clannfearrunt · 2 years ago
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part of comic that was scrapped because i started feeling weird but tldr “says buckwild things and then does not elaborate”
dont tag as ship pwease
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elizabethrobertajones · 8 years ago
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“What, are you gonna look up more anime, or are you strictly into Dick now?”
A lengthy exploration of Dean Winchester as a consistently queer character, thank to themes he embodies with his core characterisation of occupying both sides of binary traits.
(aka the reason why I lazily shove random things into my “Dean vs cake” tag with no explanation, written out while on a 8hr train journey)
The writing of Dean is of a character split between endless examples of duality, moments of characterisation which have stark opposites (either generally accepted or made up into a false dichotomy by the show) where he appears to embody elements of both at all times. Generally, the less-expected or pleasant part is something he resists admitting liking or labelling himself as.
He may be described as a killer while being shown to be the most compassionate character by his actions in the same episode; his projection of himself as a dumb grunt has been so successful that we have to scrape up lists of dozens of examples to prove his intelligence in arguments, despite one of the most-used examples being in only the fourth episode but is cited all the time to prove he’s not the stupid brother in contrast to Sam’s college-educated introduction leaving a lasting impression there; a lesser example of Dean wobbling between sides of a duality includes his strict favouritism of pie being shown in stark contrast to cake as if he must surely hate it, having declared himself for pie; and of course his frequently shown interest in women is contrasted with extremely consistent queer subtext implying that Dean is attracted to men as well.
This last duality seems to be the most persistently hard to reconcile (meanwhile Dean was happily eating croissookies by the middle of season 10 after getting over his problem with cake). Despite the common interpretation of Dean as a bisexual character with numerous textual moments to back up the reading, moments of him expressing his interest in women are sometimes seen as the writing trying to deny the queer side of his character outright, even by some of the same people making this interpretation as we struggle with text and intent over subtext and implication and how deliberate the suggestion is. While to others the existence of his attraction to women is more than enough to prove definitively that Dean is a straight character and any attempt to read queer subtext into his story is inaccurate, despite an entire catalogue of examples and analysis by those who make the reading across the entire length of the show to date. A regular argument that Dean can’t be bi is for the person denying it to attach dozens of gifs of Dean blatantly expressing/exercising his interest in women as if this definitively proves it, despite only being one side of the both ways he’s suggested to swing.
A similar state of disbelief exists for real life bisexual people or those with similar orientations, with a mentality that they should either pick a side or are really one thing or the other, depending on their most obviously expressed orientation/gender, usually based on their current partner or obvious behavioural cues (especially ones society favours or would find easiest to read). Reading a fictional character who can’t talk for himself to answer it, who can only continue to be written and portrayed on screen following various patterns, and going through storylines which may or may not answer anything, of course makes it all the more impossible to reach a definitive reading, as it is entirely subjective and down to the viewer and how they understand what they see on screen. Dean being written with all this duality in his behaviour can lead to extremely contradictory readings, which is also a smaller symptom of the show’s broad appeal playing successfully to multiple audiences.
Of course people can like a varied selection of music or dessert treats in real life and it is generally considered a mark of a balanced and well-rounded individual to cultivate varied tastes in things. No one trying a croissookie for the first time should be a stunning moment of character development. In storytelling, associations and traits are made easily known by small details with larger social or tropey coding in order to quickly get to know them, and subconsciously access a wealth of implications about how else they might act/feel or their backstory. Characters are defined by often seemingly meaningless distinctions which make it difficult to imagine something perceived as an opposite trait to it, as something the character could also occupy. The trait is used as a shorthand to convey a great deal about the character, from which assumptions can be made about the rest of their personality, and it allows for false binaries where it makes understanding a character confusing when they’re shown enjoying something they previously seemed to hate; with a rigid definition to help us understand them to start with, the character acting in a contrary way becomes suspicious, breaks immersion, or requires analysis to work out why they’d change their behaviour, as we are aware they are a fictional construct and need to be explained and interpreted, and that someone is creating it all deliberately to some end for our entertainment. 
