You know, I feel like Castiel’s intense need to always give Dean peace and keep him from having to do the morally questionable work always feels like penance for what happened in On the Head of a Pin.
Castiel is the only one alive who saw Dean in hell. He is the only one who witnessed him at what Dean considers his very worst, when he took pleasure in causing other’s pain. Sam knows how much internal pain and conflict this caused Dean, but he was never actually witness to it. I think it’s up there among Dean’s greatest fears (after losing Sam of course), going dark side again and hurting innocents. Even when he was a demon, he still had enough of Dean Winchester in him to fight off that impulse. Crowley kept him sated by feeding him demons to harm because even Crowley knew making Dean hurt innocents would be stepping over a dangerous line. It’s why Dean was willing to be launched into space and sacrifice himself forever, to avoid becoming the thing that fucked him up the worst.
Back in season 4 Castiel only knew that Dean was the Righteous Man, had a mission God wanted him to do, and that he was Alastair’s best torture student. And he had seen Dean in hell enjoying the torture. So when he commanded Dean to return to torture, it was with some trepidation (I mean, even then Cas was starting to fall, starting to “
express emotions, the doorways to doubt”) but he still insisted upon it because he didn’t truly understand how bad it would be for Dean. But then things went south. Dean was darkening right there in the room with Alastair and Cas began to doubt. And when Alastair got free and nearly killed Dean, I think Cas felt immense guilt and began to truly change how he saw his life and Dean’s and broadened his role as Dean’s protector from just physical to emotional.
It feels like so many of Cas’ decisions since that day are his own self-imposed penance for that decision because they are explicitly to give Dean peace and save him from ever having to harm an innocent and become what he saw in hell again. In the green room, Cas was trying to shield Dean from the pain of seeing Sam free Lucifer. Season 5 was all about saving Dean from saying yes to Michael because the ensuing battle would harm millions of innocents and Dean’s psyche. Saving Dean from becoming involved in shady dealings with Crowley and a heavenly war was Cas’ entire storyline of season 6. In season 8, Cas was willing once again to die and be locked in Heaven to give Dean peace on earth. He avoided Dean when angels were after him to keep him out of the fight and was willing to stay by his side literally forever when he was a demon to protect him from the pain of harming innocents.
So now, Cas going to heaven where many of his siblings hate him and stealing the Colt to go kill Kelly on his own are very much in character and follow the trend of Cas being willing to take on just about anything to give Dean peace and keep him from having to go down that path that he first witnessed in hell. I imagine for Cas, there is no worse fate than allowing Dean to live with the pain of harming an innocent again, when he can take that on himself. Cas may make some terrible decisions, but every one seems to be out of love and self-sacrifice for Dean.
Everyone may be flailing about the incredible romantic implications of the giften mix tape, but let’s not let that overshadow another grad gesture of love on the part of Cas: to once again be willing to even damage his own soul by killing an innocent to protect Dean from ever being even close to what he saw in hell.
Even at the end of s6 (and really ALL of s6, based on what we learned in 6.20) was about the same thing.
In 6.21, Dean IS torturing demons trying to find where Lisa and Ben had been taken, he WAS falling into that again when Cas showed up and saved him from a demon who escaped his trap and was about to kill Dean. Because Cas saw Dean almost beyond caring for himself again.
What he didn’t see was the look on Dean’s face after he told Cas to leave.
It’s what motivated Cas to throw in with Metatron in 8.22. It’s what motivated him to work with Sam behind Dean’s back in s10 to cure the Mark. It’s why he’d said yes to Lucifer in 11.10.
It’s the absolute most heartbreaking incarnation of “I did what I had to do.”
This is my blog, and I’m going to just say a little thing about Destiel because I want to, and I can. Especially because this is the least amount of queerbaiting we’ve ever seen in this show thus far. Why? Because there’s a lot of nuance for those of us who grew up in the Mix Tape Generation, and to us, there’s absolutely no way to misinterpret this scene.
Here’s why I liked it, and found it so wonderful.
