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hollybell51 · 1 year

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ok i know you said requests are backlogged but i also read your sam winchester fic (oh my god???? so good!!!!!) and i noticed that you put dean on your tag list form and i am literally in love with him so if you get time could you do like a hurt/confort fic for him where the reader gets like seriously injured and tells him she loves him because she thinks she's dying and doesn't wanna die without saying it?

Anon you are in luck, the supernatural brainrot is still going strong. Also if you wanna be tagged in stuff make sure you submit responses to that form otherwise I don't know what usernames to put xx

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Dean Winchester x fem!Reader

Supernatural (2005)

Word count: 5.8K

Summary: hunting a ghost that only seems to attack young women, you volunteer yourself as bait. The plan doesn't exactly go to plan, leading to some confessions being made.

Content: ANGST. Angst, besties. Hurt/comfort, mainly hurt but there is some comfort there, whump (sorta), mostly Dean's perspective but still second person narrative voice (loml), probably bad characterisation but I think it's passable???? Sam is like the no. 1 Dean/you shipper, A+ wingman. Badly written emotional vulnerability but I tried I promise. Kissing, first kisses, "I love you"s, bit of blood but not too explicit, hospitals, etc. etc. Dean is a warning on his own but yknow what I love him. I may have missed some stuff so please don't hesitate to catch me on it!

Notes: ft. my freaking awful titles lmaoooo. This isn't really set during any actual episode, but I'm sorta working off only having watched the first two seasons so just assume it takes place somewhere around then. Also the more I watch this the more I just wanna grab him and put him in my pocket or something, it's so bizarre. He's so pretty. I love his cockiness, I love the little eyebrow thing he does, I love the little jaw thing he does. Sorry if I messed up any lore or anything, writing this was a fever dream but tbh I had fun, it's nice to just sorta write you know? Thanks for the suggestion Anon

“Guys, can you hurry up?”

Dean glanced over his shoulder, frantically sprinkling fuel over the exposed corpse below. He couldn’t see all that much in the darkness, but it didn’t exactly look like you had the upper hand. None of them had realised how big the ghost was until now, and with the machete it was currently slashing at you…

“Almost there!” Sam shouted, striking a match and casting it into the grave. The remains went up with a “whoomp!”, the ghost howled and stumbled back. It was difficult to really know what happened in those few moments as the light from the burning remains glinted off the metal of the machete and the ghost shimmered and began to disappear, but what was clear was that something had happened to you.

“Fuck,” you groaned, dropping your own weapon with a dull thud. You staggered, catching yourself on a headstone before your knees gave out and you sank to the ground. You were hunched over awkwardly, your shoulders heaving, hands clutched tight to your stomach.

“(Y/N)?” Dean asked, frowning. Were you hurt? Just out of breath?

“I’m alright,” you called. “Just… give me a second.”

“Shit,” Sam muttered, dropping the salt and packet of matches and running towards you. “Dean!” he yelled as he knelt down, stripping off his jacket and balling it up, pressing it to your stomach.

No, Dean thought. No, no, no, no. He was frozen, the can of fuel dangling limply from his fingers. He’d known using you as bait for a psychotic ghost murderer was a bad idea, even when you’d insisted that you’d be fine. It wasn't that he didn’t think you could handle it – he’d seen you in action enough times to know you were a force to be reckoned with – but he’d had a horrible feeling something was going to go wrong from the moment you’d laid out your plan.

“He goes after girls, right?” You’d had an uncomfortable light in your eyes, all steely determination that Dean simultaneously loved and hated. Loved because, well, it was so you and it meant you were getting shit done, hated because more often than not you were putting yourself in danger. And yes, he was aware of the hypocrisy.

He’d tried to talk you out of it, Sam had too. But once your mind was set – and set it was – no amount of convincing on anyone’s part could do anything about it. The second the idea had begun to form in your brain, the path was laid and there was no point trying to change that.

“You better get over here man, quick!” Sam’s voice dropped, but wasn’t quiet enough that Dean couldn’t hear his next words, addressed to you. “Just hold on, Dean’s coming. Keep breathing, ok?”

Fuck, that didn’t sound good. Dean’s limbs jerked back to life. He didn’t waste another second, sprinting the few metres through the forest of tombstones to where his brother was bent over you.

“Don’t just stand there!” Sam yelled, one hand pressing his jacket to your stomach. “Help me!”

It was like his body was moving on autopilot, kneeling beside you and taking over from Sam without any input from Dean himself. Dully, he noticed that there was already a warm, damp patch on the jacket, as well as a dark spot glistening darkly over your side. Shit.

“I’ll be fine,” you’d insisted when he'd raised his doubts. “I’ve got you guys. You just burn the bones fast, I reckon I can hold him off for a few minutes.” Then you’d shrugged, grinning. “And if it all goes to hell, I know you’ve got my back.”

Yeah, fat lot of help they’d been.

“What happened?” he asked.

“He got me on his way out,” you laughed bitterly. “Can you believe that? Halfway gone and he just–” You broke off, making a vague slashing gesture with your free hand. “God, I’m an idiot.”

“No, no you did fine. We shoulda been quicker.” Dean assured you, pressing harder. “Sorry,” he muttered as you let out a pained whimper.

“‘Salright,” you grimaced. “My fault. Dean, I gotta–”

“Shh, no, it’s fine. It’s ok, you’ll be ok.”

You shook your head, tears mixing with the sweat on your face. He watched one trace a path through the dirt caked on your skin. “It’s important, please.”

He shook his head. “The only thing that’s important right now is keeping your eyes open, yeah? Just… just do that.”

“I’m calling 911,” Sam said. “Just stay there, don’t move.”

“I’m not planning on taking off, don’t worry.” You smiled tightly, then your face twisted in what Dean thought was fear, panic even. It was like a punch to his stomach, he hadn’t seen you look that scared since… Well, ever. Your hand fumbled over his, trying to find something to grab.

“It’s alright,” he told you, pressing on the jacked one-handed as the fingers of the other one twined with your own. “It’s alright, (Y/N).”

“No, no Dean, you have to burn me. Make sure you salt me, uh… Sage, use sage too.”

He felt the blood drain from his face, cold rushing through him. “What?”

“Please,” you begged, your voice breaking. “I don’t wanna hurt anyone. You have to get rid of me, ok?”

Oh God. Oh God. Dean looked up, searching frantically for Sam. He was watching you while he talked to the emergency operator, his fist pressed against his mouth and his hand shaking where he held the phone. He met Dean’s eyes, shaking his head.

“You’re not gonna hurt anyone because you’re not going anywhere.” Dean’s voice was blessedly steady, despite the uncomfortable lump in his throat.

“Promise me,” you whispered, then shouted when he didn’t respond. “Promise me, Dean!”

He gripped your hand tighter, your own fingers digging harshly into his flesh. “I promise you will be ok,” he said.

You sobbed, your body heaving under the rapidly dampening jacket. That was way too much blood for Dean’s liking, and judging by the increasing urgency of Sam’s quiet conversation on the phone, he felt the same.

Your panicked gaze locked on Dean’s face, tears coursing down your cheeks. “I don’t wanna go,” you choked. “I didn’t tell you. I can’t go.”

Didn’t tell him what? It didn’t matter. He squeezed your hand in what he hoped was a more reassuring than painful way. “It’s ok, you’re not going anywhere, alright? You’re staying right here, I’ve got you.”

“You’ve gotta listen to me, Dean–”

“No, tell me later. Just hold on, save your energy.”

“Dean–”

“(Y/N) hold on!”

“Dean!”

“Dean, listen to her.” Sam had finished on the phone, the screen shining eerily on his face. At Dean’s raised eyebrow he gave a tiny nod. Yeah, there was an ambulance on the way.

“Sam, she is not gonna die.” He shook his head, turning back to you. “We’ve got all the time in the world, ok sweetheart?” He searched frantically for something to say, anything to keep your attention. He was no doctor, but he knew it would be bad if you passed out. Very bad.

“Uh… fuck.” He broke off, floundering. What would keep you awake? What could he possibly say after you’d just made him promise to get rid of your spirit once you were dead, which was not going to happen.

“It’s actually not a bad night,” he started, already kicking himself mentally. “Bit of a breeze. I guess it’s sheltered down there, you’ve got a nice, uh, headstone blocking it. Ground’s not too bad either, not too hard. Glad it’s not gravel, my knees’re killing me.”

A watery laugh clawed its way from you before another sob wracked your body. “Dean, I gotta tell you…”

“Can you see the stars from down there?” he asked, cutting you off. “I bet they’re bright out here. No light pollution.” He grabbed your hand as your fingers loosened their grip, dread settling like a stone in his stomach.

Your eyes wandered away from his face, sweeping over the space behind him. You nodded, but the haziness that had slid over your face didn’t do anything to help Dean’s panic, especially now that you weren’t holding his hand nearly as tightly as you had been.

“Wait,” he said, squeezing your fingers. “Just focus on me, keep looking at me.”

Your eyes swung back to his. “Please,” you whispered. “Please Dean, listen to me”

Sam’s hand settled on his shoulder, large and heavy. He nodded to your face when Dean glanced at him, and to his horror he realised there were specks of blood on your lips.

He swallowed hard. He hadn’t realised, but this was probably one of the worst moments of his life. He’d entirely ignored even the possibility of you being injured, let alone dying – just thinking the word felt wrong – since you’d joined him and Sam, doggedly refusing to acknowledge the near physical ache the idea of your absence caused. Now it was happening, right in front of him. Heat prickled behind his eyes.

He took a deep breath, steadying his voice. “Yeah, alright sweetheart. You tell me, I’m listening.”

Relief washed over your face. “I wanted to say it,” you whispered, “before. I didn’t want it like this.”

“It’s ok. Sh, it’s ok.”

Your body convulsed under his hand with another sob, more blood leaking from the corners of your mouth. “I love you,” you choked. “I love you so much. I don’t wanna get stuck because I never told you.”

Oh. Oh. Dean’s mind went blank, then crashed right back into his skull. It was like swinging on a swing, at the peak of the arc where you floated a little before you started going down again. Yeah, that was his brain in that moment. Of course you’d have the guts to say it when he didn’t, even if it was out of fear of becoming an angry ghost. He cursed the universe and its cruel sense of humour. He faced horrors beyond most people’s imaginations almost every day, but still couldn’t say three simple words when he wanted to more than anything, and now you’d taken the first step for him and it was because you thought you were about to die. Someone up there must have hated his guts.

“I know,” he said finally, nodding. “I know you do. Hold on, ok? There’s an ambulance, it’s gonna get here any minute” It wasn’t what he wanted to tell you, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t make his mouth cooperate.

You smiled, your grip on his hand all but nonexistent now. Your breathing was getting shallower by the second, your eyes unfocussed and no longer trained on his face. It was like now that you’d said your piece, you weren’t even trying to stay awake. He didn’t like to be too dramatic, but he was almost convinced that he was the one who’d been stabbed, not you.

“No,” he whispered. “No, (Y/N), not you. Please, not you.”

A wailing siren sounded in the distance, blue and red lights flashing rapidly brighter as the ambulance drew closer.

“Just a few more minutes,” Sam said, pacing. His eyes never left your face. “Come on, (Y/N), any second now.”

You were perfectly still, too still. Dean leant over, careful to keep applying pressure to your stomach as he listened for breath. The faintest hint of it brushed his cheek, not enough. He blinked hard, holding you against his chest, his face pressed into your hair. It still smelled like the cheap shampoo from the most recent motel, mixed with blood and dirt and sweat. It should have been disgusting, but to Dean it smelled so right. He wondered what that said about his lifestyle choices.

“Please,” he whispered, his voice choked. “(Y/N)...”

Your hand slipped from his, and it was like a damn breaking. He felt his shoulders jerk, something between a sob and a grunt torn from him.

“I love you too,” he whispered, clinging so tightly to you he was half scared he was going to hurt you. “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, (Y/N), I love you.”

