#prophet hour

At the beginning of Season 1 Dean is introduced as a character with a strong black-and-white view of the world. His moral code is corresponding to this. Basically Humans are good and monsters, ghosts and demons are bad. He doesn’t reflect or question any of this. The whole “Saving people, hunting things”-policy with everything it includes was highly imprinted on him by John. Now, this might be one of the few good things John has taught him although of course –just as everything concerning John- this has a negative ring to it. Dean is a killer machine or at least he tries to convince his father that he is one. He is the good little soldier, the obedient son and every sign of further development and a more varying moral code is shown when John isn’t there or Dean doesn’t think about him. (For example exorcising Meg with Bobby’s help and trying to save the girl in 1x22).

This is pretty much what drives Dean’s morality in the first three seasons but even at this point family is and will ever be an exception when it comes to how Dean judges a situation.

Working with any kind of monster or supernatural being he knows would never be an option. He doesn’t approve of John making a demon deal for him (for understandable and obvious reasons) and the guilt he has to go through is one of the driving forces during a huge part of Season 2. Yet he pushes the same guilt onto Sam by making a deal with a crossroad’s demon himself in All Hell Breaks Loose (2x22). Just because he can’t let go of Sam. He doesn’t even make an exception when it comes to his own life, only for Sam. Dean doesn’t even consider working with Ruby and using Sam’s demonic powers to save his own life leading to him being brutally killed by Lilith’s hellhounds in 3x22 (No Rest For The Wicked).

  When he comes back from hell, Dean is broken. He has tortured souls and this made him realize a lot of things he hasn’t had to think about. The pleasure of killing and hurting monsters is nothing new, Dean just never really reflected about it before. It is frightening for Dean to finally come to terms with what John has made out of him, what his life has made out of him, for that matter. This experience is changing him radically and as painful and horrible his self-loathing and witnessing it on screen has been for us, it is what finally gives him the strength and the necessary motivation to re-evaluate everything he has believed in.

Another important role plays the confirmation that angels exist, that there is good in this world and that not everything has to be dark and evil. Dean finds himself suddenly dragged to the frontline of a war that he is not ready to fight and he has to re-think everything he ever believed in.

The End (5x04) marks another breaking point in the way Dean sees his actions. He is confronted with thinks he never had to think about before, he finally realizes that Cas is willing to stay with him. For someone who has experienced abandonment practically for all his life, this is a huge thing. Then there is Sam who has eventually said yes to Lucifer, something, Dean has been convinced he would never do. He finally sees that he is not only responsible for his own life and saving Sam from dying but that there is a whole new range of responsibility that came with the new role he has in the war between Heaven and Hell. He matures a lot throughout these seasons and generally reflects more before he does something.

  Season 6 and 7 don’t give Dean a lot room for character development and therefore his moral development as well. In general there isn’t a lot of character development going on in these two seasons so I am going not going to talk about this to not make this even longer. Again, just feel free to message me if you think I’m missing out on information here.

  Now let’s get to Season 8. Season 8 was a great season concerning a lot of things but especially concerning Dean’s character development. Dean finally frees himself from a lot of John’s influence and therefore from what he taught Dean is the one and only way to go. Dean starts to accept himself more and more, coming to terms with his own needs and wishes. At the same time, he feels better about himself in general and doesn’t drown in self-loathing and lack of self-worth anymore. With himself finally playing an important role in his own life his morality takes a turn in which it isn’t self-destructive anymore.

  Getting to the last part of my meta Dean makes one of the biggest exception from how he would usually act and make decisions in Sacrifice (8x23) and the only reason he is doing this is because it is Sam’s life at risk. Dean is willing to let every monster and every demon go just to safe his brother’s life and as we all know this is not the first time this happened. Family and especially Sam is always going to be THE BIG exception from everything for Dean.

In The End (5x04) Dean tells his future self that something is broken in him for killing the guy that was supposedly infected with the Croatoan virus. The Dean of the first Season(s) would not have flinched to kill someone who was infected with it. Connected to that is 2x09 (Croatoan) in which Dean doesn’t shoot the boy just because Sam said he feels bad about it. Moreover he tortures Alastair in On The Head Of A Pin (4x16) despite his PTSD just because Cas tells him there is no other way. Shipping completely set aside (because I don’t see Destiel in Season 4 either) Dean has someone who has grown strangely important to him tell him that he needs to do something and that there is no other option so he does it. These are just a few examples of times in which Dean completely changes his usual behaviour because someone he is close with tells him to. This alone is a huge difference from Dean in the first season who only trusted his own judgment.

  Season 9 finds Dean at a point where he has to make a lot of decisions against what he really believes in. We’ve already seen him struggle with the guilt that brings along and we know that this guilt is going to be one of the driving forces of Dean’s behaviour during at least a few of the following episodes.

