9.03, or, wiping the drool from the keyboard

[brightly_lit]

Needless to say, there will be 9.03 spoilers in this post!

I was dreading 9.03. There were SOO many things I wanted it to be, and I was sure it would fall down on all of them, and instead ... it was everything I wanted and more! YAAAAAY!!!!!

SOO many situations ripe for Cas's ... Casness, for humor and tragedy and everything in between.

Plus, the difficulty of being human is one of my favorite Cas themes (as you might have noticed in my fic!), and they went deep into that in this ep--it was like a fanfic come true! (With even a not-so-subtle Destiel moment there at the end, "I always enjoy our ... time together, Dean." Yeah? Tell us more about this 'time together' that never happens onscreen, Cas ....) Great ideas, great acting, lots and lots of Misha. I am glad I had all the spoilers so I wasn't overly dismayed when April turned out to be evil and Cas was booted from the bunker. OH, CAS!!!!!

I also have to mention a little detail I haven't seen anyone else mention. So Cas is in the bathroom at the beginning, clearly unaware of the basics of how to take care of his body, as he squirts toothpaste into his mouth (... and eats it?!), but then he takes his toothbrush--which he CLEARLY DOES NOT KNOW IS USED FOR CLEANING ONE'S TEETH--into the bathroom stall with him to do ... what, exactly? When it comes to Cas, it's surely best not to ask. A most entertaining little detail. Reminds me of a mentally ... unusual guy (among many) at a job I once had helping people with mental disabilities, and his self-cleaning habits, but ... you probably don't want to know.

Comments

[brightly-lit.livejournal.com]

The saddest thing is, the racist truck ep was trying SO HARD to be ANTI-racist by being "hip to POC, because, you know, Dean tapped that!" which is so head!desk, but it just kind of made me sigh, because poor guys, they're trying so hard and failing. But not tonight! Maybe because they finally stopped trying to be so in-your-face POC-positive.

I felt like the subtext of S8 was like, non-stop Dean h/c, but since it never got around to making it explicit, yeah, deeply unsatisfying.

Aw, man, it's been a long time since I saw Cars ... but it has NOT been a long time since some random scene in some show encapsulated my feelings perfectly! So I feel ya. :-)

[kalliel]

I am generally a huuuuuuge fan of subtextual Dean H/C but S7 was RAMPING UP TO SOMETHING DAMN IT, DAMN YOU PURGATORY. XP Though I've since reconciled this with myself because as much as I feel huge blowout emotional disasters can be cathartic and wonderful (and um, in less sensitive terms, aesthetically pleasing when it's fictional), I don't hold to the idea that they "need" to happen, or that that's the only way (or even the most common way, realistically speaking) hurt/trauma/etc. plays out. Ironically, I think it was Dean H/C fandom itself that soured the notion for me in the first place, because the--frankly, militantly held--idea that there was one essentialized endpoint, one prognosis, one model for narrativizing damage--which uh, nope, no, nein.

I'm curious about your S8 Dean H/C subtext thoughts, though! I've spun my Dean H/C gloss for the season, but I think it hinges more on absence than actual presence, even at the level of subtext. Mostly I felt like Dean basically just half-assed his way through the whole year (not that he didn't in S7, but the underpinnings in that case were very different to me). So much of S8 for me was like, Dean be chillin', I be ignoring him and partying with Sam and Cas instead, and then everyone be going home happy! Except Dean, who dgaf anyway.

[brightly-lit.livejournal.com]

I felt like it HAD to be implicit, right? You don't just go to purgatory and barely survive and lose your bff there and not be in emotional agony all the time afterward. Just 'cos he's gettin' real good at pushin' it down don't mean it ain't always there. (I felt like the "It's a horror show up there" line alluded to that nicely.)

But, you know ... it's television. If they want the viewer to know he's suffering, they kinda have to tell you explicitly and not just have him blustering around all the time acting like he's a-okay. This is literally rule no. 1 of writing scripts (as I learned in film school from my incredibly high script-writing teacher who came onto me on my birthday): you can't say "Dean is sad," you have to put in the stage directions something the viewer can see: "Dean cries," "Dean puts his head in his hands," "DEAN (grimly) I'M SO SAD SAM I NEED A HUG, DAMNIT." Even the occasional moment-alone-putting-his-face-in-his-hands-with-wet-eyes would have gone a long way.

As for its ramping up to something ... yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't you? But then it changes gears and suddenly it's the Sam show again and Dean's post-purgatory issues are ... what, back-burnered? SEEMS PRETTY IMPORTANT SINCE DEAN IS FREAKIN' MELTING DOWN, and here we are back at all my problems with that season again. If the idea is that Dean's mental breakdown is being neglected, they need to show him hurting more than often than they show him being an asshole, methinks. But whatever; I look back on that season and mainly feel confusion.

tl;dr: I take from Dean's recent traumatic experiences and his remarkably shitty behavior that it must result from inner turmoil/suffering, but THEY NEVER DONE COME RIGHT OUT 'N' SAID SO.

tl;dr tl;dr tl;dr !!!!