There was no reason for this scene. None. It did not play to the overall narrative of the episode, or even, the show in general, which is how a lot of the queerbaiting on the show is done. And you can go ahead and say that it’s just showing that Dean thinks Castiel is a part of the family now and that’s how he’s showing it, but Dean doesn’t make mix tapes for Sam. Or anyone that we know of. It was a small scene. Castiel means to return the tape and Dean gives it back. He says, “it’s a gift. You keep those.”
Now, this is a significant scene for being so brief.
Dean Winchester was born January 24, 1979. Which makes him about my age. And here’s what I remember about people giving other people mix tapes:
You gave your crush a mix tape to say your feelings and hopefully end up macking in the janitor’s closet after fourth period in middle/high school.
If you weren’t making that mix tape for yourself, you were making it for your crush.
Also, the most meaningful band in existence to Dean Winchester, born January 24, 1979 is Led Zeppelin.
So. He didn’t just make a mix tape to give to Castiel. He made a mix tape of HIS favorite music to give to Castiel. That’s Level 2 flirting through mix tape sociology. And we already know how much Dean treasures his music. How meaningful it is to him. One of the most popular lines from the show, to this day, is: “driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cakehole.”
This small, insignificant scene is probably lost on the younger viewers who didn’t grow up in a mix tape generation, but let me say this: for any of us who were born circa January 24, 1979, knows that this small, insignificant scene is anything but.
Mix tapes had power.
Mix tapes had significance.
Mix tapes were confessions.
I’m going to be screaming about this for at least five years.
But wait, I have more to say.
Giving a mix tape back means one of two things.
1) I don’t like you. 2) Basically the equivalent of giving back a promise ring.
We all know that Cas likes Dean. Loves him, according to his own words a few episodes back. So that nixes number 1 on the list. So that leaves 2. Why would he be giving back a promise ring? Because he thinks he’s pissed Dean off too much for him to want to stay together.
Then Dean insists he keep it. If Dean wanted to break up, he would have accepted it back. But nope. Don’t give back the promise ring, Cas. This argument is not the end of us. I still care about you. Keep it. It’s a gift.
I posit that Castiel didn’t even know the real significance of it, being an angel. He thought Dean was giving him something to be entertained by. Dean didn’t tell him it was a gift until Castiel tried to return it! Which is so very Dean being allergic to his feelings until he can’t be anymore. He’s not going to openly flirt with Cas or give him a line like he does the women he sleeps with because Cas means something to him. And he realizes that Castiel won’t understand the significance of a “confession” like a mix tape. Dean could play it off with fear of rejection if it was that. But it means something to DEAN. And Castiel starts to understand that the second he took it back!
Yeah I don’t think Cas understood what he was doing. But those of us in the Mix Tape Generation totally understood what the symbolism was. And Dean clarified to Castiel that gifts are meant to be kept.
How else am I, a child of the Mix Tape Generation, supposed to interpret that other than Dean saying I GAVE YOU MY HEART, CAS, YOU CAN’T JUST GIVE IT BACK DAMMIT.
THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL DEAN AND CAS SCENES IN SPN HISTORY.
Here we have Dean and Cas being open about their feelings. Cas has been away, and Dean’s been worried. Cas comes back, and Dean lashes out at him.
For most of their relationship, they never talk about it. Dean just assumes that Cas just wants to get away from him because he thinks Cas has more important things to do than spend time with him. Cas, on the other hand, always thinks that the only way he can be acceptable to Dean is if he isn’t a burden, if he delivers what is required of him, and if he functions properly as a savior and protector. Neither of them know the truth. Dean doesn’t know that Cas would want nothing more than to stay with him, that the reason why Cas is away all the time is so he could keep him safe. Cas doesn’t know that Dean just wants him to stay and keep him company, to fight alongside him, and to always be within reach because he worries about him all the time. They care about each other so much, but they’ve always had trouble communicating it properly–until now.
Dean gave Cas a mixtape of his Top 13 Zepp traxx–Dean’s extended an olive branch to Cas to let him know that he matters so much to him that he wants him to share his taste in music and know the words to his favorite songs–that maybe they don’t always say the right things to each other, but maybe the gesture would show him how much he means to him.