The siren was deafening as the ambulance skidded to a stop, Sam waving frantically to the paramedics swarming the graveyard. Someone pulled Dean back despite his protests. Cold stung his cheeks, the breeze from earlier having turned into a wind. It vaguely occurred to him that the reason it was so cold on his face was because he was crying.

Everything was a blur as you were engulfed by uniformed paramedics, your limp form lifted onto a stretcher and born away into the vehicle. Someone tried to talk to him before Sam, uncannily put together and coherent, spoke to them and explained. There was a lot of nodding and “thankyou”s, then Dean was being loaded into the Impala like a little kid and Sam was driving like you were in the back seat instead of in the ambulance.

All he was aware of at the hospital was Sam’s hand gripping his arm, muttering that he needed to pull it together “for her, man.” The harsh, clinical lights and the rush that everyone seemed to be in wasn’t helping Dean’s panic, every prone body he glimpsed taking on your face until he blinked and it was a complete stranger. What if the unthinkable really happened? What if you died, and he hadn’t been able to save you, keep you safe like you’d been so sure he would? What if you really did linger as a tormented spirit, what if he and Sam had to hunt you, get rid of you like you’d said? He didn’t know if he’d be able to do that.

Finally, a serious looking man with a clipboard and a badge approached them. “Are you with the young woman–” he glanced at the clipboard, “(Y/N), who just came in?”

“Yes,” Sam said quickly. “Yeah, how is she? Is she alright?”

“She’s damn lucky someone put as much pressure as they did on that cut,” he sighed. “She’s lost a lot of blood, but she’s stable.”

Dean let out a breath he hadn’t even realised he’d been holding, shoving his hands into his pockets to hide their shaking.

“Thankyou,” Sam smiled. “Thank you, doctor. When can we see her?”

He frowned at the clipboard again, tapping his fingers on the plastic. “Well she’s unconscious, I daresay she will be for a while yet.”

“Please,” Dean interrupted. “I– we just need to see her.”

The doctor raised an eyebrow. “You boys family?”

“Brothers,” Sam lied at the same time as Dean said “husband.”

“I’m her husband,” he went on, ignoring the little flip his stomach did. Somehow, the familiar lie felt different now that he’d told you how he felt, even if you hadn’t heard. “He’s my brother in law.”

“Ok,” he shrugged, “but she won’t… Well, she was stabbed. There’s a lot of tubes, bandages, and she’s out cold. It might be…” He stopped, sighing. “Some people find it confronting, seeing their loved ones like this.”

Dean felt Sam glance at him, but he ignored it. “Trust me,” he said with a tight smile, “I’ve seen worse.”

He had not, as it turned out, seen worse. You were completely still apart from the gentle rise and fall of your chest, a thin cotton blanket pulled up and tucked in with clinical precision around your ribs. You had a little cut on your forehead that Dean hadn’t noticed at the graveyard. A drip trailed from the back of your hand to a cluster of bags suspended above you, a thin plastic tube wrapped around your head just under your nose. Oxygen, he assumed. If he ignored all that, you could have been sleeping.

Sam pushed the door open softly, as if he was afraid he’d wake you up. Dean hesitated a moment, then followed him inside. Up close, he could see the light sheen of sweat on your forehead, the darkness under your eyes, the pallor of your lips and cheeks. He reached out to touch you, maybe lay his hand on your forehead or smooth your hair away from your face, but drew his hand back at the last moment. He didn’t want to somehow unbalance you from whatever tightrope you were walking right now, even though he knew that was illogical. Still, even breathing the same air felt somehow dangerous for you.

“Did she tell you?” he asked Sam eventually.

“That she loves you?” He didn’t give Dean a chance to explain that he hadn’t meant that, that he’d been talking about your fear of not-quite-death. “She never said it outright, but I sort of worked it out, y’know? You guys weren’t really that subtle.”

Dean frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just…” He shrugged, gesturing vaguely between your prone form and Dean. “You’re always looking at her, when you think she can’t see you. She does the same. Always just sorta… doing little things for each other. And you’re always touching her, I don’t know if you realised.”

“Huh. I didn’t.” It was true, although it didn’t really surprise him. He liked the little smile you gave him whenever he picked something up from a store for you – a favourite candy, something you’d mentioned you felt like – and he’d just assumed when you did similar things for him it was because you were, well, you. But now that he thought about it, he couldn’t name half as many times when you’d taken the same care and effort for Sam. Not that you’d neglected his brother, it was just… slightly less personal, less specially catered. He felt a surge of warmth for you, then a pang as his eyes landed again on your too-pale face.

As for touching you, well, he wanted to. All the time. He wanted to put his hand on your shoulder, wrap his arms around your waist, hold you close and feel your heartbeat against his. Every brief half-hug or brush of your skin against his was something precious to him, so of course he’d want more. His mind flashed back to the tightness of your hand in his at the graveyard, the warm slick of your blood as you’d clung to him. Even that had been almost euphoric, past the raw terror and sickening dread. He was going to hold you like that again – under better circumstances – if it killed him.

“Yeah,” Sam went on. “She’s the same, actually.” He laughed, shaking his head. “I remember this one time, Illinois, I think. We got a motel room with the longest couch you've ever seen. You sat down in the corner, and she comes and sits right next to you! When she’s got, like, another two metres of space to choose from.”

Dean did remember that, actually. He remembered the rush he’d gotten as you’d squished up against his side, complaining that you were cold even though your skin had been warm to the touch. He still thought about it, sometimes. “Huh,” he said again.

“Yeah.” It was silent apart from the beeping of your monitor and the normal hospital sounds outside the room, then Sam turned and faced him. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Dean shook his head. “It wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have let her put herself out there like that in the first place.”

“No, I was supposed to have her back. I shouldn’t have taken so long with the salt.”

He wasn’t wrong, Dean knew that, but it had been him who’d agreed to your plan. You’d put your faith in him just as much as you had in Sam, and he’d let you down. He hadn’t liked the whole thing from the start, but still he’d gone ahead with it. And now here you were, lying unconscious in a hospital bed, and Sam was beating himself up about it. It was all so wrong, and Dean could have stopped it so easily. But as he looked at you, he swore he could hear you snorting derisively at him, crossing your arms with a firm “bullshit!”

“It’s my choice,” you’d say. “You’re really gonna try to steal my credit?”

“She’d call bullshit on you, you know,” he said.

His brother shrugged, nodding. “Yeah, you too probably. She’d poke you, right here.” He reached around and stuck his finger firmly in the middle of Dean’s chest, right where you’d done countless times.

Despite himself, Dean smiled. Then your drip beeped and he was jerked painfully back to the present, and the problem at hand.

“Did you know she was so scared?” he asked. “Of, y’know…” Dying. Haunting someone. Getting stuck here, not being able to move on.

Sam didn’t answer for a moment, then he sighed, still looking at you. “She mentioned it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Why didn’t she tell me?

“She didn’t want me to. She thought you’d think… I don’t know, that she wouldn’t be able to do the job. She really didn’t want you to know she was scared, she was so worried about what you thought of her. She said you were…” He swallowed, cleared his throat, continued. “She said you were never scared, and she didn’t want you to think she was. Even when I told her we were all terrified.”

“Damn right,” Dean muttered. You’d done a great job at putting on such a brave front, he’d sometimes wondered if there was actually something wrong with you. Or maybe not wrong, but different. He’d never known anyone who could handle the things they did so well, not even his dad. It was something of a relief to know that there was more to it.

“She was convinced she’d be the type of person to get stuck,” he continued. “Kept saying she wouldn’t be able to move on, that she had too much that she was holding onto and she didn’t know how to let go.” He finally raised his head, looking at Dean with what he thought was pity. Any other time, that would have annoyed him.

“That’s why she said it,” he muttered, the uncomfortable lump back in his throat. When you woke up, he was going to give you a serious talk about timing.

Sam nodded.

“And she didn’t–” His voice broke, and he turned away. He wanted to punch something, put his fist through the wall or slam his hand down on the table, but he was too scared it would somehow disturb you. “I didn’t say it back.”

“Woah, hey.” Sam’s hand was firm on his shoulder, steadying him. “You did, man. You did.”

“I was too late! She was out!”

“Yeah, and you can tell her again when she wakes up.”

“What if–”

“No.” Sam shook his head firmly, fingers digging into Dean’s shoulder, anchoring him to the spot. “She’s waking up, and when she does you’re gonna ask her out on a proper date, she’s gonna say yes, and you’re gonna sort yourselves out like adults. Ok?”

Dean looked away. The prospect of asking you out suddenly felt enormous. Of course he’d taken girls on dates before, he knew what he was doing, but that had been more along the lines of “I think you’re cute and you’re clearly into me, let’s get dinner and then we can hook up.” He’d never faced “I’ve been pining over you for months and I was too scared to do anything about it but you almost died and told me you loved me – love, not like – and I have no idea where this is gonna go but Sam’s right and asking you out is probably the best next step even if it’s absolutely terrifying”. He was a total mess, and he knew it.

“Ok?” Sam asked again, insistent.

“Ok,” he agreed. “Ok.”

“Good.”

You didn’t wake up until a day later. Well, that was according to the time and date displayed on the clock opposite your bed. Dean didn’t really have any recollection of time actually passing.

He was slumped in the chair beside your bed, your hand held gently in his own as he dozed. He hadn’t let himself fully sleep since you’d been brought in, too afraid that something would happen while he was out, despite all Sam’s urging. Eventually he’d just sent his brother back to the motel, assuring him that he’d be fine on his own and that he wanted to be there for you when you came around.

He jerked out of his half-nap when your fingers twitched, cursing when his pain stabbed through his neck. Snoozing in hospital chairs was never a good idea.

“Fuck,” you groaned, frowning at the ceiling.

Dean cleared his throat, his mouth suddenly dry. “(Y/N)?”

You turned, your face clearing when you saw him. He’d be lying if he said it didn’t make his heart skip a beat. “Dean,” you whispered. “What’re you doing here?”

He shrugged, making to withdraw his hand, but your grip tightened. “I’m the ‘welcome back’ committee.”

“Oh.” You nodded, smiling softly. You ran your free hand over the bandage circling your waist, studying the IV embedded in your skin. “We got him, didn’t we?” you asked.

Right, the ghost. “Uh, yeah, he’s gone. Your plan worked,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

“It was a pretty good plan,” you grinned.

He shook his head. “It almost got you killed.”

“But it worked,” you insisted, your eyes shining. “He’s gone, Dean. Who knows how many people we saved?”

“And what about you, huh?”

You shrugged. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

He took a deep breath, bending his head so you wouldn’t see the moisture he was sure he could feel gathering in his eyes. How were you so casual about it? It had been your life on the line, you who’d gotten stabbed, who’d been bleeding out, terrified of not dying properly and becoming a ghost yourself.

“Hey,” you said gently, your hand slipping from his, sliding up over his arm to rest hesitantly on his shoulder. “Are you alright?”

“You almost died, (Y/N). Sam told me, what you said about getting stuck, being unable to move on.”

You were silent for a moment, then you sighed. “Well it’s just awkward now that I’m still here.”

Despite himself, Dean laughed. He raised his head, placing his hand over yours, rubbing his thumb in a circle over it. Your skin was warm as ever, dry to the touch. It was such a contrast from the graveyard, one he was glad of. You smiled, some of the colour already returning to your face.

“I’ve always got your back,” he said, “no matter what. Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“I wanted to, I really wanted to. But I just… I don’t know, I just couldn’t. Every time I tried it was like this brick wall went up in my brain.” You shrugged, drawing your hand back as you shifted to sit more upright. Dean missed its warmth instantly. “You’re always so… unfazed, you know? It felt kinda stupid.”

He snorted. Sure, Sam had already told him what you’d said, but it was different coming from you.

You folded your arms, as if you’d just won an argument. “See?”

“Shit, (Y/N),” he said, shaking his head. “I’m not – what’d you say? – unfazed. This shit gets to me too, I just…” He thought, unsure how to phrase it. “I didn’t wanna scare you,” he finally settled for. “Didn’t want you to worry.”

“Oh.” You picked at a loose thread in the blanket, biting your lip. “And the other thing?”

