canadian thanksgiving dinner to get to (and I’ll most likely add to this once I have time), but WHAT A GREAT QUESTION, because frankly, this is what we’ve been anticipating for…a while. 

We’ve seen 15x01. The rift between Dean and Cas = NECESSARY spousal discord. Dabb & Co know what they’re doing here, and pretty much most meta writers in the Destiel community gleefully watched the EVER-heightening intensity of D/C’s romance-coded arguments unfold in their conjoined emotional arc for the better part of 11 years!! Dabb era, dudes. Family struggles. DEEP EMOTIONAL BONDS, frayed, to be repaired in the endgame. 

English 101: writing an external conflict between two characters can inherently convey INTERNAL CONFLICT — character vs the self, thus introducing significant elements of character development and self-reflection that two characters, intentionally written as romantic star-crossed counterparts to each other, will think about, then either NOT act on or WILL act on. 

In short, the metanarrative focus on Dean and Cas fighting means they’re gonna need to RESOLVE it, and exactly, anon – since it’s the final story countdown, this also means there should be a subversion of every other instance in which they’ve almost hashed things out but were: A. always interrupted, B. gave outside forces priority, not their interpersonal relationship, or C. just plain ol’ avoiding addressing it. 

HOW MANY TIMES CAN THEY SURVIVE THAT? How many times can we survive the drawing-out of WILL THEY WON’T THEY/USING THEIR WORDS?

Lemme tell ya, I do believe we’re going to see the D/C narrative focus grow more potent the closer we get to 15x20, if not earlier. Again, PR isn’t showrunning, but Jensen and Misha are fully aware and informed of their roles as Dean and Cas; they know their tension is a key emotional plot point driving the physical plot, always has been. I mean, it’s already amplified, right in the first episode of the final season!!

After finding out that God is the Big Bad, Dean and Cas must re-evaluate everything they thought they knew about themselves and each other. Again, did they inadvertently play into God’s Angst Plot for them? Did they think they were saving the world on their own terms of free will when in fact, God wanted them to do exactly that – to ignore their self-consciousness and each other’s emotional needs in the process?? *rips hair out* 

Keeping up the awfully sad vibe of arguing ex-husbands a la 14x17/18/19/20, Sam continues to represent all of us. Currently, we don’t see any resolution in sight; once S14 came to a close, they were still clashing. The negative spaces are NOISY! Once again, D/C = divorcees at odds, with what looks like irreconcilable differences. Sigh.

It’s the classic trope of setting aside personal conflict to get the important crap done, yet not realizing that personal conflict is inevitably going to implode.

To get on the same page, Dean and Cas’ preconceived notions of FREE WILL must be challenged, and true free will –> LOVE. God couldn’t control the existence of love...the most powerful force in the world. The ultimate manifestation of free will. TFW threw a wrench into His plans when Dean, out of LOVE, refused to shoot his son, Isaac-mirror Jack – when Cas, out of LOVE, also raised Jack as his own humanized child alongside psychologically nurturing him with Dean – when Sam, out of LOVE, chose to be his teacher in the ways of survival and human difficulty. 

TFW singularly chose to destroy God’s script when they started loving the Nephilim, the TFW mirror, God’s OG Big Bad for his cut-and-paste SPN series of The Winchester Brothers and the Angel Castiel: Same Mistakes Never Learned.

*Back to the point, sorry I went on a whole TFW-lovey-dovey tangent there lol – YEAH, I hope and expect that Dean and Cas will engage in a genuine heart to heart without interruptions, where they no longer let God perch on their shoulders. It’s time for them to set their cards on the table. It’s time for them to USE THEIR WORDS.

Romantic or not (lbr a non-romantic resolution –> greatest cop-out for a 15-year iconic institution, because why even implement consistent, constant tropes of a damn non-platonic nature without any proper follow-through, even in subtext?!), the fact remains that Dean and Cas are longggg overdue for a discussion – a deconstruction of their tension, clearing the air of ALL the stuff they’ve hidden from each other, and with bated breath, I wait. 

(The visual D/C narrative also holds: they stand as a unit together, Sam positioned apart from them. Like, we been knew.) *trots around in clown mask*

Seriously. I’m Destiel-positive so far. 15x01 simply strengthened my (cautious) optimism. If you want to read more about the D/C rift, with Jack at the core of it all (oh man, how fitting that Belphegor, who’s taking up Jack’s image by possessing his body – and remember, Jack was the catalyst for both heavily marital-code unity and conflict in Dean and Cas’ relationship – will seemingly take over Jack’s role as metanarrative exposition/mirror for now), I wrote these late S14/beginning of the last hiatus (below), plus x x

I discuss the Dean/Cas argument here, here and here – it’s both a break-up and argument entrenched in parental mistakes, self-guilt, and their ultimate bond with/trust in each other (particularly in relation to Jack, their subtextual son), where the lying and the dishonesty (a redux of S5/6 and S12) are combined spiral narratives of their relationship that they eventually have to break together. COMMUNICATE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE

I’ll emphasize this again too – still highly relevant lol (14x18):

Cas is telling himself: if I was completely honest with my husband, without holding back, we could’ve been able to avoid this. I wasn’t honest because I knew how much Jack meant to us. I was 😨. I did it for myself…I did it for Dean. 

Dean is telling himself: I dunno, why am I taking my husband’s dishonesty so hard? Because I 😍 him a lot, and I 😍 my son. I trusted Cas to be honest with me. We could’ve worked together. But, 💩, I guess I wasn’t as open with him as I was supposed to be…about what I wanted, and what I felt.

The general rule of scenes is, they should do at least one of the following:

Provide exposition

Advance the plot

Develop a character/the characters

If your scenes are boring--not only in this case, but in general--think about whether they’re doing any of those things. If not, consider why you’re including the scene in the first place.

For your case in particular, if your scenes are particularly boring, think about whether they’re necessary at all. Do they just exist to prove that he is being used and abused and forced to run errands? If so, is there another more interesting/productive way to show that? Do they exist to prove his character growth? Can you show that another way?

wip gesture/expression sketches. from twitter.

He have a loooong story behind (with bad and good things), and to move forward in his new life he decided to make a drastic change of look.

He was really REALLY skinny, he used to have long, beautiful hair. He was so jelaous of them..but in the end they were only a thick blanket that protected him from what he always feared: judgment.

Now he learned to love himself in a sane way, to let go of the past, and now he's truly happy.

Idk why I made this post but LOOK AT HIM. MAh BABY. I'm so happy that his story ends well, and I'm so happy that the person he inevitably hurt because of his fears received his good ending as well ( the second character in the drawing is Caesar's actual bf, a different person)