3.10 // 10.16
Tag: spn 10×16
i don´t get why people want to ruin our happiness, like i´m not queer but i´ve been super excited about the scene the whole day and i also had to send gifs to my friend who has only seen couple of episodes and she was happy too, so i can imagine it must be even bigger party for bi people, also i don´t know why they think we see only sex in it? i saw some crack of course, but most people just cry because of the big character developement and how dean wants to love someone and be loved back
The phrase I see all the time from naysayers is “You’re reading too much into it.” Supernatural is very open about it’s heavy use of subtext, we’re supposed to read into things, that’s one of the ways the show engages their audience. Any fan who claims that subtext doesn’t exist on Supernatural must not know how this show works. It was even told to us, clear as day, in Meta Fiction 9.18 that subtext is one of the things that makes a story work. At the other end of the spectrum are fans who acknowledge that Supernatural is heavy with subtext but ignore the subtext they don’t like and try to convince people that it doesn’t exist.
The confessional scene was obviously meant as subtext because Dean spoke vaguely, that’s a method writers use to invite the audience to look at subtext and determine what Dean really meant by his vague statements. But we have to look at the entire scene to read the subtext, we can’t draw conclusions based on one sentence.
It starts out with Dean spending a full minute talking about his sexual history with women. The only one mentioned by name is Gina. I can’t remember any time in canon that Dean hooked up with a Gina and my search of the wikis is turning up nothing. That means it wasn’t a reference to a specific canon event, Gina is being used as a general reference to Dean’s many sexual flings.
When Dean finishes his discussion about sex and the priest gives him penance they have this conversation:
Dean: Then that’s it? Then I’m good to go?
Father Delaney: One would hope some inner exploration might occur. Prayers are just the beginning to some serious soul searching.Dean’s confession was over but that last line from Father Delaney inspired him to keep talking and to be more honest. He spoke about his fear of death and then:
Dean: There’s things, there’s.. people, feelings, that I want to experience differently than I had before.
Father Delaney: Go a little deeper, perhaps, than with Gina.
Dean: Yeah. I’m just starting to think maybe there’s more to it all than I thought.The confession concludes with Father Delaney asking if Dean believes in God and Dean replies with the same thing he’s been saying since season 5, he believes God exists but doesn’t care.
The key elements of the confession were: Dean’s past sexual conquests, being told to pray, Dean’s fear of death, his desire to experience life in a different way, Father Delaney clarifying that by different he meant different from his past sexual/romantic experiences, and then re-affirming to the fans that Dean still thinks it’s pointless to pray to God.
I’ve seen people say that Dean’s line about experiencing things differently was a reference to the overall theme of the second half of season 10 which has been Dean trying things that he used to not be interested in (like Taylor Swift and cake). I do believe that was part of what he was saying, most people have several layers when talking about wanting a major life change, but it wasn’t the main reason for him saying that. We were told, very blatantly, that he was talking about sexual/romantic relationships because of Father Delaney’s clarifying remark of “Go a little deeper, perhaps, than with Gina.” The priest wanted to make sure he understood Dean so he brought up Gina and Dean said yeah, Dean confirmed Father Delaney’s suspicions that he was mainly talking about sex/romance. That part wasn’t even subtext, it was actual text.
Now the question is, was he talking about wanting a deeper relationship with women or was this Destiel subtext?
It’s a little late in the season to plan on having Dean meet a new woman that he can enter into a relationship with. It’s possible that they’re planning to bring back someone from his past, like Cassie or Lisa, and this confessional speech was foreshadowing that. However I can’t find any scenes/subtext in this season’s episodes that reference Cassie or Lisa. That means it’s highly unlikely that this was foreshadowing him getting back together with an ex. This late in the season Supernatural doesn’t introduce new subtext lines, they reinforce the ones they’ve built up in earlier episodes.
The romantic tropes surrounding Dean and Cas have been significant since season 8. Two things that stand out to me about the confessional scene is that Dean was told to pray and then it was reinforced to the audience that Dean doesn’t pray to God. So who would he have thought of when the priest told him to pray? Who has Dean been praying to for the past 6 years? There is one specific person that Dean associates with prayer and right after he was told to pray Dean shared that he didn’t want to die because there are people and feelings he wants to experience differently. We don’t have to dig at all for that subtext, even people who hate Destiel know that when Dean prays he prays to Cas.