“Yeah, the other thing.” He’d known this was coming, he’d tried to find the words as he’d sat beside you, waiting for you to wake up. He’d almost had it, he told himself. How hard could it be, after all?

“I didn’t wanna die with, like, unfinished business. That’s the main reason people stick around. It felt like if I didn’t get it out there, I wouldn’t ever be able to… keep going. Move on.” You swallowed, not meeting his eyes. “It’s ok,” you went on, “if you don’t, y’know, feel the same. I’d understand.”

So you hadn’t heard him. Dean wasn’t surprised, but some part of him had been clinging to the hope that somehow his words had gotten through to you even as you were bundled into the back of the ambulance.

He shook his head. “I just wish you’d said something before.”

You looked up, hope chasing confusion across your face. “What?”

“I wish you’d said something before,” he repeated. “It would’ve saved us both a lotta trouble.”

“I don’t…” You frowned. “What’re you…?”

He shrugged, his heart beating a million mph. “I love you too,” he said simply.

You blinked, opening your mouth to say something, closing it again. Slowly, a smile crept across your features. “Alright,” you grinned, way too smug for Dean’s liking. “Alright then.”

“Don’t push it,” he warned, but the threat was empty and you both knew it.

You shifted again, leaning towards him. “Come here,” you said softly.

He stood, ignoring the ache in his back from the bloody uncomfortable chair.

Impatiently, you beckoned him closer.

He raised an eyebrow, brushing a stray piece of hair from your face. “Do I get to kiss you?”

“That’s the goal, yeah.” You rolled your eyes, tilting your face against his hand. Dean wasn’t fond of the whole “butterflies in your stomach” thing, but he had no idea how else to describe the feeling that tiny gesture conjured. It really was like someone had released a swarm of the things inside him, and he wasn’t sure if he liked it or not.

You were watching him expectantly, almost like you were challenging him. “Go on,” your eyes seemed to be saying, “try it.”

He did. Your lips were softer than he’d expected, and just as warm as your hands. You made a sound somewhere in the realm of a sigh as his hand slid down to rest on your shoulder, pushing gently towards him, your own fingers running over his jaw to brush along the back of his neck. He couldn’t believe he’d waited this long to kiss you, and now that he’d finally taken the plunge, he never wanted to stop.

But he had to breathe, unfortunately, and so did you.

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that,” you whispered. You were still close enough that he could feel the words against his skin.

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that,” he replied.

You laughed, a soft, breathy sound, and closed the tiny gap once more. “I love you,” you murmured between kisses, “and I’m sorry it took me almost dying to say it.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that too.”

The door handle clicked, the hinges squealing. “Ok, so I ran into the doctor on the way in— woah.”

Dean stood up so fast he almost overbalanced.

Sam was standing in the doorway with a disposable coffee cup in each hand, his mouth hanging open as he stared from you to Dean and back again.

You cleared your throat. “Hi, Sam.”

He shut his mouth, shoving the cups into Dean’s hands as he crossed the room and bent to hug you with a muttered “thank God.”

“Watch it,” you warned, “I’m injured.” But your arms snaked around his back anyway, your voice muffled as you pressed your face into his neck.

“You’re never allowed to scare us like that again,” Sam said firmly.

Your eyes found Dean’s over Sam’s shoulder, and you smiled. “I’m not really planning on it, don’t worry.”

Sam just laughed. “How’re you feeling?” he asked when he finally let you go.

“Ok,” you nodded, then frowned. “Hungry.”

Sam glanced at Dean, who shrugged. He’d gotten bored some time in the morning, and the packet of pudding that had been left on your bedside table along with a bottle of water had been practically begging to be tasted. He’d wondered if you’d wake up before they brought a replacement, he’d even felt a little bad eating your food, but he was hungry, dammit, and when Sam had left he’d said he would come back “later” which meant “tonight”. And that was too long for Dean to wait. He also didn’t have any money on him, and wouldn’t have left your side for the cafeteria when the pudding was right there.

“What?” you asked.

“He ate the pudding they left you,” Sam said. Dean never should have mentioned it, but he’d been desperate to get Sam to bring him something and it had felt convincing over the phone.

Dean glared at his brother and the coffees – which were very noticeably not the fast food he’d had in mind. “You try living in that chair for a day, see how long you can go without.” Then he turned to you. “You didn’t miss much, don’t worry.”

“Well, I’m hungry!” you protested, crossing your arms and looking for all the world like a petulant toddler.

Sam’s words about asking you out echoed in his mind.

“I’ll buy you dinner,” he said. “At an actual restaurant, not a fast food place. As soon as they let you outta here, alright? In the meantime…” He reached for the bottle of water, handing it to you with an apologetic shrug. It was better than nothing.

You wrinkled your nose at him. “This is a pretty shit first date.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” he said. Then, on second thoughts, “It’s not a first date, Sam’s here.”

“Geez,” Sam muttered, “sorry. And after I got you a coffee too.”

“Did you get me one?” you asked hopefully.

“No,” he said slowly. “But you can have mine if you want?”

You sighed. “I don’t like it how you do. But thanks,” you added with a smile.

“Sorry, I just wasn’t expecting you to be awake.”

“Have a little faith, Sam.”

He smiled, glancing between you and Dean.

“You owe me a coffee, and you owe me a dinner,” you continued before he could say anything. Dean thanked you silently. He didn’t really want a shovel talk from his own brother right now, which he could see Sam was just dying to dish out. He wondered if you’d be getting one. Probably, but he had no doubts that it would be less “shovel” more “talk”.

“Soon as you’re fixed up,” he said. “I promise.”

“And it’ll be a date?”

“Sweetheart, it’ll be the best first date you’ve ever been on. Trust me.”

You just grinned, ignoring Sam’s fake-disgusted sigh. “Ok.”

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vendettasfanfictioning · 6 months

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Sam-coded: Analyzing the parallels between Destiel and Sam's arcs with his love interests.

PART 1: JESSICA MOORE

FOREWORD & DISCLAIMER

With a fan community as enormous as Supernatural's, it is fair to assume that most, if not everything, stated here has already been pointed out or dissected multiple times before—especially considering the long span of time that the show has aired and the three years thereafter. The goal of this post is not to claim these ideas as my own but rather to compile and expand on them.

I also want to add that regarding Jessica, specifically, the canon facts about her are incredibly limited what with her only "real" appearance being at the Pilot episode (though she is referenced and alluded to in multiple episodes all throughout).

That said, she had a critical role in shaping Sam's goals, with emphasis on earlier seasons' Sam's development so it felt fitting to start this series off with her.

There are many instances that the fandom has pointed out cinematic parallels between Sam and Jessica & Dean and Castiel. In this post, I would be elaborating on all of the key points I have found, namely: 1. The scripted meeting, 2. Grieving a lover, and other random findings.

1. IN THE BEGINNING (WITH REGARDS TO GOD'S PLAN)

To start, both Sam/Jess and Dean/Cas were fated to meet to serve a higher narrative purpose.

Frankly, I think that is fucking beautiful, but not only that; it can be argued that, if we were to speculate that Sam met Jessica right after he ran away from Dean and John, then Jessica and Castiel did the same thing. They pulled their respective Winchester brother out of hell/a dark place. (That may just be me talking out of my ass, but it's such a poetic concept, isn't it?)

Most importantly though, both parties were doomed by the narrative, but in polar opposite ways.

(Screenshots taken from 5x20)

Sam was destined to love and then lose Jessica for two reasons: to start the story, and to make Sam go down the "dark" path i.e. adjacent to Lucifer, demon blood, evil. Their story was scripted from the get-go, even before Supernatural decided to go metatextual with God.

(Screenshots taken from 15x17)

On the other hand, Dean and Castiel were never meant to be anything more. God himself says that Castiel was supposed to continue obeying heaven, do what he was told, and it is one of (if not the one) that completely separated the Supernatural storyline from any of Chuck's other drafts.

(GIFs from 15x18 and 15x19)

Furthermore, Castiel's love for Dean and Dean's loss of him marks the end of the story and makes Dean defy the role that God made for him. Admittedly, it's a flawed parallel, as Dean has already moved on from being Michael's Sword and the Righteous Man. To that, I say it only further proves the point; their unscripted "profound bond" directly opposed God's word. It was what should have broken the cycle.

And still, both ended in tragedy. It's just that one was written to end that way and the other wrote itself.

2. THE WINCHESTER BROTHERS ON GRIEF

(GIFs are from 1x01 and 12x23)

This segment can't start any other way than with these iconic shots of the Winchesters holding their brother back from running towards the love of their life (as the lover, in question, dies/walks to their death). These shots are the very reason I started this whole analysis, and they speak for themselves.

Even their clothes are inverted here, because Sam and Dean are experiencing the exact same thing. The grief, pain, and helplessness that comes with losing a partner.

(While compiling these, I stumbled upon the eerie realization that the shots attached above and the ones below have swapped color palettes in a way? Granted, that may just be some editing thing. Technology and video quality aside though, you can't deny that the vibrance of the fire vs. the bleakness of Apocalypse World juxtapose aesthetically well with the shots below. Just another one of those, "is it intentional or did Supernatural just run out of options from the sheer breadth of it?")

(Screenshots taken from 1x05 and 8x07)

This parallel in particular is what makes me believe that Supernatural either has amazing writing or just a terrible retention for continuity and reflection. Because, again, Sam and Dean are going through the same damn thing here: guilt. Specifically, the guilt of their lover's death—how both had reasons to believe they could've prevented it.

Also, these are cinematically shot the same way: Jessica and Castiel by the road, a deadpan stare at the Impala as the brothers drive by, then disappearing from sight at a second glance. How else are we to take this other than Dean grieving a lover the same way Sam grieved for his girlfriend? Did they just forget this scene from 1x05 when they filmed 8x07? (Most likely, yeah, but that doesn't disprove its contribution to the narrative.)

The premise is also similar, damningly so, the only notable difference being the formatting, with season 1's monster-of-the-week almost-standalones and season 8's continuous, over-arcing conflict with hell and the tablets.

(Screenshots taken from 1x05 and 8x07)

At the very core, though, is Sam and Dean with their, "I could have—" statements. Sam had visions about Jessica dying, he could have warned her. Dean had Castiel right there at the portal to exit Purgatory, he could have pulled him out. It is that guilt they must carry around and that burden they must bear.

(Screenshots taken from 1x05 and 8x07)

They even give one another the same damn pep talk. Dean saw that Jessica's death was slowly killing Sam, the same way Sam saw that Dean's return from Purgatory without Castiel was tearing Dean apart.

(Screenshots taken from 1x05 and 8x07)

Lastly, here are the verbal acknowledgements of their grief. Because hey, who am I to try to explain subtext and nonverbatim connections.

2.1. TO BE JOHN WINCHESTER'S SON

In this segment, I would like to point out two of the instances that Sam and Dean accepted being compared to John Winchester, both in regards to losing Jessica and Castiel respectively.

(Screenshots taken from 1x20)

Again, this is what the story was all about. Sam and John could or at least find solidarity in this, as was intended for the plot. (They even mirror God and Lucifer here, which is an entirely different can of worms I am not opening today.)

Keep in mind, Sam's always hated how John raised them, but it is evident that he found some comfort with John given their undeniably specific situations.

(Screenshots taken from 13x04 I talked a little more about this arc here)

Sam openly calls Dean out on his John-esque behavior; an irony in itself given that the brothers have long since established that Sam was the one who resembled John the most whereas Dean was always, "yes, sir!" until the very end.

In this very same arc, there is a concerning increase Dean's alcohol consumption—and the use of alcohol as a coping mechanism in itself, rather than the leisurely treat it recurringly was in the show—which are telling signs for the headspace Dean was in.

They both lashed out in John Winchester ways they've internalized over the years growing up. Sam went down the path of self-destructive revenge-seeking, while Dean lashed out by rejecting being a father role to Jack, becoming the "drill sergeant," instead. These traits were what hurt them as children and were the crux of John's grief over Mary's murder. Round and round the cycle goes.