Kevin’s been in 12 episodes including last Tuesday’s. His instability is already there before we even know him. I remember the first time we saw him and he was this little kid doing his homework and practicing music. He is introduced as a character with an insanely busy schedule from the get-go. So what we immediately see is that he’s always been in a high-pressured environment. He said he wanted to be “first Asian American president.” So my point is, as a straight-A student, I’m pretty sure he already had “breakdowns” before even being a prophet, as any kid would in his situation, I suppose.

Basically, he’s gone from one high-pressured situated to another, now being a prophet. The only thing that changed are the people he’s influencing. Because now, he’s not only responsible for his own life, but in a way for the world, too, carrying that weight along with Dean and Sam.

In Season 7 we perceive him as a kid who freaks out about this responsibility he suddenly got. But at the end of that season when he’s kidnapped by Crowley, he manages to keep calm and escape on his own. This is a first step for him into acceptance of the supernatural world and handling it as well as he can.

In 8x01, we see him having learnt how to deal with life his own way when Sam doesn’t reply to him anymore. But here, he still has his mom living with him. When they got their tattoos together, he’s screaming his head off. (I guess we can all agree we don’t think he’d do that anymore after all the torture he’s been through now.)

After his finger got cut off, they put him on the boat with his mom. He sends her away, then he starts losing it completely. He doesn’t sleep (or barely), eats nothing but hot-dogs, survives on aspirin. He just works, works, works. He’s stressed, being under pressure from Sam and Dean, and mentally he’s broken: paranoia, hallucinations… This is a complete low point for Kevin. He cannot stop working because actually wants to be rid of it. He thinks that if he figured out the Demon Tablet, if he can figure out how to close the gates of hell, he will be out.

But there is a change in his character during this period. After he is kidnapped again, for Sam and Dean, who haven’t seen him in ages, he took a run for it. But when they see the video in 8x21, Kevin explicitly says “I won’t break, not this time.”

Crowley is known for his torture. We don’t get a transition between this episode and the previous one, so my headcanon is that he did torture him first, but failed, and therefore placed the fake boat. Two reasons for this: 1. He said he somehow erased Kevin’s short term memory so he’d have no recollection of being kidnapped. So, it could also be that Kevin didn’t want to cooperate/tell him where the other half of the tablet is. 2. I think the real reason he didn’t break is because of his mom. Crowley admitted to killing her after she wouldn’t give Kevin up after all the torture. Since he sent her away willingly, he probably blames himself for killing her. Mostly because his mom didn’t give in to Crowley’s torture, he must have felt he had to do the same.

And then he realizes it’s fake, probably from the start since he said they “forgot the secret knock”, and handles it in a calm way. Imagine Season 7 Kevin in that situation, I think it would have gone quite differently. The sad part is that he never had any direction from anyone coming to this personality change. He barely saw Sam and Dean, and Garth also was gone most of what we saw. During season 8, he was mostly alone on the boat or being tortured. A certain level of paranoia may be still there right now, should Dean and Sam ever leave him on his own again. When Kevin is alone, things don’t go well.

Another reason why he’s incredibly unstable is that he always changes his mind about helping. He wants to stop, but then he never does. He has his mental breakdowns, but is then back on Sam and Dean’s side doing whatever they want. In the Season 8 finale, he has a fight with Cas who says he is “always a prophet” but, as we saw by the end of the episode, Kevin was just getting ready to leave when the Angels started falling and then he got locked up in the bunker. So he didn’t even listen to Cas. So, he always does what Sam and Dean want him to do, but given the chance to get out, I think he would take it.

He started crying last episode, not because of what Dean said about him being family being emotional, but because he realizes he will never actually get out. I’m sure he doesn’t mind right now, but as we’ve seen before, Kevin tends to change his mind about things pretty quickly.

Lastly, on the subject of Crowley offering him a deal for his mom; if they bring his mom back, it could cause trouble. She’s a liability and can be used against him. How sad it may be, Dean being harsh on him in saying his mom is dead in any way that matters was probably the only way to keep Kevin safe.

He is going to be faced with a whole new set of challenges including getting to know and learning how to handle his new needs as a human being. He is going to experience hunger, pain and tiredness (“You eat, sleep and all the other things you never had to care about”, Dean 9x01). Furthermore he will be at a complete loss when it comes to experiences he could base his actions on because these experiences are non-existent (“This is all new to me. Hunger, Cold.” Cas 9x03).