[kalliel]

Yes, yes, it would have gone a very long way. XP I draw some of my favorite-est indications of H/C based on how Dean sits down on chairs so IT WOULD HAVE GONE SUCH A LONG WAY. XD

But you know, I think I'm slowly wandering away from the school of needing even that. Because if I consider examples from real life, I think that depending on the person, depending on the context, there are any number of ways people can outwardly exhibit (or fail to) even the craziest of traumas and mental collapses. Which maybe is why I'm so wildly comfortable with Dean's poor interpersonal choices and means of handling everyone important to him, ever, while another set of Deanfans are really not. Being an asshole being the symptom of the greatest salience? Yeah, I can buy that.

I guess where I'm at right now with Dean (lol I think about this far too often and with far too much care, but hey, it's fandom. I know I'm in EXCELLENT company for this kind of thing, XD) is, there's a strain of Dean H/Cdom that swears on their Dead H/C membership cards that people cannot keep all of that down, people cannot hide these things, there has to be that meltdown (as I mentioned previously). And while that's often true (particularly given the volume of Things Kept Down when you start talking Winchesters), no, it's not always true. Because the truth of it is, some people can.

And for some people it actually works; it's not always desperate repression that comes back to bite you in the ass even worse. I don't...necessarily think Dean is one of those people; I'm actually fairly sure he's not. XP But in terms of these last couple years, I'm inclined to believe that yes, apparently he can actualize at least the first part of this strain of people, and "keep it down." And if in a given stretch of time it doesn't show, then there's even a chance that he doesn't feel it for that stretch, either; it's on lock down, and it's behaving. It's not the same as it's non-existence, or even "healing" per se, but those things aren't always an option. And it's not as though the idea of a "talking cure" has been universally proven to be some gold standard. If silence and lockdown work for Dean, I can root for him on that. And if it doesn't, well, eventually he'll be pressed to try something else then, won't he. XP So I do find myself wanting to trust him, in some way, with all of that, I guess.

Of course, at the same time, I don't deny that he is also tearing down everything around him, and that's not handling it, it won't help him, and it's certainly not remotely fair to Sam or Castiel or Kevin or anyone else. So it's kind of like, well Dean, you have two choices. Destroy everything from the inside-out, or the outside-in? :(

Sooooo uhhhh that there would be my most recent fledgling overinvolved no-fourth-wall Dean H/C thoughts, in a very big nutshell. XP I think that's a fair outline of how I write late-season Sam with respect to Dean as well, though I don't think my Sam is quiiite where the above is yet, and also has obvious personal investment in not being collateral as far as outside-in scenarios go, inasmuch as he may be afraid of an inside-out one. So that colors things considerably, too. XP

Re: tl;dr tl;dr tl;dr !!!!

[brightly-lit.livejournal.com]

It's true that some people can manage it pretty well for a while (some for a lifetime of denial and destruction! which, yes, seems to work all right for them, except for the whole driving-everyone-away-from-them bit), and I agree that Dean is one of them, at least at this point. (Come to think of it, he's probably always on a certain level desired this, thinking if he could just keep everything under tight control, he'd be a 'real man' and a better hunter, without all those pesky feelings getting in the way.) I give him maybe a year, possibly two, before the dam cracks and the deluge ensues.

So I hear ya ... although I won't go as far as to describe it as "working" for him. Clearly he's very keen to avoid facing certain things and will avoid it as long as possible, but I have no doubt it'll end up biting him in the ass in a way maybe not talking but at least THINKING about it could have prevented. I mean, I think a kind of suffering he never imagined even when he was in hell is headed right for him as a result of all this denial.

It's all very realistic and I think very interesting--an lj friend pointed out on my meta that when Sam finds out Dean stuck an angel in him, he'll have finally lost everything, betrayed so outrageously by his own brother, which I'm thinking will leave him ripe for saying yes to Lucifer and will drive Dean to end!verse levels of sociopathy (that's my latest theory on where all this is headed). I'm excited for that kind of thing, I guess, particularly if it's done really well.

But though I agree that it's REALISTIC, I suppose it brings up the question of the differences between story and reality that perhaps SHOULD be different. It would make for a much more satisfying show, emotionally speaking, if we occasionally saw Dean's torment. Then again, maybe it WOULD actually be more realistic to see his torment, because even deep in the throes of denial, these people still suffer, if only occasionally, alone late at night when there's nothing to distract them from it. Not necessarily "I'M SO SAD SAM I NEED TO PUT MY HEAD IN MY HANDS WITH WET EYES FOR A MINUTE" kinds of suffering, but there are ways to show someone's inner torment in a visible way, and for the story to work for the viewer emotionally--especially for the viewer to be able to have sympathy and love for that character--I think it's better if you show it. But either way, it's interesting to see these very real, seldom explored human interactions play out on this show that, yes, I can't believe is a real show, either.