2.2. TO BE LUCIFER'S VICTIM

(GIFs from 5x03 (a) and (b))

Again, another iconic parallel considering Lucifer's go-to trick to getting what he wants was to pose as the person his victims want the most. Another example of this exact same scenario is when Lucifer appears to rock star Vince Vicente as his dead girlfriend (and Vince ended up saying yes.)

In the earlier seasons, the most obvious choice for Sam was of course Jessica, as Lucifer was desperate to get ahold of Sam as a vessel. That was narratively sound, right? Even though 5 seasons (so about 5 years in canon) have passed since Jessica died, Sam hadn't forgotten her and she remained his greatest weakness.

(GIFs from 15x19)

Then on the flip side, during a time the story's well past the Script and God's most definitely free-styling, Lucifer appears again—and it is on God's orders. The devil chose Dean's weakness (Castiel) to blindside him, so Dean ends up running on emotions instead of questioning it.

This happened right after the episode Castiel confessed, and before the episode that Should Not Be Named... That also speaks for itself, doesn't it? Insane, absolute insanity to me.

3. MISCELLANEOUS: SYMBOLISMS & OTHER COINCIDENCES

(Screenshots taken from 1x01 and 14x12)

This is where I might be reaching, but it's a small observation I noticed while bingeing the Pilot episode. Of course, at the time, production likely didn't even put much thought into Jessica's costume, but it's a funny thing to point out all the same. (I screamed a little about Cas' healer motifs here in comparison to Cesar/Jesse if you're interested.)

(Screenshots taken from 1x01 and 10x09)

They both have the same Look when their boyfriend is talking down on himself, I can't even make this shit up.

+ I'm so frickin' tired I cannot look for screenshots anymore but Jessica's cookies plus Castiel's "you don't understand, I need pie," moment in the convenience store resonate with me.

+ Might edit and add more to this later, for now I sleepge.

REFERENCES

1x01: Pilot 1x05: Bloody Mary 1x20: Dead Man's Blood 5x03: Free to be You and Me 5x20: The Devil You Know 8x07: A Little Slice of Kevin 10x09: The Things We Left Behind 12x23: All Along the Watchtower 13x04: The Big Empty 14x12: Prophet and Loss 15x17: Unity 15x18: Despair 15x19: Inherit the Earth

UP NEXT: SARAH BLAKE

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cryptkickers · 6 months

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i could write essays on the insane meta narrative behind the supernatural musical episode i feel like we moved on too fast. 200th episode that somehow perfectly portrays, in parallel, the insane contextual and subtextual olympics that make the show so appealing to it's freak fanbase whilst having the lead characters confused and uncomfortable (at best) with the idea that this is supposed to represent their lives . whsvsjd. the longing looks dean gives throughout the whole thing, only for them to never give him the peace he somehow visibly craves despite the godawful writing. jacting joices, etc. and then sam and dean drive off into the night, and never talk about any of it again .

bear with me but can u imagine a stealth trans dean in s10 stumbling into the group of nerdy queer girls putting on a drag show about his life because they idolize him so much?? but this time, they fix it– he can save his brother. he gets to fall in love with his best friend. there may be some robots and dramatic killings of calypso in act 2, but none of that matters by the end: because he gets his peace. he gets to see these girls care about his story; about him!! they understood supernatural better than the writers of the finale and they would've taken care of dean i just know it . its simply insane that "the secret good version of spn that lives in our heads" was like.. quite literally in the show lmao.

anyways all this happens and it's only season 10. it's only 2014. god. but the vision is so clear! <3 i need to rewatch 10x5 and so do you. 💯

#the show of ever or whatever #supernatural #200th episode #spn meta #spn theory #dean winchester #the man that u are

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entropic-saudade · 1 year

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Also can we just talk about The Implications from when Jack says “I wanted mankind to make their own fate. No interference from anywhere, no exceptions”?

Without interference, Sam’s world could’ve been destroyed too. Even if Sam and the other living hunters would’ve copped onto the danger eventually, because the Akrida needed to be killed by something not from earth, then their chances would’ve been slim (of course, they could’ve gone to Purgatory or Hell or used the HunterCorp versions or Apocalypse versions of the people that may have still been down there —unless Jack put them back — in order to find a suitable weapon, so it’s possible they had a better chance of not getting destroyed compared to other worlds). We know this, bc Dean says it next as his reasoning for meddling.

That fact is why Dean and Baby were vital, even when the core four did most of the work throughout the season to make their own fate after Dean set the ball rolling in The Winchesters. Dean needed to interfere in order to save all the worlds.

And in doing so, isn’t Dean making his own fate?

Or do you only get to make your own fate if you’re alive? (In which case, Heaven isn’t quite as free as it claims to be).

Are you only considered part of mankind if you’re alive? (Ouch. The person who throughout the show, at least to Cas, has been humanity’s representative (“He’s in love… with humanity,” “I loved everyone because of you”) and one of its saviors is no longer considered to be part of that?)

Thinking outside of “Chuck won”/“Jack is corrupted by Chuck/god power” theories, it’s possible that since Jack is still pretty much a kid (he still can’t tie his shoes 😭) he just doesn’t understand the nuances or full implications of the rules he’s trying to implement. He doesn’t understand that without Dean’s interference those worlds— even a world with people he cares about on it— may have been lost. He doesn’t understand that not doing anything to save those worlds is a bad thing (abstaining from action is not a neutral choice, it aligns one with the oppressor (in this case, the Akrida, and thus Chuck) in situations where one otherwise has the power to help). He’s trying so hard to maintain peace and order, to not repeat the mistakes of his grandfather and father, that he’s tragically still missing the point. It’s a lot of responsibility and power, and the only existing guidebook on how to wield it is basically trash so he’s having to make stuff up as he goes too. Which is terrifying and stressful and things would work so much better if people just stayed in the lines he’s drawing.

A large part of early SPN was focused on how God (and by nature, all gods, fathers, & makers) seemingly left. No prayers answered, no signs, just radio silence. His absence was the impetus for a lot of major events— the angels gunning to get the apocalypse started and over with bc they wanted some peace too; the angel civil war after they averted the apocalypse and Cas subsequently swallowing Purgatory for power, going mad, and unleashing the leviathan; Cas inadvertently causing the angels to fall in the struggle for power after Naomi and Metatron’s manipulations, Metatron making himself God, the factions that arose from fallen angels; Amara being released and yelling to be heard. God being absent, and being seemingly hands-off, didn’t work.

[For now I’m not even going to dissect how Chuck claims he left because ‘helicopter parenting’ didn’t work, and that him leaving was okay because humanity made it— because it had Sam and Dean. But then we see him later (and in actuality throughout the show) just trying to repeat the same narrative patterns he already wrote— Isaac and Abraham, Cain and Abel, etc for the sake of the story when it’s revealed he does interfere]

The late seasons posit that in actuality the issue was that God interfered too much, both by writing the overall narrative and with all the times he interfered (writing himself in as Chuck, resurrecting TFW countless times, anything he did to make a good story— and specifically, with his actions toward the end— killing Jack, raising Hell, snapping everyone away and trying to make his ending happen).

Jack only knows or has only experienced the latter— with the exception of Cas not being there after he was born and his short-lived experience of being separated from a father figure in that way, he hasn’t had to experience what Cas, Sam, Dean, humanity and the angels experienced for centuries. [This to me would’ve made leaving the deleted scene from 15x19 where Jack prays to Cas but gets no answer more poignant if they left it in— Jack knows what praying to no one feels like, what that pain and confusion is like]. Especially since Jack was just able to wake Cas up from the Empty anyway, and evidently pull him back out unseen in the finale, compared to everyone else he hasn’t had to experience the early seasons absent god/father struggles. He doesn’t understand that interference from on high isn’t always a bad thing in terms of where it gets humanity; the issue was that Chuck did it as entertainment, toyed with them and forced them through all this for a story. The solution then, is to just try to get Jack to understand the nuance and help with the rules and reign (which we see here a little bit, when both Dean and Bobby explain why Dean interfered and Bobby vouches for him, so Jack allows it, giving him the Colt. He still wants to put Dean back in the Heaven box but again, he’s just trying to hold things to gather and it would be a lot easier if everyone would stay where they were put).

But it shouldn’t be solely up to Jack to bear that weight.

Over and over the show has shown us that any single person trying to dictate how Heaven should be run or trying to fill that space — be it Chuck himself, or a well-meaning Cas, or Raphael, or Naomi, or Metatron, or Lucifer— doesn’t work. Over and over the show has shown us that what does work is when people work as a team— team free will, both versions; any time they rally all their allies to unite against a force bigger than they are; every version of found family on the show. Every time a hunter helps another. (Something The Winchesters emphasizes too.) Any time they win — whether it be finally killing Azazel, stopping the apocalypse, stopping the leviathan, or Amara, etc— although it’s usually one of the boys that does the final act, they never get there on their own. It always takes the help and teamwork from friends and foes alike to get there.

Although Amara wasn’t always great (blame her early attitude on Chuck), she brought up a good point about how ruling should have been about balance— not a single point of view or dictatorial narrative, but at the least two of them, working in tandem. Although Chuck absorbed Amara and Jack took in Amara when he took Chuck’s power, this balance still isn’t something we necessarily got to see onscreen in either show. It would be nice to see Amara out and let her help, along with getting visual confirmation that Cas is there and helping too, and it’s not just Jack.

If you do look at the situation from a ‘Chuck won/corruption’ theory, however, then the implications are far more sinister— Jack doesn’t want Dean or anyone interfering, meaning those worlds including Sam’s would’ve been destroyed. Interfere, and risk getting cast out of Heaven— and away from where you got the chance to meddle in the first place. He’s choosing to not interfere because on the surface it makes him look like a better, changed God, but I reiterate: abstaining from action is not a neutral choice, and in a situation where he literally has the power to do otherwise, it aligns him with the villain— the Akrida, and thus Chuck. So nothing has really changed, underneath. Mankind makes their own fate but only within limited parameters set up by Chuck, making it a rigged game. It’s a no-win scenario. Dean has to go back to the box of Heaven, where despite his family being down the road from him he still feels driven to seek out a universe where his family had a shot at a happy ending. Dean is made to go back to where Carry On was playing, where he no longer gets to pick the music. (In. What. World. Would Dean pick that cover of Wayward Son. 💀)

Either way, whether Jack is actively corrupted by Chuck, or if he just doesn’t really fully understand what he’s doing, Jack needs a little help in running Heaven and the multiverse. Dean should be allowed to be part of that help. We should get to see Cas be part of that help. We should get to see Jack change a little more, to have more nuanced understanding and flexibility.

And we should get to see that more in Season 2 if the show is renewed.

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charcubed · 1 year

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Some thoughts on The Winchesters after episode 5, and on self-reflection, and what it may tell us about Dean’s situation:

This was originally written as a thread on Twitter, which is (unfortunately) where I have historically done most of my meta writing. (Here is a collection of my Twitter posts about this show, including a few long meta threads.) I’m trying to get better about crossposting to tumblr ASAP when it's manageable.

All this to say that if this reads like it’s written in bite-sized chunks… that’s why. Also, I am writing this at midnight from an iPad lol.

So… This “Dean all the way down” show, if you will. In every episode of this show, its main characters highlight important things about Dean’s life and his relationships with others, as well as the unfinished parts of his story. Here’s a handy refresher, courtesy of my friend Matt.

I am compelled by the consistency of this (to the point of hypothesizing that Lata will be the main Dean mirror of the week in ep6).

I am also compelled by what is shaping up to be one of many consistencies in not only the themes but also the PLOTS of these episodes:

In every episode so far other than the pilot (I think?), someone is taken and trapped physically and/or mentally. Their freedom requires examining who they are as a person and what’s important to them, and/or examining who they are in relation to who they care about, mostly via reflective versions.

2: John, taken by La Tunda who punishes disobedient children & masquerades as Millie

3: Mary, taken by Bori Baba who lures you in with what you want most

4: John & Carlos, taken by a god of “destiny” who wants John to be like him

5: Mary, trapped in her mind by the Akrida

They’re all different situations, but at their core the key to freedom in the plot is always some form of self-reflection.

