#casnalysis

[googledocsdyke]

Cas is never in the meta shit because it would break the show and the characters would become real and walk out of the tv and into your living room

literally to paraphrase ziz steveyockey. cas is ripping up the narrative and eating it. meanwhile dean builds a painstaking carefully constructed house of cards from the narrative that he cannot bear to look at once created and sam opens the narrative for a bit and is like "huh cool narrative" and then literally just goes and does his own thing. so when sam and dean interact with the metanarrative there's tension and rejection of it — sam shies away from the implications it places on him, runs away rom becky, moves away from hell-as-destiny, while dean has a full-body freakout over the fact that he's allowed to be perceived and narrativised, specifically narrativised as in any way queer — but they NEVER rip through it head on.

the winchester brothers cannot bring themselves to set fire to a narrative that will always centre them as the specialest boys in the universe. dean because he is a good little narrative hero constantly battling the conflicting desires to be perceived and never narrativised, but who will ultimately always say "yes sir" to the authorfathergod, to power and authority. sam because he would rather walk away from the narrative, leave for stanford, reject his supposed boyking destiny, but when he does walk away he leaves the narrative intact.

but CAS. oh, cas. his death scene is literally him punching out of the narrative on his own terms in a moment of pure true happiness and the world folds into empty nothingness behind him. cas given the chance would hurl every page chuck has ever written into a marsh while dean dives in to try and save them. but the ink is already running. if cas were in 10x05 fan fiction the first thing he would do would be to give the tiny lesbian cosplaying him a soft crooked smile. the second thing he would do would be to reach his hand out of the screen and yank the plug tethering your tv to the wall and do gay kissing behind a shattered blackened screen. this is a private dance

[googledocsdyke]

dean and sam quoting john saying "it's not my job to be liked. it's my job to raise you right" with a smile as though that doesn't encompass EVERYTHING that was wrong. with john's parenting. this ugly insistence on adhering to some kind of "rightness" (the right kind of hunter, the right kind of obedient soldier, the right kind of man) at the expense of being kind or liked or likeable. willing to drive his own children to hatred as long as they still obeyed. and the way cas listened to that story and nodded and then rightfully refused to follow a word of that parenting "advice" at all. and raised jack and looked after claire with gentleness in his voice and kindness and words of affirmation and a goodness that produces itself over and over. the quiet revolution in saying No, i will not do what the angry men before me have done. like Fellas do you ever queer fatherhood??????

[googledocsdyke]

Do you have any thoughts/recommended texts for Cas analysis? I genuinely love the dean gender studies and I just wanna know what people might apply to Cas.

yes absolutely!! while dean studies is my first love i also deeply love cas analysis (casnalysis?) and wanna strive to do more of it. here’s some stuff off the top of my head:

1. gender, sexuality, heavenly embodiment

this is much more theological and less psychological than dean’s whole Deal because there’s so much fascinating stuff around how the angels in general experience express and conceptualise gender (@autisticandroids has a good post about angel gender & lily sunder has some regrets) but for cas in particular there’s this fascinating kind of collective fandom agreement (which i DO also agree with) that cas’ own gender kind of is gay man, that he actively chose gay manhood, but also that he’s kind of..... lacking the Insane Genderishness that dean exhibits at all times, even though he actively chose to engage in male gendering and became so comfortable housed Within Jimmy that he, as some post i saw the other day that i can’t find anymore said, “became his own body” when jimmy died. 

like on the one hand there’s an almost-canonical transness to the whole process but it also never feels fully written-into because 1) the supernatural writers for all their insanity are sometimes very boring and *most* of the time only feel interested in narratively expressing angels As Their Vessels anyways and just like leaving convenient spaces around these questions (boldest thing they ever did was hot girl cas which i WISH i had the range to unpack) 2) there’s a vague inevitabilist shrug to the whole thing since they obviously weren’t gonna recast misha collins (though they HAVE tried to get rid of him) and 3) something amorphous about cas’ entire..... personhood? makes him Empty Of Gender as a contrast to dean’s Full Of Gender (i believe it was @deanwinchestergender who said this) and like is it just the juxtaposition to dean/jensen’s whole insane Deal? or something else? 

like he actively chooses the terms of his own embodiment and yet narratively it feels like a shrug. and we’re all like “well obviously even though he’s a celestial being he was always a gay man” and like WHY. i love it idk idk much to think about! and yeah just in general the theological questions of possession and cas genuinely Becoming a man as he iterates himself consciously towards humanity it almost feels like. by doing the most boring things possible with his gender they made it interesting? idk if that makes sense.