And here we see Cas returning the mixtape Dean gave him after spending a
significant time apart. He uses this as an olive branch to get Dean to
talk to him–to let him know that he listened to it while he was away because he cares about him–that maybe this gesture would be capable of bridging the distance between them. But Dean gives it back to Cas and reinforces that the tape is his because he gifted it to him, and Cas takes it back. They tell each other everything.
Dean tells Cas that he’s angry because he’s worried, and Cas tells Dean that all he wants to do is redeem himself to Dean. They’re communicating their feelings. They know each other more wholly. They understand each other.
And it’s really amazing to see how far they’ve come now that they’ve both realized that they’re so much better when they’re together.
I can’t explain it, but something about this scene just screams “BOYFREINDS” to me
A Straight-Forward Explanation to Why There is a Boyfriend Vibe:
Two people in a friendship relationship might ask if they can have a taste of what their friend has ordered, while two people in a couple relationship assumes that eating off of their loved one’s plate is acceptable, even expected, especially if the food goes untouched.
We, the audience, are meant to pick up on this subtlety and subconsciously take note of it, without the narrative explicitly stating that this scene has a “date” connotation to it. When the writers, director and actors choose to engage in this, it’s called addingsubtext.
This particular use of subtext is there to signal to us, the audience, that these two characters are not engaged in a friendship relationship, but rather in a couple relationship. One that has yet to be fully acknowledged by either of them, and yet both of them have subconsciously adopted the couple behaviour and accepted that this is how they relate to one another.
This is why the scene screams BOYFRIENDS at you. Because that’s what the writers, the director and the actors want you to take from this specific character interaction – that they are behaving like a couple would, not as friends do.
To start with, I’m not delusional. I’m fully aware that the studio and execs have settled into a comfortable pattern with Supernatural, and especially considering it’s heavily mixed demographic (interestingly, it was ranked a favorite among republicans and democrats in 2016) they’re unlikely to rock the ship with a canonically queer relationship between two of it’s main characters.
However, it’s important to understand exactly how much queerness is bubbling beneath the thick surface layer of “no homo:” from the orgies of male-on-male eyesex to the inspiration for most of its main characters, Supernatural is queer to its very core.
Here are five (blaring but stubbornly unacknowledged) reasons why:
1. Dean’s gratuitously bisexual inspiration.
Whenever someone claims a queer interpretation of Dean is baseless, I’m always happy to direct them straight to his flamingly bisexual source: Dean Moriarty, his namesake and direct inspiration, a la the novel On the Road.
Admittedly, I read On the Road and didn’t particularly enjoy it, as I found it to be a somewhat masturbatory reassertion of masculinity for its narrator, Sal Paradise. Sal idolizes and fixates the charismatic Dean and his promiscuous lifestyle, openly having sex with and impregnating multiple women, and is all around a heterosexual power figure…right up until the point at which Dean propositions a male prostitute.
Though he’s never shown doing anything gratuitous with male characters (since the book was published in the 1960s, it wouldn’t have been legal to) it’s clear that Dean is very much bisexual, not ashamed of it, and in terms of personality, very similar to Dean. There are a few key differences (Dean Moriarty, for example, legitimately gives zero fucks about anything, whereas Dean Winchester is secretly a little ball of anxiety with the weight of the world on his shoulders) but it’s clear where Eric Kripke got his inspiration from.
Moreover, Dean Moriarty was in turn based off of the real life bisexual counterculturist Neal Cassady, who among other things had a twenty-year sexual relationship with a male poet. Here, he is pictured in a Denver mugshot:
So next time someone tells you the homoerotic subtext of Supernatural exists only in the imagination of rabid fangirls, remember that Dean is the direct descendant of two ragingly bisexual icons.
2. Castiel (or at least his wardrobe) was also based off of a bisexual character.
For a show so aggressively devoted to a “no homo” interpretation, it has a real propensity to drawing inspiration from queer characters: everyone’s favorite baby in a trench coat, for example, was modeled after the demon-busting John Constantine from the Hellblazer comics. Yup, another bisexual.