It’s making me wonder, because… well, we’re explicitly dealing with a narrative that’s cyclical, yes? We know that already, and the show’s not shy about it…

Cycles of violence + parents & children, on a micro level (Winchester family) and macro level (forces wanting to mold you into something you don’t want to be, or control you; Chuck/God as Father, destiny, and now Akrida).

But is it also a cycle in regards to this self-reflection?

Metaphorically, yes. This is what Dean is doing here and it’s why the characters are continuously acting as rotating mirrors for him. But what I’m beginning to wonder is if we’re meant to start taking it as hints to being literal for Dean, the way it is for the characters.

The characters repeatedly participate in self-reflection to free themselves from literal traps, and that self-reflections acts as reflection of Dean. What does this maybe tell us about what’s LITERALLY happening to Dean? Can we start piecing together that he’s trapped somewhere and uncovering/telling this story is key to his freedom?

🎶 Like a circle in a spiral

Like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning

On an ever spinning reel 🎶

They keep being trapped in places where they have to face aspects of who they are, who they love, and what haunts them. Maybe that’s the literal situation Dean could be in (fake Heaven trap?) and is part of the reason for the story he’s telling. Examining himself to break free.

I don’t know how front-facing in terms of the plot this may be. It could remain metaphorical. or be an extra-narrative reference about the prequel being its own thing but also a quasi stepping stone to a sequel.

But Dean being Trapped is, at this point, feeling pretty implicit.

Combine this with how mirror and reflective imagery is starting to visually pop up a little bit more.

And also combine it with all of the ways Tony’s story parallels Jack’s, and what that could imply about a “Chuck won” through-line… but I’m not getting into that tonight lol.

I am very intrigued. Everything about this is circular, and talking about one aspect kind of tips you into talking about another, which is FASCINATING story construction. So I’m sorry if I repeated myself here!

It’s reminiscent of a triskelion, naturally, a la the necklace in ep2.

Calling it quits for tonight because I am TIRED. Bottom line:

The repeated implication is that Dean is Trapped and doing self-reflection to try to break free. How literal that may or may not in terms of where/when he is remains to be seen, but… it’s feeling more and more pointed.

And I know I’m one of the foremost Chuck won preachers, okay, but I do try not to let it color my view of this show too strongly. I can’t help it that the material feeds me at every turn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#spnwin #spnwin meta #the winchesters meta #the winchesters #spnwin 1x05 #the winchesters 1x05 #when will I post my very long 1x04 meta on this website...#char writes things #dean winchester #unreliable narrator my beloved #hallofmirrorsnatural

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bowlegsandbiceps · 1 year

Note

HBOnatural gimme the deets

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OKAY SO

I'm basically taking the transcripts and whittling each season down into 12 chapters (episodes) and making everything more intense/horror driven. Essentially a tightening of the narrative and finding the core driving force of each season and structuring the story to maximize the impact. Special spotlight on The Boys' trauma and all the weird, seedy things they likely would have done living the lifestyle they did. Making them more morally ambiguous, etc.

I've only gotten partway through the pilot as far as writing goes but below are my personal headcanons about the fic.

+ TRUE MIDWEST GOTHIC and southern gothic vibes

+ it starts out as weirdchesters but is very much destiel

+ Sam has a scar on his cheek from the fire

+ Dean has “your name” tattooed on his ass and wins an astounding amount of money by telling people “i have your name tattooed on my ass” and coaxes them into betting him to drop his pants. He gets hit only about 20% of the time.

+ Dean’s a speed freak but has pot plants hidden in nearly every national forest in the lower 48. Sam will roll with Dean on his birthday but otherwise sticks to pot or coke if someone offers. And the demon blood later of course. Dean flirts with Heroin after Hell but Cas puts the literal fear of God into him.

+ Oh Cas is T. E. R. R. I. F. Y. I. N. G. like sure he’s in a human vessel but he gives everyone the creeps as if they can sense he is other somehow. He kills people indiscriminately at first. Like a waitress comes to ask for their drink order and he smites her for interrupting. Dean is half horrified half annoyed like WILL YOU QUIT MURDERING EVERYONE THAT TRIES TO TALK TO ME WHILE YOURE TALKING TO ME??? (Which should have been his first clue honestly but even HBO!dean is dense at first)

+ Dean fucks every woman he possibly can because he may have a minor sex addiction (really he’s just touch starved) and it annoys the hell outta Sam in the early days. Especially when he brings them back to the room and essentially forces Sam to watch. He starts openly experimenting with men after his demon deal because who gives a shit anymore anyhow. He quits for the most part after Cas arrives because Cas just keeps killing them afterward.

#kingdumbass #answers #hbonatural

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ariel-seagull-wings · 1 year

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THE CLASSIC GHOSTBUSTERS MOVIES, NARRATIVE PACING AND CHARACTER WRITING

@thealmightyemprex @the-blue-fairie @angelixgutz @themousefromfantasyland @goodanswerfoxmonster @amalthea9

So i revisited the first Ghostbusters movie last night and watched the second one this afternoon.

I started to think, with the help of a nap, what made the first movie particularly satisfying and enduring, whereas the second movie, while still having enjoyable individual moments, is unfortunally not as strong in terms of cohesion.

The conclusion that I camed to me is that, the first movie had been made to tell an individual story with beggining middle, and end, not as the start of a series of movies, so every detail had to be carefully tought to tell an unique, simple and easy to follow story.

There is a sense of cause and consequence in each scene, with some moments where the characters stop to breath and discuss what is happening, but the discussions never drag and we are taken to the next scene in a satisfactory way, never feeling that we missed something important with a rush.

And is not only the main characters that are written to be in the right, but even small characters have a role in shapening the world and the narrative, and while they still can be antagonistic to the main characters, they still are presented as human and with important points to present.

The library lady is the point of view character we follow in the opening when we first are introduced to the concept of invisible ghosts, and she will be the first person who will need the service provided by the Ghostbusters.

After that introduction, we are taken to the setting of the university, and we see the psychic experiments voluntaries react in different ways to Peter Venkman's ruse of "guest the right card or be eletrocuted": the young man who is constantly receiving shocks even while guessing some cards right rightfully gets angered and calls Venkman out on this, while the young blonde woman who receives favoritism from Venkman, naively flattered, almost falls for the man's seduction.

As a consequence for this unetical practices and lack of proof that the supernatural exists, the Dean of the University, while portrayed with a snob facial expression, still has reason to send Venkman and his colleagues away from the University, wich becomes their oportunity to risk their economies and start their business.

When the business of hunting ghosts becomes sucessfull during the montage, this calls the attention of Winston, who decides to join the team as a way to win some money.

The success also calls the attention of Walter Peck, the representative of the Enviromental Protection Agency, who gets concerned that the Ghostbusters may have dangerous unlincensed nuclear machines in their office.

When introduced, he tries to present his case reasonably and ask to see the machines, but is received by Venkman who lacks filter and doesn't take the situation seriously, wich provokes Peck's temper.

Meanwhile Louis is trying to get the atention of Dana, who not only has not romantic interest in him but is also starting a relationship with Venkman. It seems at first that this love triangle has no importance to the plot, until Dana and Louis are posessed by the minions of Ghozer, giving extra motivation for Venkman and his colleagues to be concerned with the appearance of the destructive God and that culminates with the two minions having sexual relations using Louis and Dana's body's to conjure the main villain.

And this encounter happens after the minions receive a sign in the form of the firehouse exploding and the ghosts running trough New York, after Peck orders the machines to be shut down in retaliation for Venkman provoking him.

There is the fight that follows afterward, but is cut short, because New York is about to be destroyed, and the Mayor needs the Ghostbusters to save the day.

A dynamic is started between characters, the characters act on it, wich takes us to the consequences that will demand the characters take the next course of action.

They all have flaws and qualities, and no matter how small their appearance, every character, joke and special effect is here in service of telling a complete, engaging story.

But five years passed, and with it comes popularity. There is a downside to a movie's popularity: is that often we focus so much in fragmented scenes, that we often forget the whole context that made the scene work.

We can call this memefication.

And thanks to memefication, we focused so much on the fragment of the "This Man Has No Dick" joke, or the spetacle of appearance of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, that we ignore that these scenes were made to tell a story.

Not only the audience forgets, but sometimes even the original creators...

And so we got Ghostbusters 2, a sequel that feels like an enjoyable anthology of comic scenes, but doesn't manage to tell a cohesive, compeling narrative.

It tries to mesh a lot of ideas as possible: recicling the idea of the Ghostbusters loosing credibility and having to recover it again, Dana rekindling her relationship with Venkman while being a single mother and dealing with the sexual harassment of her boss, a ghost that desires to posess a human body to take over the world, an ectoplasm river that feeds on the negative feelings of the people of New York, Louis Tully getting in a romance with Janine and discovering the courage to become a fifth ghostbuster.

All ideas that could work as either different movies, or episodes of a TV show, or just be cutted out for recicling too much superficial elements from the first movie, merged together that results in a movie where a lot of things happen at the same time without a sense of cause and consequence.

The result is that it starts with a good pacing and suspense, but then the rest of the movie starts to drag.

The main cause of this dragging is the insertion of arbitrary skepticism in the side characters: for no reason than make the protagonists lifes more dificult (if the job of catching ghosts wasn't conflict enough), the civilians, the judicial autorities and the mayor start to act like the Ghostbusters are mad, even tough five years is still enough time to remember ghosts rampaging trough the city and a Giant Marshmallow Monster walking and smashing the city.

The Mayor's change of personality between movies is the most jaring: In the first movie he was a reasonable autority figure who would listen with attention when a problem was coming. In the second, he chooses to ignore the problem until its too late, even when this is a movie that can harm his election to Governour.

For some reason, he listens to an assistant who lacks the justification that Peck had to be distrustfull of the Ghostbusters.

It would be understandable if it was a new Mayor character, but when its the same character played by the same actor, it just becomes jaring.

Janine and Louis have a fun chemistry together, but you can't avoid asking how is her original relationship with Egon.

Venkman starts to present a television program, but there is no way to properly explore a conflict in career choices between celebrity and ghostbuster.

Winston still is treated as an audience surrogate newcomer even tough he has been on the team for five years to have knowledge of his own.

There is no proper way to understand what makes the people of New York so negative in 1989 compared to the previous five years when the city was having just the same problems.

So you get fun scenes of spetacular new special effects and some fun dialogue like the one where Ray and Egon discuss ordering food, but now the movie is written in the favour of the spetacular special effects and funny dialogue, instead of those being ellements in service of telling a good, simple story, exploring the humanity not only of the main characters, but of the people they found who ended up needing their help.

And that lack of purpose and cohesion is the reason why the second movie is weak compared to the first one: it was something made to capitalize in its predecessours popularity, but didn't really had a new story to tell.

#ghostbusters #ghostbusters ii #sci fi #fantasy #horror #comedy #classic cinema

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antigonewinchester · 1 year

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sorry to bother and do not feel pressure to answer if you don't feel like it this is just something i’ve been thinking about, and i didn’t feel like going through all of post-s5 to try and satisfy my curiosity, but are there any instances where sam actually talks about how long he spent in the cage with lucifer? because i see people throwing around numbers a lot, from 200 years to thousands of years, and idk are there any moments where the amount of time sam spent getting tortured is actuallly talked about? or are people just extrapolating from what we've been told about hell+time in s4? what do you think🤔

Not a bother at all! :)

From what I can remember & from checking the Supernatural Wiki, Sam never got a specific number for his time in Hell like Dean did, so people have taken to guessing and extrapolating out how long he was trapped there.

Since we know the Cage was in Hell, I tend to use Dean’s time in Hell as a way of approximating how much time Sam spent there, too. In 4x10, Dean says his 4-ish months in Hell felt "like 40 years”, meaning 1 month on Earth is approximately 10 years in Hell. I actually did some calculations once to see if I could get a specific Time on Earth vs. Time in Hell ratio, and came up with this: If approximately 4 months (120 days) = 40 years (365 X 10 = 14,600 days) > 1 month (30 days/month) = 10 years (3,650 days/year) > then 1 day on Earth = approx 121.6 days in Hell. Based on when Dean died and was resurrected (May 2nd and Sept 18th, respectively), this accounting would technically mean he was there for more than 40 years, as if he’d been in Hell for 138 days, then 138 X 121.6 = 16,780.8 days / 365 days/year = 45.9 years.