2. discipline, free will, metanarratives

cas is like a tool (“i am not a hammer, as you say”) held in constant discipline and surveillance by the system that enmeshes him and it’s really, really fascinating to watch the way the angels hold each other to conformity. especially pre-god they kind of produce each other as foucauldian disciplinary subjects (which i posted about here) in perpetual visibility through angel radio, generating their own and each other’s conformity rather than being directly ruled through like a single centralised source of power. only the spectre of a god. and obviously cas’ whole thing is that he has ALWAYS disobeyed and the narrative affords him this psychological interiority never given to the foucauldian subject, an internal will and desire for freedom in a way that fits more with the liberal subject (super roughly and not with the same pro-capitalist implications but he has this internal drive for self-liberation. 

and that’s also where the metanarrative comes in ofc! i think it was @dykecas who said that cas is a real person written by people who hate him, and there’s this crack in the narrative (mirroring the crack in his chassis) where cas gets in, over and over, despite all the order imposed by the show’s authorfathergod. like we’ve all seen the analysis about how it was Never supposed to be this way they DID try to fire misha collins in 2012 and yet this gay man literally cannot be stopped! i think actually his appearance in scoobynatural is a neat little distillation of this — he drops into this animated world originally with a singular purpose (Save Sam And Dean) the same way he dropped into lazarus rising with a single 3-episode arc (Save Dean). huge hammer behaviour. his “utility” diminishes within the narrative (he finds that he can’t fly in the scooby doo universe) and so he is no longer a tool/means to an end that salvation moves Through. and in the process (and huge creds to @lesbianyuugi for this) he does something ENTIRELY unrelated to his original cas-as-tool aim, and learns, like, the meaning of laughter from shaggy and scooby. WHICH brings me onto the third point

3. love, queer kinship, family-making

HE’S GAY AND HE’S A DAD! i feel like a lot of tumblr throws around the term “found family” in a very flat and tropey way (which is fine it’s cute and fun no matter what!) but like . GOD there’s so much specific stuff going on here. like the way that cas (unintentionally) obliterates the midwestern white christian nuclear family (made incarnate in the novaks) which like could be uniformly portrayed as an act of deep malice and villainy but instead grows to serve as a surrogate (if imperfect/complex, but DEEPLY loving) father figure for the gay daughter who has now escaped that nuclear family/seen it destroyed depending on how you read it? like he remasters the entire concept of fatherhood and it’s a very interesting (if DEEPLY) unintentional subversion of the homewrecking non-nuclear gay trope. cas is so good because his character arc doesn’t say “look, gay people can be normal and have perfect settled families just like you” it says “gay people DON’T have normal settled families actually and they are full of love anyways! or Because of the abnormalcy itself!) 

to cite ziz lesbianyuugi again he DOES queer fatherhood in his parenting of jack particularly because it really is one of the ONLY parent-child relationships in the show that breaks the incessant cycle of abuse and control and cold indifference perpetuated by the authorfathergod (a cycle reified in 15x20 lol). like god’s treatment of cas and his siblings mirrors john’s treatment of sam and dean (particularly dean) mirrors victor’s treatment of krissy and her crew mirrors dean’s later treatment of jack. there is a CONSTANT reiteration of the story of authorfathergod (often a father tightly entwined in biological kinship) treating a child as a mechanism or a tool or a means to an end. and cas looks at ALL that he has suffered and all that he is ever known and chooses constantly to reject it with every piece of love he expresses for his child. and not to sound like the kind of academic people make fun of on twitter but there is an INHERENT queerness to that. gay love will pierce through [the veil of death/the thick silence of abuse/the mechanism of godly control/hegemonic american masculinity] and save the day