Dean is a controversial character to define in part due to his projected façades he creates either for the job or for personal and emotional security, including façades he keeps for Sam’s benefit and therefore will be persistently shown on screen due to their interaction in every single episode. Many of the episodes about their childhood expose these vulnerabilities by showing the characters before their modern day dynamic was fully established (3x08 especially as it had so much of them interacting as kids), or by exposing that there is a great deal Sam doesn’t know about the ways in which Dean has protected him from harsh truths about their upbringing and father (9x07 springs to mind there and “the story became the story” to explain how Sam ended up never knowing certain things about Dean’s childhood or the way John was as a parent to him). 10x12 and 12x11 explored Dean returning to a childlike or innocent state, further revealing the ways in which he creates – or rather, curates – his seemingly generic surface personality for Sam’s benefit. 
By changing the rules of how Dean is written they can expose him having different tastes or behaving in entirely different ways which betray the gruff and macho exterior for what it is - a part of Dean but by far not the only part. 10x12 showed Dean enjoying cake and Taylor Swift while briefly in a teenage body - the joke being that his mind remained entirely intact to his current age. At the end of the episode Dean enjoys Taylor Swift on the radio and then starts eating croissookies or wanting cake in later episodes. 12x11 again makes Dean vulnerable in front of Sam and almost the first thing he does as a sign he’s no longer remembering to project for Sam, is admit to liking Dory and therefore watching Disney movies, betraying yet another part of his tough exterior which something like catching a Pixar movie on the down low would be entirely opposite to the personality he wants to project. 
(As an aside I’ve seen wank recently that the performing Dean meta is because people want to get rid of Dean’s surface layer entirely and entirely remove this part of his personality, which is a misunderstanding that of course it’s a part of Dean’s personality but he would be happier and more well-balanced if he would own to the other parts. Moments like admitting he likes chick flicks are actual genuine huge progress to unravelling this persona and have not drastically changed who Dean is - only allowed Sam to go from a suspicious outsider to someone on the inside where he and Dean now share the knowledge Dean likes chick flicks openly and without aggression or deflection, meaning they can be happier and more comfortable. When they actually watch a chick flick together with Jody in 12x06 Dean can’t exactly complain about doing it and Sam is utterly comfortable teasing Dean to Jody because it’s no longer hostile territory... Obviously that’s an ideal way to resolve all their other issues without making some weird hypothesis that now Dean has to do nothing but watch chick flicks and cry about them in his down time since this admission... He can just be more comfortable embracing both sides of the duality of his interest in movies - the random box of socially acceptable stuff to Dean’s eyes, and the stuff that he’d be embarrassed to admit liking for reasons rooted in the toxic masculinity that informs a lot of his shell.)
Anyway, unpacking a balanced understanding of Dean’s personality is difficult (and finding things people agree on even about what the surface layer means or is for), as many things he says or does will be taken as fact, and therefore meant to convey the entire understanding we should have about Dean, meaning every action or statement contrary to the initial interpretation becomes bad data that is easily discarded, or one off moments that lend no greater understanding to his character. This is not helped by the multitude of writers who have contributed to his creation, throwing in disruptions or unexpected approaches to his portrayal which to some may seem too far to credit even for such a multifaceted character (and of course what it is and who it bothers among the various factions caused by these readings change depending on the moment, as different concerns about his characterisation arise... But seriously can we all agree that Dean apparently having never even heard of It’s a Wonderful Life even through pop culture soak (which is 90% of his personality) in 9x03 is clearly a step too far). 
Differentiating what seems like a poorly considered character beat from intentionally contradictory portrayals of his behaviour, that can be reasoned out or understood for what they were attempting to convey more in tune with the wider picture, does not always happen smoothly. This leads to interpretations of Dean that can be extremely hostile to each other and seem to discuss starkly different characters as certain readings take their place in the wider story as they interpret it and the intentionally ambiguous writing of the show fosters many layers and different interpretations throughout. The reading of Dean as a queer character or not is only the most contentious of these entirely different narratives people find in the story.