Taking the 1 day = 121.66 days and looking at Sam’s time, he went to Hell (also!) on May 2nd, 2010, and then his soul was pulled out of Hell in early December, 2011. (I’m not sure on these exact years within the show, but it is implied that Dean spent a year with Lisa, met up with soulless!Sam after that year, and then timing of the plot approximately followed the timing of the show’s airing.) Let’s say December 2nd, 2011, is when Death pulled Sam’s soul out of Hell, just to keep it simple. That would makes Sam’s time in Hell 365 days + 215 days = 580 days. 580 X 121.6 = 70,528 days / 365 days/year = 193.2 years.

I suspect where people are getting the ‘Sam spent thousands of years in Hell’ idea is from 6x14, where Sam remembers his time in the Cage when he’s unconscious for 2 – 3 minutes and then tells Dean that this time felt like “about a week.” If 3 minutes = 1 week (or 10,080 minutes) > 1 min on Earth = 3,360 minutes in the Cage. 60 mins X 24 hrs = 1,440 mins / day on Earth > 1,440 X 3,360 = 4,838,400 mins per day in the Cage as 1 day on Earth. 580 days X 4,838,400 mins = 2,806,272,000 minutes / 60 mins/hr = 46,771,200 hrs / 24hrs/day = 1,948,800 days / 365 days/yr = 5,339.17 years in the Cage.

Now, I don’t think the writers were likely thinking of Sam or Dean’s times in Hell is this specific detail. Dean’s “40 years” in particular feels like it’s meant to evoke Biblical stories, like God telling Noah it would rain for 40 days & 40 nights during the flood, Moses being on Mount Sinai for 40 days & nights, or Jesus wandering the wilderness and rejecting Satan’s temptations over 40 days. Dean’s “40” being years is a way of further emphasizing the horror of Hell & his experiences there, as well as more metaphorically evoking the time dilation of trauma & traumatic events.

Imo, this kind of metaphorical read also applies to Sam's 3 minutes = 1 week in the Cage flashback. I do not think this was intended to line up with Sam's actual time in the Cage, as Sam isn’t physically going back to the Cage but only remembering his time there. This kind of time disparity again evokes traumatic events and how someone’s experience of time can be affected by both trauma and their remembering of it. It’s also another way the narrative can emphasize why getting rid of Sam’s wall would be a really really bad idea… which then makes Cas breaking Sam’s wall at the end of the season such an Oh Shit!! moment.

#asks #sam #dean #dean & hell #sam & hell #thank you for the ask!#also i really really hope i did my math right here lol #personally while it's fun to try to get specific numbers i don't think there's a 'real' answer here #and it's enough for me to know that sam spent A Long time in Hell and it was Bad; that's its importance w/in the story #also tbh 5000+ years just feel. kind of absurd. hard to take seriously as compared to 193 yrs you know?

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vaicomcas · 1 year

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how did the Spn writers get away with The Empty fiasco?

I wnatedto confirm something so I went on the wiki page and they just contradicted everything over time

I makes me so angry

but also the relationship between billie and shadow makes me curious, she threatned to throw sam and dean in empty when she was just a reaper

while the shadow itself confirmed that God not having power over its domain was a lie.

How did Billie have that power? does that mean any reaper can do that?

then why didn't the OG death send Godstiel to empty? wouldn't that have solved the levaithan probelm?

Good question about how Billie would have had the power to throw Sam and Dean into the Empty. Also Billie seems always very serious about upholding rules. So not only wouldn't she have the power, it would be OOC for her to abuse her power like that.

One possibility is that was just Billie's expression of her disdain for the Winchesters keep being resurrected. Another plausible explanation I can think of, is this would not have violated the rules. That Sam and Dean were already destined to go to the Empty when they die. Which meant, they were not human anymore after having been resurrected too many times. Of course then both went to heaven in the finale, but perhaps that's because Chuck's rules no longer applied (and they were always exempt from the show's rules anyway).

The whole OG Death and how he dealt with the situation in 7x01 made zero sense and was just the Winchesters prevailing over any logic and cohesion of the narrative. He got enslaved by two humans and then does nothing to retaliate after freed by Godstiel?

Death not sending Godstiel to the Empty on his own accord was probably because he didn't generally kill anybody who wasn't "supposed to" die already (as he tried to show Dean when he made Dean death for a day, there is a natural order of life and death, and Death upholds it and does not interfere). He probably doesn't see the Leviathan or the resulting death of humans as a problem for him, but just part of the story of the world that unfolds which he stands outside of.

It sort of calls into the question of whether "the natural order" was decreed by God. Because they presented Death as being equal to God ("in the end I will reap God too") it would suggest the natural order was outside of God's domain. But God created life (and with it death), so how could the rules of life and death have stood indepdent of God?

I also hated that they made Billie a villain in the last minute. Like if Billie wanted to kill all the people who had been resurrected due to Chuck's manipulation of the rules, she could have done so already. She was Death. If OG death could be enslaved to kill, it meant that Death has the power to kill anybody they wanted.

I could keep going down rabbit holes, but it's not going to be fruitful trying to make sense of all the plot points. There is always going to be the need to "suspend disbelief" for any fantasy stories to make the story work. When there are that many seasons and so many different writers espcially I can see how it may be difficult to keep things straight. But sometimes the contrivance is so excessive it's hard to overlook it even if you want to believe. Sometimes (as the case with myself) one doesn't want to be cooperative with the writers' intention making those inconsistencies even more glaring.

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busybeesbuzzing · 1 year

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So this is a first for me but last night I had the BIZARRE experience of having a dream where Jensen Ackles was my professor for a class of some sort? But like that he showed up late having come from obviously something for the premier of the new Winchesters series and was still in Dean mode and struggling to focus and teach the class. And idk what the course was for but the lecture turned into some sort of rant/pitch for the new series/Supernatural in general. It’s already fading but basically the lecture was like something about how the different forms of love as we conceptualize them arose from our trying to understand love as created by an indifferent and selfish god who requires unquestioning loyalty and obedience when such a requirement is philosophically incompatible with his other most notable creation, Free Will? And that the historic struggle to reconcile the two may sound esoteric and inaccessible to the common lay people (and that certain SOMEONES may insist that it can only ever be considered a Mystery as in one of the Mysteries of organized religion like the questions of Original Sin and Evil forgiveness only obtainable through Sacrifice and Resurrection), but it is actually something so personal and intrinsic to our actualization? And that reconciliation of the two is conceptualized through this perfectly imperfect narrative that asks us to consider love in a backdrop that spans from from the initial struggles of a man and woman to embody the ideals of Romance and Family when their being together is solely the collateral of the mechanizations of outside forces to bring about the end of some Greater Thing to the literal fall of all angels whose sole purpose of their eons-long existence was the embodiment of love as perfect dedication? And that something something the use of the word sass-holic pronounced as sass and asshole? And that the ultimate thesis of the story (and at this point he is hitting his palm against the podium, almost yelling in his emphasis) is that FRIENDSHIP is the MOST SACRED form of Love upon which our actualization hinges and that as such it is our responsibility to bring the narrative to fruition with the ONLY. SATISFACTORY. CONCLUSION. which is the explicit positing of the new conclusion that FRIENDSHIP is the original impetus for and can only be fully realized through MARRIAGE.

And then I guess He realized that he had gotten a bit off track because I don’t think the class was even like a philosophy or theology or any related subject course so he started jogging laps around the room to try to refocus himself from the rambling back to whatever we were supposed to be learning but he was still sort of agitated and rambling and then when he got back to the front of the room he turned around as someone stepped into the classroom from the doorway behind us all and his eyes just sort of widened and his expression went all open and vulnerable, you know, in That Look and I very suddenly and very immediately was kicked from the dream and woke up just straight fully awake at like 4 in the morning.

All of which is to say either Jensen Ackles subconscious pitch for The Winchesters just paid my dreams a visit OR I just witnessed The French Mistake 2.0 and the actual DeanCas proposal moment.

#supernatural #dean winchester #he was really trying to make a point #just really emphatically on a role #and we were all just sitting there like #is this going to be on the upcoming test?#lol this has been in my drafts for so long i totally forgot about this dream but might as well post #absolutely feral about the turn the new series has taken

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rainsongmp3 · 3 years

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DEAN WINCHESTER PARAGON OF HUMANITY

#thinking about the lot’s wife quote from slaughterhouse five ya know the ‘and i love her for that because it was so human’ of course dean’s #sexy little lot’s wife moment is the holy fire turning to look at cas in the man who would be king and just how Human that is and how Human #dean is he may be the narrative god but he can only be That because of his Humanity he encompasses all the highs and lows successes and #failures of human in one Self that is actually many fractured Selves and of course all of this directly related to cas and his relationship #to dean because dean is his teacher and his compass the True North of humanity dean teaches cas to be human (but is interestingly Not There #when cas is actually human and that in itself is fascinating because dean is set up as the Teacher but he can’t Teach) cas learns the entire #spectrum of human emotion through dean because of dean and we can’t forget metatron’s fun gaybait pause ‘he’s in love.......... with #humanity’ expressly using humanity as a stand in for dean winchester all of it and all of dean screams Humanity he is the most loving person #and the ultimate killer he’s a mother and a father and a son and a brother he’s a Masculine cowboy action hero and a Woman he’s a final girl #he’s a ghost and a monster he’s an angel and a demon he’s God and the Devil he’s jesus mary and joseph he’s the apple the snake eve adam and #the garden he’s a sinner and a nonbeliever and the righteous man the michael sword he’s a serial killer and a savior he is a million #contradictions wrapped into one man and it Works because he is also not one man #dean winchester paragon of humanity #spn #supernatural

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vendettasfanfictioning · 4 months

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I need more fics framing The Rupture as something necessary for destiel—it hurt like a fucking bitch, sure, and it was a low blow for Dean to hit Cas exactly where he knows Cas hurt most (in being the problem or a burden), but also. Looking at it from Dean's perspective, it really did feel like a move that old, early-seasons Cas would do; withheld information, acted on his own, took risks that could cost others.

And when it all piled up? From Jack's soulless behaviors directly killing Mary, to the deal with Belphegor in hell costing them Rowena. Again, hard agree that it was one of the most painful lines dropped in the show (especially so if you remember that this is post-Empty deal), but context guys, context.

Plus, I believe this separation wasn't only long-time coming but also a pretty important addition because what is destiel if not a pair of stubborn idiots who can't communicate. That's not to say an argument is necessary to talk (it can be, in certain situations, sure) but they've been on different pages since Cas came back in S13.

The center of their disagreement seemed to mostly lie in their belief in Jack. I can't remember a time they really sat down and smoothed things out so much as they avoided talking about what happened during the Widower arc altogether, and that's when the wound really began to fester. (It didn't help that they had to deal with so many problems all at once; the Brits, Asmodeus, Apocalypse World, Lucifer, then AU Michael...)

Here is what we know that Cas believed (from the canon narrative): Jack formed a bond with Cas, even before he was born he somehow showed Cas a possible future; paradise. It's the same power, perhaps a protection mechanism with nephilim seeing as God labeled them as Abominations, that turned Kelly as well. What we know Cas saw (from the deleted scene/script): Cas' paradise consisted of everyone he loved, his family, being safe. This included Sam, Kelly, and Dean on a beach, with more focus on Dean as he tells Cas, "thank you."

From what we could see that Cas did not, Dean had enough resentment against Jack that wasn't going to magically go away overnight. Jack hadn't formed the same bond with Dean that he did with Cas.

What happened before Jack was born: Heaven and Hell both sought out Jack for their respective goals, an innocent woman was going to die from the sheer magnitude of giving birth to a Nephilim, and Cas left by what Dean assumed was delusions and manipulations. What happened when Jack was born: Mary fell into a portal to a different universe—a rift that only opened due to the anomaly and power of Jack's existence—Kelly died, and Cas got stabbed right in front of him.