To answer your questions, people are saying we’re reading too much into things because they either can’t see subtext or don’t want to acknowledge the subtext they don’t like. They claim we’re only talking about sex because an effective method of invalidating people is to ignore the body of a discussion and flippantly say it’s about something frivolous or selfish. Supernatural has been fairly obvious about the Destiel subtext in the past 3 seasons, so obvious that they’re receiving a large amount of hate for queer baiting. Entertainment news writers have always turned a blind eye to queer baiting but many have started commenting on the Destiel subtext, that’s how blatant it’s become. Even TV Guide, who have always been supporters of Supernatural, wrote an article saying the queer baiting needs to stop. Whether or not Destiel will actually go canon is up for debate but the existence of Destiel subtext is not.
In the confession scene, the Destiel connections were fairly easy to make. It may have been foreshadowing, it may be queer baiting, only time will tell. My money is on foreshadowing because it doesn’t make sense that they would queer bait after receiving so much bad press for it.
I’m glad the scene excited you, and you don’t have to be queer to be happy about the possibility of queer representation. It’s important for everyone and queer allies should be just as excited about representation as queer people are.
So the people who don’t read that scene as either Dean coming to grips with being bi in general or being in love with Cas specifically, how DO they read it?
The main reading I’ve seen—besides the bi!Dean or Dean/Cas interpretations—is that it was Dean admitting to wanting a long term romantic partner.
After Dean says that he isn’t ready to die, the exchange with Father Delaney goes as follows:
Dean: Recent events, uh, made me think I might be closer to that than I really thought. And I don’t know, I mean, you know, there’s things, there’s people, feelings that I- I- I want to experience differently than I have before. Or maybe even for the first time.Father Delaney: Go a little deeper, perhaps, than with Gina.
Dean: Yeah… I’m- I’m starting to think that maybe there’s more to it all than I thought.
So Father Delaney connects Dean’s confession of having people and feelings that he wants to experience in new ways to the probably-made-up fling he had with someone named Gina—and Dean agrees. He wants something more in a romantic sense. He wants a relationship.
This is something that has been hinted to in the narrative and through silent storytelling since the beginning of season nine, but after this scene it could only be clearer if he flat out says “I want a long-term partner.”
If there are other interpretations to this I’d love to hear about them, but I really can’t see this exchange suggesting anything other than a desire for romantic love. It’ll take a pretty convincing argument to de-romo this dialogue.
So basically everyone agrees on the wanting a relationship part, but those who don’t see Dean as bi think it’s a general longing for a women yet unmet.
That would be, frankly, really weird ten years in. New character, completely new relationship, adding a 4th person to Team Free Will. Is that the writing on the wall that non-Destiel shippers see?
If it’s actually possible to NO ROMO that confession without contorting the logic into a pretzel, I’m a cat.
And I really don’t see how, given what we’ve seen for the last three seasons, there are any possible candidates for a long-term romance that we haven’t already met, because Dean’s clearly thinking of a particular person, and not someone in the abstract.
And that is a very small pool of candidates. Sam and Charlie are out right off the bat, which reduces the pool even more. Claire and Chrissie are kids, so they’re out. Ann Marie has already NOPED out of the pool. Of the people Dean’s still at all close to, that leaves Donna, Jody… and Cas. And of those three, there’s only one that Dean’s said he ~needed~. Only one he’s ditched Sam and driven for hours to go and see. Only one he’s wished was with him when he felt alone and overwhelmed.
Only. One.
ok I’ve seen a lot of us doing what we tend to do when we’re particularly excited about a piece of spn that lends credence to ‘dean is bi’ readings, which is conceding like, “and yes, its ambiguous, and it could mean something else really easily, but if you look at it this way with other things from earlier in the show, you could use it to read it the way I prefer, and that could turn into something later.” and i feel like this tactic is sort of owning up to the ambiguity/polysemy that our perspective hinges on, and acknowledging that this ambiguity could negate our reading.
but with this one…i don’t know guys, i kind of feel like the ambiguity is exactly what supports the ‘dean is bi’ reading.
to cut right to it, why wasn’t this the dialogue of the scene?
Dean: …Recent events…made me think i might be closer to that than i really thought. And – and I don’t know, i mean, there’s things I wanna experience differently than I have before. You know, uh, I’ve always kinda loved ‘em and left ‘em but…I don’t know, maybe I’d wanna stick around for once, do the whole wife and rugrats thing
Priest: Go a little deeper perhaps, maybe with Gina?
Dean: Yeah…I’m just starting to think, maybe there’s more to it all that I thought, with someone like her
Something like that would be more like something we would go “ok yes he’s talking about a hypothetical woman, but we could interpret it as a symbol for anyone, and that he’s really talking about, just in general, a long term relationship,” and in that way find our reading in the text.
