#claaaire

Claire’s forehead scar is from before 4x20” anon cont.) (2/2) (Admittedly I once tripped and scarred my forehead with a doorknob when I was about Claire’s age, but Claire doesn’t seem clumsy and her badass fighting scenes prove that she has good reflexes and coordination etc.) But then it occurred to me that all the scars she has in 13x10 she must’ve gained sometime after 12x16 - because… (Oops, 2/3)

(3/3) … because she was a werewolf for a while and all the scars must have healed when (like the bite mark), right? If that’s the case, wow, she’s been busy after we last saw her. Hunting vampires, ghouls, werewolfs. But also recently dorkily tripping and hitting her forehead. (Maybe there was a cursed rabbit’s foot involved in that, we did sort of get a “I lost my shoe” callback) Anyway, do you think all of Claire’s scars in 13x10 are from after 12x16? Because of the werewolf thing?

(YAY we finally assembled all the pieces of the puzzle! :P)

That’s a good point because I assumed it was a childhood thing too (because I ran into a doorknob when I was as tall as them…) but I don’t know if they’ve made it clear that becoming a werewolf gets rid of ALL your scars or just heals up the werewolf bite and all the fresh wounds you might have… 

I think her other scars would have to be from the last year or so, though, either right before 12x16 or in the time after it, so whether she got the scars after or not, she still had a busy year or year and a half and it’s still a short time frame to get a lot of scars :P I think it’s all learning experiences maybe - not that we don’t see Sam and Dean get hurt a lot, but she’s still getting to grips with all the monsters so it makes sense she might take a lot of damage like we’d see Sam and Dean struggle with easy monsters in the first couple of seasons that she might not have learned to handle yet… 

Ha! I thought you meant Dean was Biker Barbie and I took a minute to think it over… 

But yeah, I really love them. They have a natural chemistry and a really interesting set of character dynamics, since they obviously love each other but they’re snarky about it in their own ways. I loved seeing Alex stand up for herself and not let Claire needle her because she’s had fairly passive stories, action-wise, and a ton of personal inner strength, which is obviously deeply under-valued, so seeing her draw or win in snark-offs with Claire was great to establish she’s got her own strength and is choosing her own path. And she’ll stand her ground on it and not let Claire’s “hunting is the only thing we should be doing!!” feeling stop her from being firm that she’s exactly where she wants to be, but obviously if she’s needed, she’ll come competently autopsy a monster for them…

(I mean she was raised by vampires, she’s waaay less squeamish than most people, I’d bet, so she must be a good nurse :D) 

And Claire, snarking at Alex like, “you miss me?” which is betraying the anxiety that she wasn’t missed, needling a confirmation (via the subtext of Alex’s “not really”) that Alex really did care and miss her, but they’re just snarking at each other so they don’t have to say it out loud… Such a Dean approach to things :’)

And oh no the conversation at the hospital… getting into the deep stuff with how much Jody means to them and they mean to Jody, and covering all their issues and then Claire still talking Alex into letting her look on the computer system because Alex will let her do it and probably lets her get away with loads more than we ever see because Claire looks like she KNOWS she can talk Alex into it, and Alex turns out to have already run everything she can think of to find the Winchesters, because she’s just working a normal job, doesn’t mean she has to act totally normal, which is like, the ultimate balance Sam seems never to find because every time he wants out, he gets out completely and doesn’t even think about hunting, like it’s going to reel him 100% of the way in if he lets it… 

… Heeeee also they go to concerts together off-screen, and we know Sam and Dean sometimes so that according to that narration in 5x22.

It’s funny, I have just started the 10x09 rewatch I need to do before Wayward Sisters, but I watched it the other day with my mum too just because, and I have been thinking about this a lot. 

my desktop has literally been stuck on this all day while I have a migraine at all the things I wanted to do :P

They give her SO many superficial traits to him - the whole connection to Cas told through familiar lines like about her praying to him every night, or the ketchup conversation, and Cas comparing them directly in 10x10 about both being… gosh what was the phrase? I’ll have to look that up… “one extremely messed up human to another”… I’ve been trying to think about Claire in the bigger picture, and she’s a massive Dean mirror, but her story is different and I actually kinda like what it all built up to really.

She loses her family when she’s much older than Dean - 12 to his 4 - and she doesn’t have a sibling so she has to go it completely alone. She knows the supernatural exists but only angels and demons - she doesn’t really have experience with monsters, just the mytharc, and she’s been *possessed by an angel* so they’re unequivocally real to her. She grows up praying directly to Cas while Dean has had no faith since Mary died. 