And this isn't to discredit Dean's love for Jack, when he did allow himself to love him or see him as family, but you can love someone and still resent them or feel bad about them. Moreso during extreme circumstances, however unfair or illogical it may be. Again, did they ever really talk? Maybe my memory is failing me but I'm pretty certain they didn't, or at least never in great detail, or came to an agreement about it.

Dean and Cas... just had so much dirty laundry and Rupture made sure they aired it all out. But I think we, as a society, would benefit greatly from not framing Dean as the big bad villain here or Cas as some poor innocent bean. Supernatural's theme was never about brotherhood or family, it's about how shit could have been so much easier if they just communicated.

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absolutebl · 2 years

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So I know you love a good tsundere, and who doesn't? So me and a friend started watching some BL shows lately, cause what else ar eyou supposed to do with you time? The thing is my friends prefers a good kuudere to a tsundere. So do you have any good kuudere character recommendations? Thanks

Oooooh, lovely challenge, let's go!

kuudere クーデレ = a character who is calm and collected and never panics, shows little emotion, and can even be completely emotionless. They may be hiding true feelings deep down, but rarely (if ever) show them. This archetype is popular for: older siblings, teachers, morally grey, ancient supernatural (gods), and warrior characters.

stern daddy is stern

Kuudere Characters in BL

There are fewer of these in general because Thailand dominates BL and they do NOT like kuudere, too emo. But I think I can find you a few. They mostly gonna come from China tho, so that means censored bromances. It also means this is almost always the seme character.

FROM CHINA

Advance Bravely's Yuan Zong.

We will never know if he's secretly a cinnamon roll, but I suspect as much. Still I think he fits the bill. Warning this BL is wackdoodle, Chinese censorship got ahold of it and instead of sad or depressing like normal, it just got weird af (with no actual f, of course).

Guardian's Puppet Master.

This is a censored bromance but this side couple is so cute - very grumpy sunshine. He is stoney faced and entirely unflappable, as one might expect from an ancient alien with a super creepy power. Are they a couple? Maaayyyybeeee. Certainly in my universe.

K.O. from Love O2O.

Unequivocally my favorite on this list. This is a very very subtle side couple, but they gay, no doubts here. K.O. is pitch PERFECT kuudere. He doesn’t enter the series until half way through and they are very very side dishy, so you might not want to bother with the series just for them. Still, perky sunshine coder and badass hacker is probubly the best pairing ever to happen in modern cinema and I am wrecked we haven’t gotten an actual BL for this trope yet.

Mr frostypants from the Untamed.

Yeah yeah, bite me. But I think you could make a case for boy’s got a kuudere flute stuck up his proverbial arse. In the best possible way, of course.

FROM THAILAND

There may be a few more from Thailand than I listed, but I think that it is mainly wooden acting. (I thought long and hard about Itt from My Gear and Your Gown and then was like, “Why I’m I thinking so much about this crap show?” and stopped.)

Phu from Oxygen.

He’s about as close as Thailand gets to kuudere. This is the side dish seme in this series, and I found him profoundly unlikeable, but he fits the bill.

Dean in Until We Meet Again.

Okay he cracks a smile a few times but generally he’s totally unflappable. Honestly, I stuck him on this list because he is basically linguistically kuudere (SO COOL). Which is to stay, the way he speaks Thai is SO curt, and he is almost always entirely stoney faced. That changes in the later half of the series, but his language always remains sharp, and cool, and abrupt, bordering on rude but somehow not. And he’s allowed to get away with it because of his personality!

There were a couple boys who almost make this list from Korea and Taiwan but actually turn out to be too much stundere semes for me.

Honestly, I am probubly missing a ton from Japanese dark BL.

It’s an archetype they loved to use (like Boys Love) often in the uke character. This is because, narratively, when a kuudere uke won’t budge or relent he gives the seme “license” to spiral into murder, mutilation, rape, and so forth. But there is a reason I only watch those shows once.

(source)

#Kuudere #Kuudere in Bl #BL archetype #japanese yaoi #livea ction manga #chinese BL #chinese bromances #Advance Bravely #guardian the series #Love O2O #thai bl #Oxygen the series #Until We Meet Again

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norahastuff · 3 years

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penny for your thoughts on salmondean codependency ?

Sure. Fair warning it’s long (was longer but I stopped myself.)

I think it’s complicated in a show that’s had so many different showrunners because they’ve all handled Sam and Dean’s relationship very differently. In Kripke’s era (s1-5) there was a romanticization of the bond. Sure there was a lot of in-depth exploration of how they wound up at the place they were at, spoiler alert: it was all because of John and his obsessive crusade to find the demon that killed his wife. That’s all he cared about and as a result, Sam and Dean had to be everything to each other. But Kripke had no intention of dismantling that at any point because he was (and always had been) writing a tragedy. Gamble continued that too. There was no room for anyone else in their lives and it would always just be the two of them against the world. So Cas had to go. Bobby had to go.

(Actually, it's funny because Gamble didn't intend this at the time, her plan was to kill Cas off, but by Edlund creating the masterpiece that is The Man Who Would Be King, he not only saved Cas from being seen as a villain, but he also deepened Dean and Cas' relationship in such a profound way and inextricably linked the two of them emotionally. And since Cas was eventually brought back, that laid the foundation for a lot of what their relationship would become.)

Up until this point, there hadn’t really been any significant dismantling of perhaps the more unhealthy parts of Sam and Dean’s relationship. Enter Carver. He stripped things down and started to explore what drove these characters. What they wanted and why they couldn’t have it. It starts with Dean being mad at Sam for not looking for him in purgatory, which sets up the whole speech in the s8 finale of Sam’s guilt about letting Dean down, but the thing is, Dean was never honest with Sam about his year away either. He never told Sam he could have gotten out much sooner if he hadn’t stayed to find Cas. I mean Dean had assumed Sam was up there alone doing God knows what to try to bring him back, and yet still he stayed in Purgatory because things were clear there. He needed Cas. Anyway, I just find that interesting, but Cas isn’t a victim of Sam and Dean’s relationship in s8.

Who gets the honour of being cast aside? That would be Benny and Amelia, two characters they introduced in s8 specifically to highlight that Sam and Dean’s relationship doesn’t allow for anyone else to be a significant part of their life. I mean that’s nothing new, we’ve watched that happen many times before. Lisa even said as much to Dean. The thing is this time? It’s framed as a truly sad thing. That moment at the end of 8x10 when Dean has just ended things with Benny and Sam leaves Amelia, and they’re sitting alone drinking beer and watching tv is such a hollow empty moment. This is not what they want. But it’s the way things have to be.

I’m actually fascinated by Sam and Dean’s conversation in the church in the s8 finale. Not so much Dean’s assertion that there is no one else he would put before Sam, but more so what provokes it, which is Sam saying “who are you going to turn to instead of me. Another angel? Another vampire?” See the thing is Dean saying he would always put Sam first is not news. We know this and it’s not really an unhealthy statement in itself either. A lot of people would put their sibling above anything else, not less a sibling who you raised and is the most important person to you. But in this context? After what Sam said? It just highlights how unhealthy they are if Sam believes that Dean having other people in his life means he doesn’t love him enough. That he’s a disappointment to him. That’s so profoundly fucked up.

(Note, Dean tells Sam that he killed Benny for him but he doesn’t say anything about Cas. I think like I said before, this is because Cas and Dean’s relationship has largely existed out of the Sam and Dean stuff up to this point - Sam and Cas don’t even really have much of a relationship yet besides both of their connections to Dean.)

And then from here, things start getting steadily worse. But we also keep being shown how bad they are. Dean lying to Sam, taking away his free will by letting Gadreel possess him. Dean sending Cas away, Kevin dying. It’s all awful. The whole “there ain’t no me if there ain’t no you line” from 9x01 isn’t really said by Dean, it’s Gadreel, but that is how Dean feels. He does think that’s all he’s good for. And over the season we’re shown how much of himself and what he truly wants he’s had to give up because of his ingrained “Save Sammy” and “Sammy comes first” mentality. It’s always been this way for him. In 9x07 we see that he had found a happy home, a good father figure, and his first love, a first love might I add that he had to leave behind with no real explanation because Sam needed him, and Sam comes first.

I mean just one episode earlier we had him rushing out the door elated about seeing Cas and spending time with him, only for their time together to come to sad and melancholic end when Dean once again leaves Cas behind without any real explanation, because despite what he wants Sammy comes first. What he wants doesn’t matter.

See I think after the Gadreel stuff comes out is where the narrative starts to get a little wonky for me. You can clearly see that this was intended to be a shorter story that they ended up stretching out to a much longer one because of renewals. There’s also the fact that this is a formula show so they can’t necessarily be separated for longer than an episode or two. S10 is a rough one to get through at times, I think the themes still mostly hold up but it’s a rough one to get through.

S10 highlights all the connections that Dean has, Cas, Charlie, Crowley even, but Sam doesn’t really have those bonds in the same way. For Sam it’s just Dean, so he goes down a reckless destructive “do anything to save Dean!” path and so many innocents pay the price, and ultimately with the release of The Darkness, the whole world.

They skirted right up to the edge of exploring just how toxic and dangerous their relationship had become in the season 10 finale.

DEAN: I let Rudy die. How was that not evil? I know what I am, Sam. But who were you when you drove that man to sell his soul... Or when you bullied Charlie into getting herself killed? And to what end? A..a good end? A just end? To remove the Mark no matter what the consequences? Sam, how is that not evil? I have this thing on my arm, and you're willing to let the Darkness into the world.

I can’t say evil is the right word, they were never evil, but they were wilfully blind to everything and everyone else when it came to saving each other. S10 tested my love for the show because after watching it, because there was certainly a feeling that the two of them had become the villains of this story. And don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have a problem with that, it’s just after 2 seasons of this I can’t say I had a lot of faith that this was going to be properly addressed or if we were going to keep going in circles around it. Keep being shown, it’s bad and then nothing much being done to fix it. Your mileage may vary on how it was handled, but I think s11 did a relatively ok job considering it wasn’t the end of the story, and the show needed to keep going.

See from Dean’s side a lot of the codependency rests on 1. His father’s orders to always save Sammy 2. His low self-esteem where he sees himself as nothing but a blunt instrument. 3. His guilt at not being able to perfectly fulfil every familial role in Sam’s life 4. His belief that no one could choose to love him but family has to love you. 5. The unhealthy example of what it should look like to love someone that he got from John. You give up everything but them.

For Sam (and honestly it’s not as clear for me as Dean’s side is so feel free to correct me/disagree on this) 1. Everytime he’s tried to leave and create his own life it’s never ended well. 2. His guilt over wanting freedom and a normal life when he was younger (I’m referring specifically to Stanford era here) 3. His guilt over everything Dean has given up for him. 4. John. 5. Jess.

Ultimately it all comes down to isolation. They both had to be everything to each other, and the deeper they got into this fight, the more people that they lost, the tighter they clung to this notion of family and brothers. I think s11 (and 11x23 in particular) was an important turning point, both for Sam and Dean’s relationship, as well as for them as individuals. Because they weren’t alone there anymore. Cas was there. Sam let Dean walk to his death. Of course, it would devastate him, but he knew it was what had to be done. And he didn’t walk out of that bar and go back to the bunker alone. He had Cas, he had someone who cared about him and wanted to help him and talk to him. Sure Dean asked Cas to take care of Sam for him (you know after Cas offered to walk to his death with him) but Sam let him. He let him be there for him. We didn’t get to see much before the BMOL showed up and blasted Cas away, but still, we saw enough.

I think that’s a significant difference to note why their relationship was different in the Dabb era. It wasn’t just them anymore. Cas was an important member of their family and given a level of importance he’d never been given before and couldn’t have been when the story they were telling was of the dangers of their codependency. Mary was back. Eventually, Jack would become a part of their unit too. Just the two of them wasn’t enough for them anymore. This is made abundantly clear with all of Dean’s desperate attempts to get Cas to stay in s12, followed by his inability to keep going when they lose Cas and Mary in s13. Similarly, Sam really struggles when they lose Jack and fail to get Mary back later in the season.

