#YOCKEYNATURAL YALL!!! YOCKEY FUCKING NATURAL

[deadlyanddelicate]

alright so. 14x10 ‘nihilism’. written by yockey and directed by amanda tapping so i already knew i was in for a treat but holy shit.

it’s 2am and i am processing so this is neither exhaustive nor polished but uh. so michael traps dean inside his head and we get to see the fantasy he’s stuck in. hold that thought. 

let me just jump ahead to sam and cas getting inside dean’s head for a second. let me feel some type of way about cas noting - in a somewhat aghast way - the sheer amount of trauma in dean’s brain. like!!! you’d think cas knew, having pulled dean out of hell and everything, BUT. cas was very much just castiel then. an angel, more empathetic than most, with too much heart definitely, enough heart to start feeling for dean - but he didn’t know dean. he wasn’t in love with dean yet, or at least he didn’t feel that love in a human way. imagine cas now, with all the feelings and trappings of humanity, having to come to grips with the fact that dean’s mind holds that much horror and pain inside it. that’s a whole other level of heart-wrenching. like-- he knew dean had suffered but now he knows dean has suffered. it hits different. I have to wade through all of Dean's most terrible memories, he says, filled with dread.

(and then, of course, we get sam’s tragicomic statement that - well duh, of course michael wouldn’t keep dean HERE, dean thrives on trauma!!! because it’s all he’s ever known!!! like. the delivery is funny but the statement is deeply deeply heartbreaking).

so. they have to head towards contentment. and what does dean’s contentment look like?

a bar. not a bar to get wasted in but a bar that he owns. not a fancy bar, either, it’s kind of empty and dingy, because this is definitely not dean at his happiest; either the amount of stress and self-loathing he carries makes it impossible for him to envision true happiness even in his mind, or michael simply didn’t want him to be too content bc he’s a bitch like that. but still, the bar is his and he refuses to sell it. (I've never had anything this nice, he says, breaking my damn heart in the process). nice or not, the bar, ultimately, most importantly, is a place of his own, where he can be safe and provide shelter and hospitality to other people. a place where he’s not hunting (though he will still fight monsters if he has to). 

i repeat: HUNTING IS NOT PART OF DEAN’S CONTENTMENT. he will stay at the bar, and he will fight if necessary, and fight damn well, because he’s good at it. but mostly he will wait for his family to come home, and he will feed them and pour them drinks and shelter them from the pouring rain. do you get that??? do you understand how insane it makes me??? dean’s source of contentment being the obtaining of a home that he’s been yearning for since he was four and had it ripped from under him??? dean AS THE HOME, as the nurturer and carer and protector of the people he loves??? and like!!! a part of that contentment is specifically waiting FOR the people he loves to come back to him - to come home to him, because he wants to be somebody’s home!!!! (that he can’t really envision it happening until sam and cas crash into his mind is its own different brand of tragedy but i digress).

and of course, there’s pamela. pamela who’s been a fantasy before, but never an attainable one - pamela of the ‘jesse forever’ tattoo, pamela who teases threesomes and immediately negates them by being intentionally too outrageous and including sam in the suggestion. pamela is a safe and reassuring fantasy because dean can’t get her: because she’s taken or because she’s too much for him or because she’s dead or because she’s... plainly put, not what dean really wants. which, deep down? he KNOWS.

DEAN How come you always have a boyfriend?

PAMELA How come you only want what you can't have?

DEAN Whoa.

PAMELA Besides, you don't want me. You just like to flirt. I'm a psychic, so I kinda know.

DEAN All right.

isn’t that just. unhinged???? dean acknowledges that he wants what he can’t have. and he’s not talking about pamela, of course he’s not talking about pamela, a minor character who died all the way back in season 5. what he wants is the person he’s waiting for at the bar -- and who yet never seems to arrive (the person who’s always leaving, always leaving, and not nearly coming back enough). what he wants is the person that he thinks he can never have, because surely angels just don’t feel that way, right? when they try to care it breaks them apart. it can’t be. it can’t ever be, but he can wait for cas, in case he ever decides to come back, and he can pour him a drink when he does.

(this is even confirmed in a roundabout way by michael, because we know this michael blatantly lies: e.g. he tells sam dean was at his happiest when sam left him alone with their (neglectful, abusive) dad, when we know that dean was miserable. and he also tells cas dean only tolerates him out of obligation/gratefulness, so... pretty safe to say dean feels the opposite, and that in fact he very much wants cas for himself.)

my two main takeaways here are: one, that dean’s contentment - not even his perfect dream, not even his happy ending, but the baseline for dean’s contentment - depends on having a home of his own, quitting hunting, caring for his friends and the people he loves. so, you know, well fucking done on delivering that with the finale.

and two, that even in his own head, even when trapped in a fantasy that is literally trying to keep him from yearning for the outside world, dean is still just hoping for the bare minimum for himself, still always waiting for the people he loves to come back to him and stay, and he can’t even conceive of having what he truly wants -- what he’s waiting for, always endlessly and inevitably waiting for -- because the one thing he wants, it’s something (he thinks) he can’t have. sound familiar?