#once again saying. DABB. ERA. JO

[mrcowboydeanwinchester]

Logged on bc I was manic about something else but you've derailed me with thoughts of 25y/o Jo and 38y/o Dean

YUP !!! GLAD IT'S NOT JUST ME

i just think. you've got a jo who (to her perspective) seconds ago kissed dean and then died on her mom's shoulder. now, she's back and her mom is still dead and dean, the person she is closest to in this new world, is eight years older than he was last time he saw her. not quite old enough to be her dad, not young enough to be her brother or her lover... their whole dynamic is broken. he doesn't even wear a goddamn leather jacket anymore.

from dean's side of things, he's spent the last eight years feeling inescapably guilty for how jo sacrified himself for him and how the harvelles essentially died in vain. not only this, but he has since progressed hugely in how to treat women and has realised his treatment of jo was super demeaning. and he'd always thought he could never make it better but now he has a chance to and he's desparate to but it's so much harder than he imagined

and (just like with mary) it's looking into the eyes of a person you thought you knew so so well and realising you don't know them at all. jo saw dean as a flirty, rebellious hunter who she had a massive crush on, a guy epitomising the 'live on the road hunt for a living' narrative she was dreaming of achieving herself. now he's some 38 year old dude with a home he keeps meticulously clean and a whole family outside of her. dean saw jo as a younger, unskilled, attractive girl who had a huge crush on him and no stake in the hunting game. now she looks young but not in a fun way just in a sad way and has lost both parents to demons and sacrificed herself for the cause. this is without both of them addressing the fact they are very queer.

their conversations are insane. awkward, cathartic, and insane

[mittensmorgul]

Hi Everybody! Y’all probably know by now that I’ve been obsessively listening to @season14podcast since it started (hooray for the updated weekly posting schedule! I haven’t listened to the new episode that dropped this morning yet because I’m still obsessing over the previous episode, which is the point of this post, actually, so maybe I should can the parenthetical and just get on with it! RIGHTO!)

OKAY! So the previous episode was about 2.06, No Exit. And I have feelings about this episode, specifically regarding Dean’s surface-level misogyny and his repeated dismissal of Jo’s ability as a hunter. PARTICULARLY the fact that when he eventually clarified that he didn’t have trouble with women hunting, but amateurs. Because honestly I don’t think this was about Jo at all. This was about Dean (and to a lesser extent Sam), and how he was raised.

In the early seasons of the show, I think this was partly an attempt to show just how isolating from “normal society” the hunting life is. Even after Sam and Dean make a sort of home base out of Bobby’s house. Even after they discover the roadhouse and make some connections with other hunters. They’re all still (all hunters, that is) still relatively secretive and isolationist.

This is a theme that will be addressed over and over again, in their dealings with a lot of other hunters. Remember this was Gordon Walker’s line when they first met him, that he hunts alone, and Sam and Dean should get out of town. And it will come up again in 4.04 with Travis the “rougarou specialist,” who called Sam and Dean in for help hunting the thing he supposedly specialized in his whole life. And while we will see hunters contacting each other for information, or to give others the heads up about events on the spooky side of the street, they largely DO work alone-- or at best as a regular team like Sam and Dean do (and like Ellen and Jo will by s5, and like Bobby and Rufus were implied to have done for years). But Jo was raised in this strange liminal space between hunting and the real world, where even hunters like Rufus were known to show their faces on occasion. It wasn’t really being raised in the life (like we’ve been shown that Sam and Dean were), but it also wasn’t being raised “normal” either.

And the mention of Bobby and Rufus, just thinking back to Bobby’s Hunter Origin Story is yet another example of why amateurs don’t hunt. His wife had been possessed by a demon, and not having any idea how the supernatural worked and being directly threatened by that demon, Bobby killed her before Rufus arrived to help actually get rid of the demon possessing her. Think about what we know of demons-- they leave the host or are exorcised, and if the body is unharmed, the person will live. Bobby’s complete lack of experience, of knowing a simple exorcism, drove him to kill his own wife. Can you even imagine? The guilt of it all literally haunted him. See 3.10, 5.14, and 7.10 for just how much it haunted him.

The thing is, once people have been on ONE hunt, which we typically think of as Hunter Origin Stories, they already HAVE experience surviving that hunt. They might feel compelled to continue hunting, but they also know first-hand the terror, the danger, and that anything can and will go wrong.

EVERY Hunter Origin Story we’ve heard is like this.

EXCEPT Jo’s.

I know this post is all over the place, but I swear it has a point. I’m gonna skip WAY ahead in canon for a minute, because Dabb era is STILL focusing on this. 14.16 involved a conversation DIRECTLY ADDRESSING THIS.

Dean: Knowing about monsters and fighting 'em are two different things. Sheriff Romero: So you make that choice for everybody? Imagine telling them. Imagine the lives you could save. Sam: No. No. It doesn't work like that. People die. Even when they know how to fight, people still die.