Examining the different presentations of Dean and his sexuality can be an enormous task with twelve seasons of discussion and imagery, metaphor and both textual and subtextual displays of interest Dean expresses that would need to be analysed (not always to the obvious gender when assuming Dean is textually portrayed as heterosexual and subtextually bisexual – for example in 8x13 Dean has his humorous misunderstanding with Aaron, who he calls his “gay thing” rather fondly to Sam, and takes absolutely no pains to establish to anyone that he wouldn’t have been interested after being caught out by and unable to lie about his interest in a proposition that Aaron had expected to only scare him off). 
Setting aside the smaller episode to episode instances which lend to a bigger picture but are hard to discuss to get the sense of a larger narrative (as there’s too many, and each one would need to be described), I’m just going to go for a few big obvious examples which can be used to describe Dean in relation to this framed binary of interest one way or the other by briefly examining some of the more prominent relationships Dean has that I think represent both sides of his interest in men and women. 
Buried in the subtext of the show since season 9 or 10, Dean ended up having a physical relationship during a brief “summer of love” with Crowley, since then and to date portrayed clearly as a relationship and them as exes, with varying amounts of fondness, embarrassment and knowing innuendo about their activities and history. It’s about as close to textual as any relationship Dean’s had with a male character and there’s now 3 seasons of content between 9x11 and 12x15 relating to it.
There is also Dean’s most popularly shipped and most firmly subtextually embedded but constant relationship with Cas - waffling about angels aside, a male bodied and identifying character. The evidence for the queer subtext of their relationship dates back to Cas’s arrival in the fourth season. Narratively, as a clear example, being played against Ruby, and the way that relationship with Sam was used in the story. Though Anna is introduced to have Dean’s relationship to the divine directly paralleled to Sam’s relationship to the demonic, with a 2 episode romance arc to allow a parallel of both brothers hooking up with their respective sides, Cas and Ruby play as narrative foils to their Winchester and the other’s relationship all season, and to greater emotional and plot effect than Anna, whose personal relationship to Dean is non-existent after she becomes an angel again. Dean and Cas continue to have romantic subtext for the entire time Cas is on the show (and even while he was supposedly written off and dead).
Dean’s longest lasting romantic relationship on the show (with most flings being the “girl of the week” in Dean’s words) was with Lisa, between seasons three (where she was used to demonstrate the normal life he’d never get but suddenly really regretted never having and was acutely aware of missing) and six (where after the apocalypse they end up together as a year break from hunting for Dean), ending in non-fatal tragedy after a mutually acknowledged break up earlier in the season, after which she plays no further part in the story. 
His sexual and romantic history with Lisa does not invalidate his romantic connection to Cas, nor his sexual history with Crowley (though of course it has more textual grounding even than his fling with Crowley hardly being a secret or subtle or “Destiel” having been name-dropped in the show). Likewise, the relationships with Cas and Crowley don’t invalidate the time he spent with Lisa as a meaningful and fully desired part of his life. (And of course Dean continued sleeping with women after and during his elopement with Crowley...) All of these elements exist within the story and never ask you to choose between them. Even the Crowley and Castiel parts complement each other, taking the form of Dean in a love triangle of sorts with the demon and angel on his shoulders, again another binary that Dean is in the middle of, between angel and demon, Heaven and Hell, the dynamic of which reliably plays out since season nine when Crowley’s seduction and muscling into their previously established romantic subtext began.
Though these are the eye-catching examples of relationships as a demonstration of Dean’s ability to share his affection, of course looking deeper reveals that Dean has been a queer coded character since the start, and no examples of long relationship arcs would be necessary to argue that Dean’s bisexuality exists in the subtext, even just in the way the show discusses and frames his character (and some people do identify with him in general as a bisexual character, without caring about ships but rather through his experiences and the way he’s written). Dean just has a relatable state of existence that specifically seems to describe him as bisexual, with general queer coding subtext. 