Another big moment is Dean letting Sam go alone to lead the hunters against the BMOL in 12x22 while he stays back to try and reach Mary. Like he tells Mary, he’s had to be a brother, a father and a mother to Sam and he never stopped seeing him as his kid, but in that moment he makes a choice. He lets Sam take charge and he shows that he trusts him and believes in him. He knows he can handle it.

Sometimes it’s not even a character growth thing. Sometimes having other people there stops you from making destructive choices even though that’s still your first instinct. I’m thinking specifically of 13x21 after Sam was killed. Dean would have run headlong into that nest of vampires and got himself torn apart, but Cas was there to stop him. He was able to make him see reason.

Basically, I think that for a long time, they thought the only relationship they could have was each other, which then became a self-fulfilling prophecy because their desperate attempts to keep each other around led to them losing the people around them. They eventually started to learn that that wasn’t true, they could have more, they were allowed to want more, and that it wasn’t an either-or situation. Dean didn’t have to choose between Sam and Cas. They didn’t have to choose between each other or Jack. The same goes for Mary. Different relationships can coexist without threatening each other, and not say that their relationship in s12-15 was all smooth sailing, but it was certainly so very different from everything that came before.

(There’s maybe a point to be made about how they didn’t have anyone or anything in the finale and how that relates to the story we got, but honestly I have no idea what the intention was with any of the choices made in that episode so I’ll leave it at that for now.)

#asks #winchester brothers #my spn thoughts #long post for ts #Anonymous #spn meta

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autisticandroids · 3 years

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Okay so this was a while back but im preety sure you had mentioned an au of yours where dean is a serial killer and cas successfully stalks him but i don't think you talked about it more than that and i just really want to hear a bit more bc that idea sounds so tastefully fucked up

okay so. weeks later i finally end up answering this ask. it inspired this post btw. anyway spn is a show that's like. all about justifications, as i said in the post inspired by this ask. it's about having no choice and doing what you have to do. and like there is the phantasy embedded in it, a phantasy that is both indulged and punished. but most importantly it's justified. the monsters are super strong to show how brave our heroes are for fighting them, the main characters let out great wails of grief every time their lady loves are violently ripped from them (even though now they are free to do whatever they want), the narrative twists to show our heroes as correct whatever they do. the fantasy (of being allowed to enact violence, of being free from feminine "control," of being right) comes first. the material construction of the universe of supernatural comes afterward. whatever the fantasy is, the universe of supernatural will provide material conditions to justify its acting-out.

and what this means is that our protagonists, dean in particular, are constantly doing just horrific things, which in any other circumstance would be unconscionable. but the universe of supernatural provides justification for these acts. the point of my serial killer au which i think about so so so much is to ask the question: what if these justifications melted out from under their feet? what if dean was left holding nothing but a lie and the weight of everything he's done?

therefore, the premise of my au is such (under the cut because this baby is long):

john and mary winchester, in the mid seventies, joined a doomsday cult known as the men of letters. the men of letters were rather unusual for a doomsday cult, in that they believed that the apocalypse could be prevented by human behavior. this started as correct living, correct worship, yadda yadda, the kind of behavior and thought control that cults are known for, but with the justification of: if you don't do this, the world will end. eventually, this escalated to human sacrifice. the men of letters managed to untraceably kill two homeless people in the late seventies. but they eventually fell apart. however, a month after john and mary left the men of letters (mostly john's choice, mary still believed), mary died in a house fire. john took it as a sign from god that actually, the men of letters were right, and the world would end unless john himself did something about it. so he took some of the (intensely numerological) theology of the men of letters. and he worked out his own formula. and he applied it to the yellow pages. and started ritualistically killed people to prevent the apocalypse, with his two sons in the back of the car.

now, obviously, this is some kind of grief induced temporary madness on john's part, shaped by the mental abuse he suffered in the men of letters. but the thing is, once you've killed a couple of people to prevent the apocalypse. well. there's this thing called the sunk costs fallacy. john wasn't gonna question his own beliefs after that.

and he raised his boys to believe it, too, or at least he raised dean to. they didn't tell sam what they did until he was twelve, and sam didn't buy it, tried to call the cops on them several times but in the end, they always prevented him. eventually sam ran off to stanford, where he now lives under a cloud of guilt that he's too loyal to his family to rat them out.

john died a few years back of a heart attack, but dean is convinced it's because he messed up a ritual two weeks before it happened, so it pushed him further into this belief system.

dean's killings (and john's before him) are ritualistic and distinctive, obviously the same killer each time. but they happen anywhere in the united states, seemingly at random, there are inconsistent amounts of time between each one (sometimes as short as days, sometimes as long as years), and there is no particular victim profile. obviously, since our killers are following an arcane mathematical formula to make their choices for them, but the police don't know that.

castiel novak is an unemployed shut-in with a small inheritance which he's living off of, a cryptography degree, and an obsession with all things morbid. he spends most of his time on the reddit true crime forums, playing amateur sleuth. by complete chance, he happens to recognize one of the symbols frequently used in corpse displays by the so-called sioux falls satanic slaughterer (so named because the first time three of his victims were in the same part of the country, it so happened that they were all in sioux falls, south dakota. this was in the late eighties.) as being mostly only used by a little known cult group called the men of letters, which dissolved in the mid eighties.

he only notices this because, as a teen, he had a special interest in cults and fringe religious groups. the men of letters weren't a particularly notable or well known phenomenon; they were small, and a lot like every other cult that formed during the seventies cult boom. (no outsider ever heard about the human sacrifice; there were rumors, of course, but they were garbled, sensationalized, and mixed up with satanic panic fodder.)

(the men of letters' two sacrifices were nothing particularly romantic or fantastical. they first lured panhandler josie sands back to their compound with promises of food and a warm bed when she admitted she couldn't get a bed at a shelter, and was thinking of getting caught shoplifting just so she could be under a roof in the county jail. the men of letters' leader, a man who took on the name alistair, forced his inner circle to dress in the ceremonial black robes he had given them when he initiated them into his nearest and dearest, and which his wife had sewn out of old bed sheets and dyed black with home made oak gall dye. these robes still left black smudges on the wearer's skin occasionally if they sweated too much. josie was laid, bound, on the altar, a slapdash thing constructed over the course of two days from scrap plywood and a couple of milk crates. a rich red tablecloth purchased at macy's for $3.99 hid its ugliness and gave it grandeur. alistair attempted to kill the struggling miss sands by bringing a sharpened kitchen knife down on her bosom and piercing her heart, but, having never killed a human or even slaughtered an animal before, was unaware of the problem presented by the human ribcage. after rather ineffectually poking at the area beneath sands' bosom with his knife while she shrieked in pain and terror for about ninety seconds, alistair tried a different tack, and slit her throat, which worked just fine, and she bled out quite nicely. the second and final victim of the men of letters was a local vagrant named larry ganem, an older gentleman who walked with a limp. he was lured back to the compound in approximately the same manner as sands, but instead of being bound, he was fed stew laced with sleeping pills. even if alistair hadn't slit his throat, he wouldn't have woken up. it's actually arguable whether he was still alive at time of sacrifice; mary winchester (eight months into her first pregnancy), who, as a member of the inner circle, was in attendance, actually tried to take ganem's pulse as he lay on the altar (now covered by a different tablecloth; the red one had turned stiff with sands' blood and been subsequently burned) and found nothing, so it is entirely possibly only sands' death can be directly laid at alistair's feet, and ganem's is the fault of mrs. ellen harvelle, who prepared the laced stew. regardless, these two deaths are lessons in the nature of human evil: it is very rarely skilled, suave, or smooth. it's often slapdash, half-hearted, and just plain incompetent. but that makes it no less grisly. alistair may have begun to drink his own kool-aid, as it were, and escalated this far out of genuine belief that the apocalypse was coming and it was up to him to stop it, but it is far more likely that he sensed the imminent collapse of his little empire, and wanted to bind his subjects to him through the horrors of shared guilt, considering two lives a small price to pay for the continued loyalty of his inner circle. and the tactic worked: the men of letters didn't start to collapse in earnest until almost four years later. perhaps if alistair had continued the killings, the men of letters could have lasted for far longer, maybe even up until the present day. but it seems that alistair, a psychiatrist by training and unused to violence, simply didn't have the stomach for it. unlike, say, john winchester, who before his time with the men of letters had done a two year tour in vietnam, during which he had killed three living, thinking human beings with the american government's go-ahead.)

anyway. castiel is the first person, ever, to make the connection between the men of letters and the sioux falls satanic slaughterer. and once that connection is made, castiel begins to research the men of letters far more in-depth. and he notices something: the theology of the men of letters was intensely numerological, filled with patterns, significant numbers, and even spiritual equations.

castiel thinks of the seemingly random selection of the slaughterer's victims, and has an epiphany.

he cracks all his fingers, and gets coding.

six months. it takes castiel six months to discover an equation that could fit the slaughterer's pattern. it's complex, but also clearly based on several of the men of letters' holy numbers, and accounts for every single one of the killings. it also suggests that there should have been two or three more deaths scattered across the years, but more than likely those did happen, it's just that they weren't reported as part of the slaughterer's portfolio.

but much more importantly, castiel's model can also make predictions. there will be two killings, fifteen days apart, in a city seven hours' drive away, six weeks from now.

so castiel waits. and he books a hotel room. and two months later, he's waiting outside 217 oak street when a shadowy figure climbs up a tree and lets itself into the upstairs window.

dean winchester is feeling particularly all alone in the world when he breaks into maisey banks' home (217 oak street). his father has been dead for half a decade, and he hasn't spoken to his baby brother for twice that. it's not like this whole grizzly saving the world business makes him a lot of friends. so once he's done killing maisey (which is easy, she was ninety three and dying of cancer anyway. she doesn't even wake up when he slits her throat) and arranging her corpse in the appropriate manner, with prayers and sigils, he turns around. and sees a man standing behind him.

smiling slightly.

as he watches dean gut this old woman.

dean freezes.

the man takes a step forward.

"you're very attractive for a serial killer who's been operating since the eighties."

dean is silent.

"family business, is it?"

silence continues.

"i'm not here to report you to police. i'm just here to see if my algorithm worked right."

and dean finally breaks his silence: "what the hell is wrong with you?"

what's fun here is that dean knows (or rather "knows") that he isn't a serial killer. so he finds what cas is doing, this amoral serial killer stormchasing, morally repugnant. because cas has no way of knowing he isn't a regular serial killer.

there's also the fact that that cas proceeds to flirt with him. aggressively. and follows him back to his motel.

but the thing is that dean is all alone in the world. and as cas continues trailing him around, he starts getting, well, flattered. and feeling a little bit less alone.

it doesn't take very long before they fall into bed. even if cas is an amoral stalker with a fetish for what dean considers a distasteful yet necessary vocation.

so. they fall into bed. they fall in love. they make a little life together, in dean's big sexy car. dean tries to explain to cas that he's saving the world. that these people's lives are a necessary price to pay. and cas seems to listen.

of course, castiel doesn't believe a word of it. but he's found that he likes dean. really likes him. and he realizes that the collapse of dean's belief system would destroy him.

so he sets about becoming as complicit in it as possible.

even to the extent where, when dean is hit by a car and ends up into the hospital a day before one killing is meant to take place, castiel agrees to take on the job. (he doesn't actually kill anyone, obviously. but he does use his extensive skill with computers to create three fake newspaper articles which make it look like he has.)

but five years later, something goes wrong. really, really wrong. dean miscalculates the formula. and by the time he checks his work, the actual date of the next kill, as demanded by the formula, has passed. in fact, so have three others. and the world didn't end.

dean collapses. he hyperventilates. all those people. all those people. for no reason. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people.

cas seems totally unfazed. dean stares at him in shock. but cas just takes dean in his arms, and whispers in his ear: "oh, dean, i never believed in the equation. i love you no matter what you've done."

and dean buries his face in cas' chest.

#spn #asks #anonymous #abuse tw #violence tw

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