#others feel like a clumsy attempt to make their version more adult and complex

[thenotoriousscuttlecliff]

Sorry, but having Zuko actually fight back against Ozai during their Agni Kai is just wrong. He was a child, only 13 at the time, afraid to fight his own father and was mutilated as punishment, because Ozai saw Zuko's begging and unwillingness to fight as unforgiveable weakness.

The Angi Kai isn't meant to be a showcase of Zuko's fighting potential (that's what the Zhao fight is for), but to show the utter cruelty of Ozai.

[spiders-hth-is-an-outlier]

Hot Take: Daphne is Castiel

(Sorry if everyone but me has already thought of this.  It made me feel clever; don’t take this from me.)

So I was thinking about that Daphne Loves Fred carved on the bar in Dean’s “fantasy,” and then I was thinking about Daphne in general and who she is to Dean, which actually has some layers to it.

So, Scoobynatural was obviously entirely about childhood innocence, and Daphne is exactly the right Perfect Girl for a pre-sexual, child version of Dean.  She’s pretty and feminine, spunky and game for adventure, loyal and a caretaker -- honestly, she’s one pale pink nightgown short of a full-blown Oedipal issue (not in her similarity to Actual Mary, of course, but to the Mother Mary fantasy that Dean, who grieved his mother and the innocent pre-monster life she represented nonstop throughout his childhood).  Dean’s life was, like an episode of Scooby-Doo, lived on the road, out of a moving vehicle, on an aimless ramble from event to event with a reset button at the end of every “episode” -- but Scooby-Doo remained a fantasy and not a nightmare for him because it showed The Hunting Life not as the grim, marginal existence that Dean actually lived exclusively in the care of gruff man’s men like John and Bobby, but a playful version full of bright colors and giant sandwiches and the Sweetest, Prettiest Girl In the World.

Right, so but then -- puberty happened, and Dean discovered sex.  And the thing about Dean is that he ISN’T attracted to ingenues like Daphne.  Dean likes frisky women.  Dean likes ladies with experience.  Dean’s adult fantasies are exclusively about strippers and porn stars and One-Night Wonders and tramp-stamp rock’n’roll badasses like Pamela.  And he doesn’t have some kind of gross Madonna/Whore complex, either -- the time he found a woman that he could see in the wife-and-mother role, it was Lisa, whom he remembered with enormous enthusiasm from her younger days, when she used to pick up cute drifters in biker bars and bang them like screen doors for a couple of days then send them packing.  Yeah, Lisa had mellowed with age by the time she was Dean’s actual partner, but he picked someone he associated with assertive sexuality, not just domesticity.  Dean likes women who are going to meet his flirting and come back at him twice as hard, who want him, and who know what they want him for.

Season 13 rolls around, and he slips through what the fuck ever and ends up revisiting his childhood, and his childhood crush.  And in keeping with the theme of the episode, which is about the needs that nostalgia fulfills and the urge we have to protect the innocence of the child versions of ourselves (even knowing that the whole concept of “childhood innocence” is built on a series of illusions), he’s back in that child mindset right away: he wants DAPHNE, Daphne is PERFECT and BEAUTIFUL and everything he missed out on having in his life when he was young -- she’s both Devoted Girlfriend and Team Mommy Figure.  She’s terribly ill-suited to the person Dean actually grew up to be, but that’s not the point; she’s a child’s dream of feminine affection.

So who is Daphne, as “person” within the Scoobynatural universe (as distinct from the character Dean knew on the tv show)?  Well, just like he remembers, she’s brave and cheery and endlessly kind and foxy... but unlike whatever Dean’s half-formed boyhood fantasies were all about, she’s... completely unattainable.  (Oh, look who wants what he can’t have.  Hm.)  She’s completely unattainable for two reasons.

One is that she IS a devoted girlfriend -- Fred’s devoted girlfriend.  Sam calls him out immediately for trying to pick up someone else’s girl, and Daphne is impervious to Dean’s clumsy attempts to disparage Fred (”What a jerk!” “Not really.”)  When he asks what Daphne wants, she describes Fred -- strong, sincere, ascot.  (We’re gonna come back to the ascot.)  Daphne’s wants and needs are simple: she is a one-man woman, and she has her man.  There’s nothing there for Dean to work with.

The second is that... Daphne is a child’s fantasy, and appears to be, completely without calculation, as asexual as a child.  Now, the rules of the Cartoon Universe clearly don’t require that to be the case: Velma is also a cartoon character, and she’s wildly thirsty for Sam from minute one.  Sex, or at least sexual attraction, seems to exist in this reality... but Daphne is wholly unaware of it.  She hasn’t even rejected it; she just doesn’t think about it.  Boys and girls don’t sleep in the same room, silly.