So as a starting point (and I’m not going to go season by season because one: we’ve been there done that and B: I’m only stuck on trains for 10 hours, I can’t elaborate on the bi Dean subtext in every season in detail), the first season plays Dean thematically against Sam’s psychic abilities (that arc more traditionally played as a queer metaphor with lines such as “don’t ask, don’t tell” uttered about Sam’s powers – from Dean, of course). Dean meanwhile is presented as feeling like a freak and outsider himself with a sense of estrangement and otherness from society which plays as an easy metaphor for a queer character (1x06 overtly having his feelings described this way; 1x08 also has him expressing discomfort about suburbia and normal life, for example). This backdrop of the sort of framing of his character is assisted with moments of flirtation with male characters (in very specific contexts which leave room to argue it’s one thing or another and would make up the surface reading, such as Dean feeling threatened and flirting to deflect - the two off the top of my head are the saucy comments to police in 1x01 and 1x12, and snark-complimenting the random (later revealed to be evil) villager in 1x11); presenting Dean’s general insecurity with gender and sexuality, a running theme that gets increasingly explored as time goes by but the roots of which are especially visible with hindsight; and ambiguously presented moments with extremely suggestive implications (for example Dean’s missing hour in the bathroom in 1x15 immediately after what seems to be a flirtatious wink past Sam to some of the people playing pool behind him - mostly men, of course). Dean’s immersion in the world of hunting, itself in general a culture presented with a metaphorical suggestion relating it to queer culture despite its overt hypermasculine and assumed conservative social structure (hand in hand with monsters sharing this metaphor), is another sense of coding Dean as belonging to a culture within but separate from the normative culture, and the fact he embraces it in a way Sam doesn’t in season 1.
Played in contrast to Sam, it’s an interesting picture. Sam is given a starting point with an attempt at building a “normal” life which of course includes a girlfriend he intends to marry and one day hopefully have a family with. Though this is all ripped away from him in the first episode, Sam still wishes for a normal life, and at several points consistently throughout the show expresses this interest and the idea that he still would dream for it as his ideal life; that he only continues hunting because it’s the family business and his brother is still in it, for example, as his line in season 10/11 when bringing it up, and in season 12 Mary wins him over to the BMoL’s world without monsters pitch with a reminder of what a normal life might be for him now. 
Dean meanwhile expresses that the normal life is not for him many times, and when he attempts to have it with Lisa, as the one example of him living as a civilian since he was four years old, it’s a compromise for his life taking him away from hunting and expressed as such, while Sam generally cuts himself entirely off from their world and can live as and imagine himself being a civilian, having a history of running away as a child, a break for freedom at college, and another attempt as an adult when he ran out of family to continue the family business with between season 7 & 8. 
Unlike Sam’s attempts to leave the life behind, Dean is shown still using the symbols of that culture, warding the house, laying down salt, and keeping a gun and holy water under his bed, that last image of which the montage at the start of season six ends with, showing vividly how his bed and normal life still has the world of hunting and monsters under it. This life quickly draws him back in with the return of Sam from the dead and back into his life, and he tries to exist in a half-in half-out state until various disasters show the problem with their set up, as Dean’s connection to this other culture upsets the balance of the home life he had with Lisa. This also is shown as a tragedy and a negative reflection on Sam and Dean’s, that they couldn’t make the compromise work. 
Similarly one of the darkest moments in the brothers’ relationship is when they pick each other over Sam’s once hopeful way out and chance at a normal life on the other side of all their eight seasons of accumulated trauma, Amelia (and Riot the dog), and Dean’s (of course ambiguously coded) relationship with Benny, and it seems awful that they’ve given up so much and chosen such an extreme, clearly over their own happiness and desires, because of their obligation towards each other and their job. In the example of 8x10, Sam gives up total normality while Dean gives up an emotional connection within their world.
On the surface the fact both Sam and Dean are disrupted out of normal life, especially by each other’s presence, and would continue hunting because of the other, seems an identical conflict of interests between them and a normal life. But their actual attitudes towards it are again presented as opposite. Dean expresses many times that he sees no end to hunting for him, and that he would happily die doing it; later attempts to suggest possible endgames include possibilities of considerably more settled lifestyles still within the hunting culture, again for Dean a hybrid life where he may occupy two ends of a spectrum simultaneously, and that he might be allowed to emotionally settle while still being able to identify as a hunter and to be a part of their world. 