Though in true assbutt fashion, his love of men is censored in movie and TV adaptions, Constantine unabashedly swings both ways in paper form – a.k.a. where Kripke found inspiration for Castiel’s look. Here, we see him platonically receiving a man-hug from one of his bros:
So I’m not saying the fact that two out of three main characters are modeled after canonically queer figures could have anything to do with Supernatural’s gratuitous queer subtext, but y’know. It might.
3. Cas himself is sexually complex (and literally cannot be straight.)
Dean has made reference to the fact that he “doesn’t swing that way” (ironically, both of which times he was literally in the midst of blatantly flirting with men.)
Cas, however, has no such reservations: he’s never indicated, vocally or otherwise, a preference towards either gender, so much as outright declaring that he doesn’t give a damn.
He reacts to male and female flirtation much the same way: just try and tell me his suspicious glower and Mick wasn’t similar to Mandy the waitress (and try and tell me they both weren’t acting like they’d like to eat him for dinner.)
Moreover, the only time we’ve seen him ever achieve some kind of intimacy with female characters is when they’re literally throwing themselves at him. Hey, he’s an aesthetically pleasing fellow – or rather, an aesthetically pleasing something.
Which brings me to my next point that he isn’t really a fellow at all: Cas not only gives zero fucks about sexual orientation, he also gives zero fucks about gender. Sure, he’ll spend seven years in the same ill-fitting trench coat, but he’ll also rock a petticoat like nobody’s business.
I’ve discovered that the writer for “Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets,” Steve Yockey, is a gay man, which honestly makes it all the more perfect: not only does it establish the Orlando-esque flexibility (or nonexistence) of Cas’s gender, but it eliminates the possibility of his straightness.
And I want Destiel to be canon as much as anybody, but am I opposed to Cas being a genderfluid lesbian? No. No, I am not.
4. Dean can textually be interpreted as bisexual (and probably should be.)
For anyone who questions whether Dean not being straight as an arrow, I’m happy to point out some very canon things that happened on the show:
And yes, when feeling threatened, he’s professed not to swing that way. But you know how many queer people I know who have at one point felt compelled to lie about our sexual orientation? Every single one. And I live in the bluest of blue states – Dean was raised in Bible Belt America and spends most of his time in the Southwest. Not to mention the fact that he was raised during the heat of the AIDs academic.
In other words, he has every logical reason to be wary at the prospect of coming out of the closet, or even acknowledging same sex attraction at all.
Moreover it’s been canonically established that Dean has a habit of lying about himself to protect his image of masculinity: according to Dean, he doesn’t do shorts, chick flicks, cucumber water, skinny jeans and sunglasses, and Taylor Swift music. You know how many of those things he loves? All of them.
Finally, not every member of the cast or crew might agree (though I know for a fact that some of them do) but their interpretations do not effect textuality. And Dean can textually be interpreted as bisexual.
5. Dean and Cas make a better couple than any of their love interests.
I’m going to state something I feel is obvious: Cas and Dean have more buildup, tension, chemistry, emotional connection, and romantic history than literally any of their other interests.
Take Lisa, for example: she’s Dean’s longest lasting introduced as female partner, and she’s introduced as the “bendiest weekend of his life.”
Furthermore, I’d argue that sexual attraction notwithstanding, Dean was never romantically in love with Lisa. To him, she epitomizes his desire for a mother figure, a home, and his lost childhood, as is best demonstrated in his fantasy from “Dream a Little Dream of Me:” Lisa isn’t a seductive or romantic figure here – she’s a maternal one.
Though since Dean has never had a long lasting relationship (or, to my belief, been completely in love with a girl) it’s easy to see how he’d misinterpret these feelings as romantic love.
Then we have Cas, who’s introduced by pulling Dean from the depths of hell, who makes most one-on-one scenes with Dean look like a soft core porno, and who recently (canonically!) declared his love for Dean.
I don’t dislike Lisa, but it’s easy to see which of the two relationships is more three-dimensional, more original, and more worthy of screentime.
LOL In summary:
1. Dean is bi. 2. Cas is bi. 3. I take that back, Cas is a genderfluid lesbian. 4. Did I mention that Dean is hella bi? 5. Destiel is the most canon/noncanon ship to ever ship.
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