proxy-1:

This was gonna be my usual initial thoughts post, but then the confessional scene happened. What the actual fuck. Ok, here goes.

Holy fricking goddamn. If that wasn’t a coming out scene I don’t know what is. I mean yeah, it was still in the show’s usual subtext level, but only barely. Dean started by spinning his story about “Gina”, someone who (as far as I remember) is made up, but is pretty much an amalgam of all the women Dean has been with. She was both the ongoing relationship (Cassie, Lisa), as well as the casual ones. He played up his wham bam thank you ma’am, overcompensating nature. She was made up, but was also an exaggerated representation of how Dean has tried to present himself. His version of himself was his mask, and you can set how ill-fitting it is now. And then it comes off, and it is both heartbreaking and glorious. The second half of the confession is the real Dean, contrasting in every possible way with the mask he presented in order to try and draw out the ghost in the first half. And what I love is the way the first half is all about women, how he’s sick of being dishonest, leading them on, but the second half, the second half… that’s not.

“There’s things…people, feelings, that I want to experience differently than I have before. Or maybe even for the first time.”

He mentions people, feelings. Given train of thought he was on, the subject matter of the preceding half, it’s not unreasonable to reach the conclusion that he is still thinking and talking about people & feelings in the romantic sense. And quite tellingly, he’s playing the gender game. He’s not talking about feelings for women, not in the same way he was before. It’s not that he lost attraction towards them. It’s that he wants something different. Something that he’s not ready to explicitly say, but something he feels he can bring up in the safety of a confessional, after he’s specifically been told that the priest cannot share what people tell him. Something that involves a modification of the pronoun game, something that a lot of queer people are familiar with. Now, the argument can be made (and probably has been) that it’s just general statement about changing his life, wanting something other than what he has. And is true, and likely is one layer. But this is Supernatural, which is renowned for pulling layer upon layer of meaning into things. And this is no different.

Did anyone else get the same sort of general feeling as they did on seeing Dean’s room in 9.14? Remember, when we were all speculating like mad about how it showed that Dean wanted someone in his life in a romantic sense? Well this is the spoken text equivalent. Dean is ready to have someone with him. There is no doubt in my mind that he was speaking in a romantic sense, none at all. Equally there is no doubt (for me) that he had someone in mind when he was talking about it. And he specifically amended his statement to include “Maybe even for the first time”. He’s had long term relationships. He’s been in love. With women. With men though? That side of him he has always kept suppressed (on screen, at least). He’s flirted with the idea, but he’s never allowed himself to go any further that. This would be something he’s experiencing differently than before, something he’s experiencing for the first time. It would mark a pretty profound shift in the feelings he has been experiencing. And it ties in beautifully with the way he starts it all, talking about how he doesn’t want to die. He doesn’t. He’s got things he wants, things that are for himself, things he thinks he might have a chance to have.

And then it all wraps up with fantastically symbolic shot at end, of him leaving the confessional. He opens up, spits out the all-but-coming-out speech, then is seen walking out of that tiny little box that is so reminiscent of a closet, that room where your deepest secrets can be released in safety. It was kind of amazing.

There were two moments at the beginning and the end though that bookended it all nicely. First, during the ‘then’ segment, the shot that overlaid Rowena saying “The Winchesters”? That included not just Sam & Dean, but also Cas. They could have used any one of a million shots of just the brothers, but they chose one that included Cas. Then at the end, when Dean talked about how no woman has given blood for him (I forget the exact phrasing). And he’s right, no woman has. But someone else has, and very willingly. Many times, and he even made mention of how he was “always willing to bleed for the Winchesters”. Someone whose motivations just last season were revealed to be not heaven, not humanity, not even the brothers, but Dean. Cas may not have been mentioned in the episode, but he was there in every other conceivable way.

Dean wants love. He wants romantic love. He wants to both give, and receive it. And he knows exactly who he wants to share that with. There is only one person who fits the slot, whose death would hurt him something awful. And Dean, I think, is finally being honest with himself about why.