#And Cas helps salmondean literally out of the goodness of his heart and doesn’t actually need their permission do to ANYTHING.

[castielmacleod]

It’s beyond agonising that like. Later spn seasons would have Cas absent for a string of episodes, so the show could do some salmondean case episodes (apparently the core of the show, though my eyes glazed over through most of them). And that in and of itself is whatever, except then the writers would BLAME Cas’ absence from these intentionally Casless episodes on CAS. And so you sit through all these salmondean episodes of middling to poor quality and then the next time you see your beloved side character Castiel, well guess what. Dean is fucking pissed at him for “disappearing” and is given free rein to yell, guilt trip, and act like Cas has to ask his permission to do anything or go anywhere. Never in my life have I seen a show NARRATIVELY PUNISH a regular recurring character for the crime of being recurring. I can’t emphasise enough that Cas was for external reasons deliberately kept out of the episodes that internal characters would then blame him for not being in. It is insanity inducing.

And it’s one more thing that makes it so clear that spn SHOULD have been allowed to naturally evolve into an ensemble show, because frankly it DOESN’T make sense for Cas to just leave sometimes and there is really absolutely nothing conducive about essentially writing him off and into the show multiple times a season just so it can have its precious brothers-only episodes. And I mean Cas is only the most obvious and most heavily punished example of this, but they also did it to Crowley (literally billed as a regular same as Cas through s9-12), Mary (punished horribly for it tbh, by both the narrative and the fans), and Kevin (and he was usually off on the RUN or being held captive or something horrid like that). And the thing is!! Other characters and brothers episodes don’t even have to be mutually exclusive! How devastating would it be, really, if a salmondean centric episode happened to start with “we’re heading out to xyz, bye Cas” and end with “hey everyone, we’re back”???

I just think this show could have been vastly improved if recurring characters could have been treated as like, assets to the storytelling, and not as objects to get out of the way as quickly as possible so the focus can temporarily go back to the brothers. Lol.