Because Sheriff Romero had grown up listening to the warnings, knowing there was something dangerous and evil in the woods, and yet he still didn’t believe it himself. Even knowing the weapon he would need to kill the thing, he brought a shotgun into the woods instead. Even being trained in combat, even knowing the whole story, he still was unprepared to face the monster until he had this fact pointed out to him by Sam and Dean.

There’s other stories. Jody’s, Donna’s, Claire’s, basically pick a character and think about their first brush with the supernatural and understand what inexperience got them. So I wanted this pointed out that this is definitely a recurring theme in the show. No one’s introduction to hunting goes smoothly. You can be armed to the teeth and combat trained (think of the soldiers Abaddon recruited in 9.02, or the soldiers who unwittingly brought khan worms back from a tour of duty). Police, military, even mercenaries are just completely unprepared in the face of something they’re not ready for.

It also works the other way around. You can study the lore, talk to hunters, and understand all of hunting in theory, but until you’re face to face with a monster trying to kill you, you have no idea how you might react to it.

Even the Men of Letters was effectively founded on this exact concept, you know? from 8.12:

DEAN: Okay, enough with the decoder talk. How about you tell us what this whole “Men of Letters” business is, or you're on your own. HENRY: It's none of your concern. DEAN: Why, because we're hunters? What do you have against us? HENRY: Aside from the unthinking, unwashed, shoot-first-and-don't-bother-to-ask-questions-later part, not much, really. SAM: You know what? Wait a second. We're also John's children. HENRY: You're more than that, actually. My father and his father before him were both Men of Letters, as John and you two should have been. We're preceptors, beholders, chroniclers of all that which man does not understand. We share our findings with a few trusted hunters – the very elite. They do the rest. DEAN: So you're like Yodas to our Jedis. [HENRY looks uncomprehending.] Never mind. You'll get there.

And then reinforced when we met Magnus in 9.16:

MAGNUS: Hunters? Wow! Hunters. With the key to the kingdom! The boys must be spinning in their graves. Damn snobs. Bunch of librarians, if you ask me. Although I was always fond of Henry. I was his mentor, you know? Yeah, till the squares gave me the boot. Yeah. 'Course, he came here to visit me, in secret. Called out to me, same as you did. Oh, yes. Quite the wild hair, your grandfather was.

and:

MAGNUS: Things never change, do they? I kept telling the boys over and over again -- I would say, "we could stop all this. We could rid the world of monsters once and for all if we just put our minds to it", but, "oh, no," they said. "No, no, no. It's not our place. We're here to study. We're here to catalog""

and then he went on to express the sentiment “all hunters are morons.”

So yes, this goes both ways, and it’s ingrained in the show’s language. Remember, for all their knowledge, for all their experience and their storehouse of supernatural weapons, they were still entirely wiped out by Abaddon in one fell swoop. Even after generations of training and the accumulation of knowledge, even THEY were entirely unprepared.

So... I don’t really think this is a comment on Jo specifically, or on her character. It was discussed in the podcast whether this sort of “taking her down a peg” was really necessary for her character development, and I’d argue that yes, it was. Because for all intents and purposes, in the context of this hunt, Jo is functioning as an avatar for the viewer. For all of us who’ve been watching the show and “learning to hunt by proxy.” Because isn’t that what her entire life has been?

She may never have actually gone on a hunt (she was little when her father died, and she had her mother to stay home with and have a relatively normal life compared to Sam and Dean), but she’s been tangentially exposed to the life since she was born, too. Her experience is in a context several degrees removed from actually facing the monsters. And as such, no amount of research, no amount of theoretical training, could have prepared her for actually going on a hunt.

Listening to a bunch of hunters’ fish tales (in 12.06 Dean even mentions having heard of Asa Fox at the Roadhouse, through the legend that he’d killed five wendigos in one night, and yet didn’t believe it could be true) is not a foundation for actually being equipped and prepared to go on a hunt ALONE. Because for all his blather (and yeah, the writing could’ve been handled better on this point), I really think that this is what Dean was trying to say. Not that “you can’t hunt because you’ve never been on a hunt before,” but you can’t just jump into a hunt alone without some sort of master/apprentice situation. Because it was implied that even JOHN didn’t begin hunting alone-- he was sort-of apprenticed to a lot of people, but specifically to Daniel Elkins in 1.20.

John knew enough to find the letter Elkins addressed specifically to him after his death, despite their previous falling out:

SAM: Wait, you came all the way out here for this Elkins guy? JOHN: Yeah. He was... he was a good man. He taught me a hell of a lot about hunting. SAM: Well you never mentioned him to us. JOHN: We had a... we had kind of a falling out. I hadn't seen him in years. (gesturing to the envelope) I should look at that. (He opens it) 'If you're reading this, I'm already dead'... that son of a bitch.

Because NOBODY just picks up after the sort of events John experienced in 1983 and just... goes off hunting without HELP.

Which is what Jo was trying to do in 2.06.

Which is what Dean specifically objected to.