Sam might also wonder about settling down with someone in the life as a possibility he never seemed to consider until 11x04, but it comes with precisely none of this baggage, connected instead to different arcs in Sam’s development. Sam’s interest in the normal life comes with assumed and unchallenged heteronormativity, and the desire to have an eventual wife is implicit (while for Dean since season 10 all his discussion of an endgame has repeatedly used gender neutral phrasing that he may settle down with someone). Sam is also shown with few long-term love interests, the only notable positive one since Jess being Amelia (Ruby was never going to be a settling down white picket fence thing, but again, different story being told over there where Sam has no queer subtext but other struggles). Again in (or, before) season 8 he settled down with the full intention to leave the hunting world behind, including letting go of the burden of following leads from the newspapers that would have taken him onto a case, and ditching their phones instead of at least putting himself on standby in case Kevin or someone else got in contact needing their help. Mary’s return in season 12 contrasts this all the more by showing even after she was married and settled and had already had Dean, the prospect of a hunt could still tempt her out of the house. In many ways Mary’s outlook on life and hunting has been paralleled more closely to Dean’s and “a world without monsters” is antithetical to their true desires; that they will always be somewhat between worlds, while it is genuinely tempting to Sam to leave it all behind and get married.
Very little is made in the text of Sam’s interest in women in the sense of his interest being, well, interesting. He never makes sexual comments, rarely checks women out, and is rarely depicted wishing for casual sex, something he also extremely rarely engages in except for times when he’s been soulless or drinking demon blood, giving him clear and dramatic changes in his psyche. An incidental moment where he and Dean sign a virginity pledge in 9x08 leads to an accidental unbroken “virginity” until 11x04 for Sam (and he says he’s going to go research and sounds like he means it when he leaves and stumbles into his hook up, paralleled to Dean intentionally looking for a hook up but seeming to strike out after a bad night... or - well, that moment is itself ambiguous and had a ton of discussion of exactly what “mistakes” Dean made after blowing all out of proportion an attempt to hook up with a female hunter he already knew was never going to happen when he brought her up). Of course in 9x08 Dean breaks the same vow within the episode, as well as it being obvious to Sam he would, and the way it happens playing into a long thread of pointing out Dean’s interest in women and his varied tastes in porn (Chuck had never seen so much on one computer...). Dean’s sexuality has a much greater focus in general, whether it’s his interest in women or the subtextual coding of him as bisexual. Whether it’s subtextual or Dean openly discussing sex and being shown seeking it out, a fairly consistent discussion continues within the text about his sexuality. Showing his overt interest in women leads to a more general picture of all of Dean’s interests and contributes to an ongoing depiction and thematic discussion of Dean’s interests and desires.
And so to the chosen quote for the title – Sam’s fascinating challenge to Dean about his computer usage in 7x12, combining Dean’s stated interest in watching anime porn from 7x01, implied to be about female characters (based on the sound effects coming from his laptop in the only incident where he’s actually shown watching it and - ew) and the endless Dick jokes of season seven (“Who would choose to be called Dick?” Edgar wonders about him, hanging a lampshade on the season’s desire to just make as many Dick jokes as they could). Sam once again suggests there’s a binary – in this case because you can’t really do both at the same time for reasonable multi-tasking issues. Of course metaphorically it seems to be a jab that Dean has transitioned his interest in the heterosexually coded anime porn to a strict homosexual interest in “Dick” –  an innocuous jibe from Sam who has lived in close quarters with Dean for long enough to be fairly certain of his interest in women.