Ironically Claire is bound to Cas under the exact same “angels are watching over you” link as Dean, Sam and Jack all share with Cas, but it’s the most fucked up iteration (with Sam somehow passing with flying colours as the LEAST fucked up one in this weird umbrella of humans in Cas’s charge :P) because Cas made a bad promise at the very very beginning of his story - so early on they had to make the episode to go back to it because it was only by late season 4 Cas was officially full time main character enough to warrant a more complicated backstory and knowing how his ~existence~ in a form we could understand anyway began and all. 

Claire has been utterly betrayed by Cas, and he’s her Azazel in a way - another mirror to Dean that a supernatural creature stormed in and destroyed her family. Took her father and killed him, and her mother broke and went on the road and became the Worst Parent and physically AND emotionally abandoned her. But Claire doesn’t kill Cas (because he’s not evil and wants to make amends), and she actually manages to forgive and accept his help, and he helps her resolve her family situation and put her on her new path - the end of 10x20 for Claire is what 2x22 was for Dean, but instead of having killed the thing that destroyed her family, she’s hugged it goodbye and kept the grumpy cat plushie it gave her.

And Dean’s the one who sets her on her path. Because Cas represents the big old mytharc stuff and the damage to her family - he has to reconcile personally. But she grew up in the foster system having human problems and the supernatural was maybe the CAUSE of it all but she was just raw frustrated anger when we first see her again, and she has no way “in” to deal with it… 

(And she should not have started hunting as a 12 year old, with no one overseeing her or anything - I was talking to Mittens about it a while back and yeah tbh if they brought her back as a hunter like a lot of the original spec/desires were, that she’s started hunting angels in the gap while she wasn’t on the show, she was too YOUNG and really around the age the show brought her back is really the start of when she would be old enough for them to justify her doing ANYTHING on her own. She COULD have found a Krissy set up - an older hunter to guide her and others to hunt with, to give her a closer backstory to Dean, but the separation from their world was important to start with, I think, that she had plot reasons from 4x20 why she would have started hunting run of the mill monsters and she was too young, so unless she and Amelia became a power duo of mother and daughter hunters… Yeah :P Not many ways to bring her in except either stuff happening TO her to bring her back or Cas wandering in to catch up on her…) 

But yeah Sam also just helps her in the sense of teaching her credit card fraud and his birthday present coming of age gesture to her was a credit card - independence and still not really HUNTING skills, just “you’re a scrappy youngster who needs help surviving in this world” stuff.

It’s Dean who shows her what it’s like to be a hunter, and how it all works, that you do your homework, and sets her up with the question of do you watch movies I rec you or do you hunt monsters like I do? He is the one who sets her up with the choice to continue being normal and to use her resolution of the family arc as a way to finish her involvement with the supernatural and move on and grow up into whoever she might be, or as just the first step before she starts venting her anger and frustration with the world to kill monsters and save people before they end up a messed up human like her. 

And in 11x12 Jody is sort of that guide as well - her place is to encourage Claire towards a normal life but she also has to deal with Claire wanting to be a hunter and in the end agrees to at least teach her “not to hunt like a dumbass” since she sees Claire is really set on doing this - and in that moment also that she now has a new family to defend and it’s less revenge and more helping people. And since she squared up what could have been a revenge arc she’s all “saving people, hunting things” like Dean represents. 

I think for Claire, Jody is like Bobby - the more experienced, kind hunter who steps into her life to fill an emotional gap her dead/abandoning (and then dead also) parents left. It’s similar to Dean in really broad strokes, but Jody has full responsibility of her and it’s Claire’s choice to leave or make use of Jody’s help, while I think Dean was happy for Bobby’s attention as a kid because in the 7x10 flashbacks we see how good Bobby was to him and we know what Dean’s like, and as adults he’s happy to depend on Bobby all the time and they pretty much end up living at his house from season 5-6 - it seems to be official by at least the midseason of season 6 that Sam and Dean are permanently based there although no one ever says anything about it. They drift TO Bobby and the narrative has to burn it all down to get them out of the house but Claire’s coming to Jody later in life and Jody’s attempts to guide her towards normality and away from monsters mean that she actually represents the opposite of what Bobby generally offered… In 7x10 yeah Bobby one time throws a ball around with Dean because John just wants him to learn to shoot all the time, but taking it as the transition in season 3 to Bobby being a permanent fixture in their lives and giving them the family don’t end in blood speech in 3x16 as the parallel to Claire beating her version of season 1 & 2 in season 10 and moving on to season 3 emotionally, we see Dean (and Sam) latching onto Bobby as the last time we see John passes and he’s now the sole parental figure they have. 