As another aspect of this problem you also have to remember that Castiel is used to having a lot of abilities a human doesn’t have. For example his strength. If you spend millennia with superhuman powers you can’t just shake certain habits off. We already saw it in 9x01 when he tried to first knock out and then smite that rocker-guy because he wanted to make a phone call. The street is a rough place to survive at and overestimating his abilities is not going to help Castiel to accommodate to the situation.

In conclusion, Cas is not only going to have to grapple with homelessness but also with being human.

On the one hand we know that has certain knowledge of how modern technology works (vending machine & Laundromat in 9x01 and TV in various previous episodes). Of course this won’t help him a lot without money but it might give him the impression that he is prepared to get through on his own. As we can see in the Promo for 9x03 he will be highly disappointed and taken aback when he figures out that he has pretty much no idea of how to do all the stuff we as humans think of as simple and self-evident. And yes, I am talking about the toothpaste-sequence here. I am convinced that we can correlate his complete indifference to how it works to hygiene in general. Hygiene of the lack of it is one of the most important factors when it comes to other people’s first impression of you. We saw Castiel in the 9x03 promo, he just gives off the vibes of a homeless person and with what this is usually associated with, Castiel is not very likely to get any help from people. I think it is fair to say that he is lost. He is going to feel abandoned, helpless and lonely.

  Of course we have to take into account that Castiel is not completely new to being human, he has experienced being powerless or at least nearly powerless before. The same goes for homelessness. As a being who has watched the earth for millennia, Cas know what homelessness is. Nevertheless this doesn’t change the fact that he finds himself in a completely new relation to the things he has experienced and known before.

Castiel has always felt as some kind of stranger from heaven but now he is in the situation that he is disconnected from where he belongs and that is with the Winchesters. Moreover everything that is happening to him will now affect Cas with full force. Before it was just his vessel and its reactions not really connected to him as a being. Now he will have to deal with all the things humans are used to deal with, for example the release of hormones under certain circumstances. Given the situation he is in, it is not going to be the nice kind of hormones for Cas. He is going to feel stress, anger and loneliness.

Above all else, humans are social animals and Cas is going to start and crave positive contact, including body contact. It was scientifically proven that small children who don’t experience affection die, even if they have everything they need to survive from a biological point of view. Of course it won’t affect Castiel /that/ much but it is definitely going to affect him. Adding up to this is the fact that homeless people usually organize themselves in small communities of families and friends. Castiel has neither the one nor the other so he is going to completely depend on the kindness of other people. Some of the promo-pictures might allude to the fact that Castiel will have contact with some of the homeless people but it is probably safe to say that this is not the kind of contact he needs.(This might also be where April enters the stage. Let me not talk about how she isn’t just being nice to him, this is too much pain.)

  As a last main point of this meta I want to talk about what Castiel is actually going to meet while living on the street in detail. We can’t exactly determine how much time Cas is going to spend on the street before and after he gets to the bunker. I will just assume that he is going to spend quite a while on the street, enough t get in touch with all the bad things happening. Since the writers use Castiel’s state as a human to explore humanity, this would make a lot of sense, too.

During this time he is going to have to deal with various health issues such as malnutrition and lack of hygiene (as mentioned earlier). It also means he is going to see and experience the worst of humanity not only as an observer but first hand. He is going to see egoism, violence and drug abuse, maybe even prostitution. Especially for someone with a heart as good as Castiel, this must be heart breaking. Both humanity and Free Will aren’t in their best place when it comes to homelessness. In general the psychological impact of homelessness is going to hit Cas harder than any other person because he hasn’t established any defense mechanisms.

I am going to put the focus on two aspects of homelessness that gain a special importance when talking about Castiel and his experiences.

The first one is the social exclusion that people living on the street are suffering. Now we have to consider how much Cas has done for humanity (he maybe often did the wrong thing, but he always meant well and at least he tried) and after everything the one thing he gets in return is rejection. Can you imagine how depressing this must be and how worthless Cas is going to feel? He is going to be met with outright disgust just because of what homelessness is associated with in society’s eyes. I am pretty sure that as a conclusion he is going to transfer this disgust onto himself and his self-worth.

Adding up to this is the fact that the loss of one’s home is for humans considered a sufficiently strong stressor to cause a trauma. Just to stress it again: Cas is not used to dealing with problems like this while humans usually are growing up to learn how to deal with things like these. However, Cas still has to find his place in this world and strengthen his identity. In this process Cas will have to ask himself the question “Who am I?” and will (after everything I just displayed) with a high probability have to answer it with “I am an outcast”.

Cas might have what he has always wanted and that is free will now but this also means that he has no-one to guide him anymore. Obedience and discipline is woven into an angel’s character and even if Castiel always fought against this, this fight was still giving him purpose. With this purpose just suddenly disappearing, Cas will be left without any form of guidance.