Daphne loves Fred.  But Daphne doesn’t sleep with Fred; Daphne isn’t a sexual being at all.  Her love is loyal and true, but her love is for Fred’s virtues, not Fred’s body.

There’s a whole ‘nother long essay, of course, about Dean’s weird, all-over-the-map reaction to Fred.  Fred is the worst, Fred is a loser, the Perfect Woman is totally wasted on Fred... but of course, Fred also embodies some standard of heroism that Dean wants to be: he is strong, he is sincere, he’s the leader, the driver, the Good Soldier -- not just an obedient soldier, but a good one that people admire and care about.  His fear when he gets the Big Reveal about ghosts is that he hasn’t saved enough people; he’s that kind of guy. (Oh, hey, what does Daphne worry about? Just her eternal soul, whether she’s worthy of Heaven or damned to Hell. Isn’t that interesting.) Not for nothing does Dean end up wearing that goddamn ascot by the end of the episode; more than anything, what Dean aspires to be is someone who is strong and sincere and has done good and is worthy of the love and friendship that Fred takes for granted.

Daphne loves Fred.  Well, why shouldn’t she?  He’s a good man, faithful and strong, her companion and protector and teammate.  In spite of Dean kicking against the post, even he has to admit by the end, Daphne loves Fred because Fred deserves Daphne’s love.  They suit each other.  The exist in this fantasy world, perfectly matched and perfectly happy.  In separate bedrooms.

There’s a perpetual question, after this many years, about why exactly Dean is the only sentient being in the universe who seems convinced that he can’t be with Castiel.  He is not unaware of the fact that the obvious explanation for 3/4ths of everything Castiel has done in the past decade is “he’s absurdly, self-destructively in love with Dean.”  Like, Dean couldn’t be unaware of it, because people keep saying it.  A lot of fanfic has this kind of goofy, YA novel take on it, where Dean is obliviously self-deprecating, where he’s all like, oh, just some regular guy like me, how could he ever want me?  But that’s -- come on.  Dean’s not stupid, and he’s certainly not stupid about people.  The way he blithely factors Castiel into all of his future plans, the way he’s got that beach chair all picked out for their retirement, it’s clear that he know Castiel is here for the long haul, that he’s loyal to Dean for life.  Literally everyone knows that.

Daphne loves Fred.

But Dean can’t have Daphne.  Not in the real world.   Because Daphne isn’t from the real world.  She’s not a human being, although she��s close enough to make an engaging fantasy.

Daphne is entirely, unbreakably, unquestionably devoted to her strong, sincere, righteous man.  But boys and girls don’t sleep in the same room.  Silly.

I think it’s not Castiel’s love that Dean thinks he can’t have.  That’s often fandom’s take, because of some perception that Dean doesn’t think he deserves love or whatever.  And maybe Dean doesn’t think he deserves it, I don’t know, but he’s not an idiot, and it never really made sense to me that he could be that goddamn blind to the fact that he does have it.  Daphne loves Fred, and Dean maybe has some complex feelings about that -- about whether Fred is good enough, about whether Fred deserves Daphne -- but he knows it’s true.  He’s so sure it’s true that he keeps it carved deep in the grain, a sentimental reminder, the kind of thing childhood sweethearts do, a memento of first love in all its purity.

What Dean thinks he can’t have isn’t love.  It’s sex.  Because who he’s in love with is fundamentally incompatible with Dean specifically sexually -- and while I still think Dean’s internalized homophobia is a part of that, I think he’s at least mellowed enough to know that getting over his own shit is an option for him.  What’s not an option for him is Castiel ever becoming the kind of hot-blooded, sexually assertive, throw-you-down-and-fuck-your-brains-out kind of person that gets Dean’s dick hard.  Daphne may love Fred to death, but Fred is never, ever gonna get any ass from Daphne.

Fred seems to be fine with that.  He seems to love in that same pure, childlike way that Daphne does -- that Dean did when he actually was a child with his mother’s voice in his ears, telling him that angels were watching.  But present-day Dean, the man that Dean grew into, is not fine with it.

He wants what he can’t have.  He keeps that purity of love close to him, among the other signs and symbols of his identity that decorate his dumb squirrel bar, because he does value it, and he values Castiel.  But that distance exists between them, and I’m increasingly convinced it’s because of that fundamental incompatibility -- Dean is a guy who likes to get dirty (hell, even his demon-self just had orgies at honky-tonks with world-weary barmaids instead of properly debauching and corrupting the innocent like we see so many other demons preferring to do), and Castiel is (I think almost indisputably) some version of asexual.

Castiel loves Dean and the entire goddamn multiverse knows it, but he’s still something that Dean wants and can’t have.  Both of these concepts always seemed pretty intuitively obvious to me, but I don’t think I ever fully grokked how they connected to each other until the Daphne thing fell into place.