But Dean is not so gender-specific in the speech. He wants to experience things, people, feelings differently, maybe for the first time, and he’s realizing there might be more to it all than he realized. I don’t know, it just reminds me of when I’m talking to my friends who don’t know I’m queer and we’re all talking about the future and I talk about a hypothetical person while they talk about a hypothetical husband. My gender-unspecific language is something they can overlook, but I’m sure some of them go, “Hey wait, that ambiguity is kind of making a statement in juxtaposition to the specifics you’d expect to hear.”
And I feel like it’s a very loud silence on Dean’s part here not to talk about a hypothetical woman here, especially in a Catholic confessional, because I know the church has become a bit more progressive in recent years, but I still feel like one would want to clarify that you’re not maybe yearning for something their teachings might condemn – unless you are. And if you are, i feel like you use language unspecific enough to be safely interpreted in a way that protects you, but that is close to the truth. You know? So you don’t out yourself and say, “I think I might like guys,” but you also omit saying, “I want to have a relationship with a woman.”
So, tl;dr: Dean’s omissions here speak very loudly. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this counts as Dean outing himself explicitly, but it definitely pinged something in my head to go, oh, maybe the writers will go there this season or beyond.
This reminds me of the Fayetteville sheriff talking about his partner when everything indicated he ought to be saying wife.
Those are definitely non-gender-specific when you’d expect specificity.
You know, the Destiel shippers wouldn’t be having such a spaz-attack if they didn’t add that
“Maybe even for the first time” bit in there.
I mean … Dean has been to hell, he’s been a vampire, a demon, a cowboy, a gangster, a military officer … hell, the guy has even been a dog. He has talked about his numerous experiences with women very openly. He makes it very apparent that he is very experienced in all manner of ways when it comes to wooing the ladies. He has built cars and rebuilt cars, he has shot guns, conquered fears of flying and creepy dolls. He has come face to face with the impossible a million times over ….
So, what exactly would still be a “first” for our baby boy Dean?
Yep. What’s worse is that the priest interpreted all this with a romantic meaning, thanks to how Dean confessed about his relationships with women first.
AND WHEN YOU PUT A ROMANTIC SPIN ON IT, EVEN MORE POSSIBILITIES GET ELIMINATED. Dean’s already been in real love with a woman (Cassie) and in a long-term, settled relationship with a woman (Lisa).
So if we viewers also run with the priest’s interpretation and think it’s about going “deeper” romantically AND mix in “FOR THE FIRST TIME,” the only remaining conclusion is Cas.
And there you have it: Dean confessing to wanting more. But not just more: he wants the apple pie life. He doesn’t want the bullshit he was putting on with the women he always comes across… he wants something real. Something he has never experienced before. The closest he’s ever come to that life is Lisa, but his closest shot to what he described is Castiel.
Because Cas loves him irrevocably and unconditionally. Cas would be able to match Dean in a way that they’d live without Dean having to constantly be on guard, letting him live and love without worry. And Cas is male.
That sounds a lot like new and never experienced before to me.
So in the same episode where the spirit of a woman recalled her love of a man who couldn’t love her back completely because he was so bound to his work that he was unwilling to settle down, we also get Dean confessing to wanting to experience certain people and things differently than he ever has, that he wants more than he’s ever allowed himself, that he wants to fall in love.
He can’t quite comprehend living one life and then giving it all up for another, but being bound by this duty, by this life, is what has always held Dean back from truly experiencing a life of his own. It’s why he was more in love with the idea of Lisa than he was with her, because that entire year he was with her, he never completely let go.
And this duty is what holds Dean back from love. Just as the artist was bound to his work, Dean is bound to being a hunter, to living by the blade and dying by it. He says he always believed that’s how he would go out, at the end of a blade or the barrel of a gun, but death is licking at his heels now and there is so very much he still has left to do. So much he has left to feel.
If it is duty, a mission, a life of dedication to one thing and one thing alone that prevents Dean from loving, from feeling love, just as it did the artist, I wonder how Dean would react were a certain someone to confess their love to him after all this time. Would he finally see that he is permitted to break the chains of his life, to return that love, to know what it means to feel something other than hopelessness and fear?
I would try and wrap this up with something articulate and profound, but I’m still trying to fully process that we got a straight up canon confession from Dean that he has people in his life he wants to experience differently. Dean Winchester is bisexual as hell and I’ll give you exactly one guess as to who that person could possibly be bye.
Dean Winchester went on a rant about how many girls he was getting, when he was textually lying and putting on a front. This was a macho straight dude persona, an act, and it was for the case and even the casual viewer understood that this was Dean lying, because it was part of how they planned to solve the case.
And then Dean drops the act, becomes Dean himself, and says truthfully that there are people and feelings he wants to experience differently, or maybe for the first time at all.
Like, if I have to hold your hand and walk you through that subtext, then maybe media interpretation is not for you.
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.
that’s it. that’s the show.
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