anyways here are some very haphazard recs on everything above for further reading:

angels in america (tony kushner)

histrionics of the pulpit: trans tonalities of religious enthusiasm

the public universal friend: religious enthusiasm in revolutionary america

discipline and punish (michel foucault)

friendship as a way of life (michel foucault)

the genesis of blame (recommended by @pietacastiel who has GREAT theology content in general

all about love (bell hooks)

the chapter “when hated characters talk back” in anti-fandom: dislike and hate in the digital age (is actually explicitly about cas)

also cannot recommend enough following the ppl i tagged above!! most of the unlinked stuff is available through http://libgen.li/ and bookshop is a good alternative to amazon if ur american and want physical copies

[googledocsdyke]

angel possession is like the kool-aid man. the human is the glass the angel, you guessed it, the kool-aid. this is relevant to the discussion

oh WAIT this is so good. because i think. ok there are so many different ways to DO possession like obviously the way gadreel possessed sam is different from the way benjamin possessed his vessel ("she is his friend") is different from the way cas possessed jimmy. like this comes from the fact that no one working on supernatural could be bothered to establish in-universe rules or consistent lore but angelic possession really is not an absolute truth that always proceeds the same way but a tool, a malleable thing to be used to various means. to serve the story or the angel or the vessel in a particular way

so THAT being said. the way that cas possesses jimmy is like really very much kool-aid man. like jimmy is absolutely the vessel the cup the translucent thing that holds but is almost immediately vacated of any internal presence or self. even before jimmy actually dies we never get the sense that he's sharing any kind of headspace or personhood with cas he is literally just the container that cas pours himself into. the blood in the chalice. the cup runneth over. it's spilling it's liquid it's sticky it's kool-aid it wants it soaks through everything it touches but it tries to keep itself contained. in later seasons cas settles more decisively into his body, can call it his body, no longer a vessel because he is both his form and the body that holds it. the glass and the kool-aid are no longer separate, separable things. BUT the key takeaways here are that 1) cas very much does kool-aid man possession until at LEAST season seven and 2) in some ways cas is the blood of christ. not a blood that is drunken, but a blood that itself drinks. a blood that is hungry. a blood that consumes and seeps through wants the body the bread the wafer the dean to dissolve into it. okay.

[googledocsdyke]

the way that cas basically remade himself in dean’s image after he fell in so many ways, like i will love you and i will die for you but i can never touch you and i can never tell you, and then suddenly he has this kid who looks up to him the way he used to look up to dean, and he has to learn how to be a parent to this god child and for the first time he is making his own choice to not raise jack the way dean raised sam, that instead of losing himself in parenthood he found himself?? mm delicious glass

no it's extremely insane because like. cas learned to be a human through dean like we know this. dean is a textual role model for him (cas is INSANE for this btw i say this with love for them both). and he cared about the whole world because of him and it's the best love story of all time. BUT. when it comes time to raise his child he does not take the image of fatherhood that dean reveres as a role model. like he very easily could've just been like "oh this was the kind of father who raised dean and i would lay down my life for dean so this kind of fatherhood must be Right." but NO! like from the moment he first became a father he knew that that was no way to ease a small thing into this too-heavy world. once again castiel supernatural gets a good grade in escaping the narrative and its relentless insistence on cyclical patriarchal violence. do you ever quietly defy the order of heaven and earth by being gay and raising your gay son with unconditional love??????????

[googledocsdyke]

https://lesbocas.tumblr.com/post/639905747008962560/community-2x5-supernatural-6x20 here is abed and cas agony in the garden

oKAY because. OKAY OKAY OKAY!!!!!!! do you ever think about how both abed and cas had LITERAL god arcs???? father how am i supposed to be the great and omnipotent and righteous thing i have become????? staring up at the sky begging for the burden of godhood to be relieved???? like . FUCK !!!!!!!!!!!