NOT the fact she was there with them, but that she’d taken off from what Dean thought of as a comfortable and secure life of safety, deliberately lying to Ellen about where she was going and what she was doing, where she could’ve literally died if Sam and Dean had not shown up there, too. And I mean, she had to know they would make their way out to Philly to take on the hunt, and I kinda think she wanted to show them up by having handled the hunt before they ever arrived, you know? Or at the very least wanted to prove her competence, to prove she wasn’t afraid, to prove she could do the job, too, after having literally been raised surrounded by the competent bravado that most hunters adopt when they gather together for drinking and information swapping.

I also think this was literally an episode to demonstrate to her the reality of hunting removed from the relative safe-haven of the Roadhouse. This was deliberately to show her what was at stake if she chose to go hunting on her own, and give her something concrete to balance it against in her mind. She could still choose to go off hunting, but now she knows the reality of that experience, and not the barroom fish stories version. I hate to use this term for it, but there’d always been a certain glamour about it for her, and nothing wipes the polish off like getting buried alive by a murderous ghost, you know?

But she DID learn something from this experience. Bravado has NO place in hunting. Sam and Dean wouldn’t have marched into a ghost’s lair and thrown themselves in its face. Well, maybe they would, but they would have an actual plan. Usually. Hopefully. I mean, even their plans frequently go out the window, and even they get things wrong more often than most people would be comfortable with, you know?

And I know most of this isn’t something that could be addressed in the podcast, because hooBOY this is basically one big spoiler, and we wouldn’t want to spoil Jess on what’s to come. :’D But I had to write something out about this. I mean, definitely, the writer of this episode could’ve definitely taken a bit more coaching on characterization and not implied Dean was a misogynist jerkwad, but I’m willing to overlook that mostly because of ^^ everything else the series has ever said on how most hunters begin their hunting careers. So while the attempt came off a bit ham-handed, it’s still basically conveying the same message the rest of the series does.

One last thing before I close this out. It’s also a direct comparison between Jo’s relatively comfortable and stable upbringing, even exposed to tragedy and the supernatural from a young age, and the sort of upbringing that Sam and Dean had on the road with John. Sure, we can assume Bill Harvelle may have begun training Jo in basic weapons and maybe told her the sorts of stories we learned Mary experienced in her own family as a child (bedtime stories about The Colt? yeah... hunter families are wild), but it wasn’t the isolation and immersion in hunting Dean (especially, and Sam to a lesser extent since Dean shielded him for A LOT for a VERY LONG TIME) experienced in being trained to hunt from the time he could remember. Nothing drives that point home quite like watching 12-year-old Dean’s “failure” in 1.18, you know? THAT is the comparison point for hunting as a novice. Dean HAS experienced that failure. He KNOWS what is at stake. And he has known the risk since he was old enough to hold a shotgun.

Jo only learned it in this episode. All the research, all the planning in the world, all the bravado and confidence in the world couldn’t have saved her here. But now she knows.

One last thing about all those hunter origin stories I mentioned above. For Dean, no matter how prepared anyone thinks they are, no matter how much of “a freak” (to use Jo’s word here) they may feel like, no matter how averse they are to putting it behind them and trying to live a normal life, there’s something about the experience of hunting that Dean would’ve absolutely saved Jo from having to suffer through if he could’ve. Almost every hunter we’ve met on the show is broken in a way that Jo hadn’t been before this experience, and in ways that people who haven’t survived a brush with the supernatural can’t even begin to understand. This has also been an ongoing plot point on the show. Hunters don’t retire, they either die young and tragic or else live long enough to end up like Bobby and Rufus, or worst case, like Martin Creaser. There’s no happy at the end of the road, at least not in Dean’s experience. (and hopefully Dabb era will finally write them out beyond that dark curtain)/

This was never about proving that Jo was incompetent, or that she didn’t have what it takes to be a hunter. I thought it was quite the opposite, showing her the truth of it in a way that wasn’t recklessly catastrophic for her. Hey, at least she survived to live her life, whatever she chooses to do with it going forward.

(and I’m oddly thinking about her lines in 7.04 now, after a flashback to 2.06 earlier in the episode:

DEAN: He was right, you know – that dick judge, about me. JO: No, he wasn't. DEAN: You were a kid. JO: Not true. DEAN: You and Sam. I just – you know, hunters are never kids. I never was. I didn't even stop to think about it. JO: It's not your fault. It wasn't on you. DEAN: No, but I didn't want to do it alone. Who does? No, the right thing would have been to send your ass back home to your mom. JO: Like to have seen you try.

and that’s the difference a better writing effort from someone who has a much better handle on Dean’s character can make, because this is essentially the same sentiment, only refined over the years through reflection and yeah, through personal growth, too)

(and again, not forgiving the writer here because yeeeeeesh he could’ve done all this without making Dean look like a jerk, but “jerk” is kinda Dean’s default when people’s lives are on the line-- particularly people he cares about)