Still, it illustrates the binary that this sort of thought operates in: that even when Dean is shown and known to have a multifaceted range of interests, in this case literally coded as a metaphor for his sexuality rather than coding suggestive of it as well (like the cake/pie thing), it’s an either/or despite that we know he could reasonably want the laptop to do either (though not in this context as he genuinely did want to help with the monster of the week case which was an entirely other thing outside of the binary and not relevant - you know, until 10 minutes later Dean’s fangirling over Eliot Ness and rotating to check out a soldier in the street). The end of 7x12 shows Dean is still “into Dick”, continuing his research for the obsessive revenge mission as the last beat of the episode; Sam displays that he’s perfectly aware of how multifaceted Dean is years later in the season 12 episode where he gets to tease Dean for being “an animated Japanese erotica chick” - never mind that in that case it was a binary between “chick flick chick” and that, and riffing off the pilot episode’s “No chick flick moments” (establishing the first binary of stated text and implied subtext about Dean), at the end of season 11 Sam finally managed to get Dean to admit that he loved chick flicks, so again he knows full well that he’s ascribing a false binary to Dean when he operates in both.
(Robbie’s season 7 seemed to be full of this because 7x20 also has a totally fake binary for the sake of subtext - Charlie can’t flirt with the security guard because she’s only into women, not even in an emergency... Dean, of course, is happy to help out... Immediately not playing into the arbitrary rule established about functional flirting on the job vs sexuality - or playing right into it and revealing another side of himself to help Charlie, just as Sam reveals how deep his Harry Potter nerdiness runs.)
So, thematically, where does this all go and why is it important? 
In season 10 when Dean is a demon and off “howling at the moon” with Crowley, during their subtextual elopement and honestly I would say textual sexual tryst (triplets comment in 10x01, implication Crowley knows how much Dean can stick up his butt in 11x23, “maybe I’ve rubbed off all over you” in 12x15...), their official break up is marked with Crowley yelling at Dean to “Pick a bloody side”, after Dean spends the episode overtly struggling between being a demon and a human. Of course this phrasing mirrors sentiments real life bisexual people can have to deal with from intolerant people. In the end of that particular episode Dean accepts he’s a demon, but on his own terms, not being bound to Crowley’s desires for him, after the King of Hell runs out of interest to Dean as a source of free drinks and no consequences fun as he starts making demands of Dean to work for him. Sam and Cas pick a side for him shortly after to cure him of being a demon, and then again at the end of the season to cure him of the Mark of Cain, the root cause of his transformation, after Dean had spent most of the season adapting to living as a hybrid human and Knight of Hell. 
This arc resolves at the end of the next season metaphorically, when Dean restores harmony to the universe by reconciling light and darkness in Chuck and Amara, picking neither side in a binary which has been causing conflict by one overpowering the other since the dawn of time and currently threatening the existence of the universe when Dark attempts to destroy Light. Dean is described by Chuck as “the firewall between light and darkness” in 11x21, emphasising he has a place of cosmic importance in occupying a middle ground between two binary choices. He is both a “virile manifestation of the divine” (so says a server in a hippy cafe in 7x07, but there’s more to his words than he knows), and a worthy bearer of what turned out to be a mark of primordial darkness that made him a conduit of Amara’s power. Dean doesn’t need to pick a side, and occupying ground from both sides makes him stronger. Not for nothing, Chuck also is revealed to be bisexual during his return arc, clearly stating he had had both girlfriends and boyfriends while hanging out incognito on Earth.
By the end of season 11 then, it is clear through these textual statements and actions that Dean is a character linked to this pattern of a strong connection or implication of one thing and also to something that is presented as an opposite or opposing force to it in the narrative, and that he represents a middle ground embodying both. He is the croissookie. 
Though the show leaves a lot to be desired in textual representation when it comes to Dean’s bisexuality, the subtextual thread of the story is filled with imagery and suggestiveness directly relating to this depiction, and this exploration is only a small part of the way Dean is surrounded by the queer subtext of the show. This particular imagery relating to Dean is a regular, important and eventually universe-saving part of his characterisation, and discussion of the imagery of him occupying a dual nature can be applied to many of the other ways the show explores and divides his psyche without making it into a discussion of his bisexuality at all - these divided aspects of his personality have been fuelling discussion of his character for years. And as he has a separate and extremely detailed queer reading, applying this facet of his character to his bisexuality specifically creates a fascinating reading of the depiction of this in the text.
Standard disclaimer none of this proves anything but I love looking at Dean this way and it completely informs my reading of him.
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