And that leads us to Claire wanting to be a hunter because of admiring what Dean and Jody do. And wanting to save people because she clearly feels strongly about monsters and her own frustration before she had a path, that hunting monsters is a clear *righteous* moral path, is not actually something that Dean was allowed to come to naturally. He was raised as a hunter, and he doesn’t get to choose it as an adult.

No, wait, it’s Sunday night I’m allowed to mention it again because it’s basically next week… I won’t quote the whole massive speech though :P Okay, so Dean never gets a choice to be a hunter when he’s growing up but it’s a lifestyle he was completely raised in. When he CHOOSES to be a hunter is in 2x20 after spending the ENTIRE season resenting John and the job and the burden that was put on him, and it’s uuuutterly depressing but he realises in the djinn dream after spending an entire season wrestling with wanting to just give up and stop hunting and leave the whole thing behind because he’s so tired of it all, that no one else will do it and so he has to - and he hates it but those lives are on him. I actually compared it more to Patience’s decision to leave in 13x09 because she would have the visions whether she became a hunter or not, but staying with her dad pretending to be normal would be like Dean being trapped in the wishverse djinn dream, knowing he had wished himself a happy ending but everyone was dying because he wasn’t out saving them. He had news articles of the deaths, Patience has her visions.

But Claire just sees something she really wants to do - to save people and kill monsters and rid the world of evil, and she makes it as a choice as an adult as her coming of age, based on her experiences of the world, and she has an unburdened FREEDOM to decide to do that, to feel like it is something that is in her nature and the idea of doing it is too compelling to sit quietly and do normal things with her life. Every time she has the choice to do normal things - to enrol in colleges and schools and get on with her life as Jody was hoping for her, she takes cases and hunts things and gets deeper and deeper into learning the job she actually WANTS and possibly NEEDS to do. 

I really love this about Claire - that because we got her innocent of monsters to start with, and that she had multiple chances to get off the ride, she chooses to hunt anyway and there’s low angst about it - she doesn’t have decisions the weight of which Dean did in all those instances, because her life or death revenge story is already wrapped up, peacefully. She just ends up on the road hunting monsters because after seeing this is a life people lead, and despite seeing the toll it’s taken on Dean, she still ends up emulating him. But as the next generation of hunters, who aren’t raised into it against their will, or out of necessity to learn everything about evil forces to hunt down anything in particular. She already dealt with Cas AND saved her mom, AND killed the angel that was responsible for that, and so she’s got an angsty backstory, but that’s not the thing that’s compelling her forwards… There’s no revenge and sacrifice cycle like the Winchesters are in. 

It’s similar to Jody, and the others - they all find out the supernatural exists but of all the Wayward Sisters, Kaia is the only one with UNRESOLVED main arc angst and probably a whooole bunch of misery tied to the Bad Place that they need to help her with/she needs to overcome as her personal arc. All the others have dealt with the stuff that makes up their backstory/introduction to the supernatural in their initial episodes, and are pretty much ready for a fresh start when their story begins :D

…

(x)

You know what I really love about this? (Aside from Claire's boots, of course)

I think this is the first time we might ever see Claire able to reach out to SOMEONE ELSE. Even in 11x12 where we saw her sort of come to terms with Alex it was more mutual bonding through all that drama and Claire saving her and a sort of understanding of each other over what their differences were before... Just getting some stuff out in the open so they're more on the level and it's shown through them cooperating to make Jody breakfast rather than a personal scene between them going one way or the other on apologies and understanding. Possibly because they sort of mutually cancel out why they were so grumpy with each other before.

In this case though, Claire is finally the experienced hunter and one who can try to relate to whatever Kaia looks really bummed out about here. And Kaia's slumped, introverted posture shows she's the one who's miserable and worried, right down to her toes pointed together. Claire's sitting confidently and watching Kaia but not smothering her... I hope she's listening to her, or relating to her in a way where she can offer her some comfort or even just show she's there for her.

Claire's been pretty isolated and without real friends the entire time we've known her, even if she did manage to get on with Alex in the episode we saw them together, after that of course she still leaves and goes back to hunting and we have had relatively little time with them together. I like the idea that Claire has matured and advanced enough now that she can be the one in this position, where she can help and support the other Wayward Sisters.