Even Rowena knows how much Castiel means to Dean. (11×03)
Rx
Is anyone keeping a list of all the times someone uses coded slang for same-sex relationships/activity in SPN? Because it seems like there have been a lot of posts recently discussing double-meanings of words used, particularly with regards to Dean, Cas and/or their relationship.
And if someone is keeping a definitive list, they should add this reference to Cas having a “bent” halo. Bent is a slang term for homosexuality in the UK, which means that having Rowena make that reference, to Dean, in reference to Cas comes off as particularly deliberate. Especially since she’s goading and taunting Dean about Cas.
11×03 “The Bad Seed” “You’re right, there aren’t words, Cas. Cause there’s no need.”
Hands down probably one of my favourite moments of the episode. Even if utterly painful. That moment in the warehouse was the turnaround of 10×22 “The Prisoner” and I’m pretty certain that Dean remembered that confrontation between him and Cas from just days ago very vividly. There’s a reason to why he didn’t fight back, why he didn’t even lift a finger to defend himself. It’s because he didn’t want to, because he felt every single blow was earnt and well-deserved. But you know what probably does me in most? It’s how he shies away from a gentle touch and not just the possibility to be healed while he almost embraced to be beat up. We all know Dean is someone, who expresses love and care and devotion with his entire body. We know how much he craves touch and how much – and even if he wouldn’t admit it – cherishes hugs and being held. But he denies it himself. That is why this is so painful to me, because Dean is keeping his distance to atone for what he did to Cas. And he does so by keeping people at arm’s length (which Cas may understand the completely wrong way, which makes this even more freaking tragic), because he doesn’t think he is worthy of any expression of love and care. ;____; FML, I never asked to feel about a fictional character the way I do…
what I wanted to say about the episode is that both no homo moments were deliberately shown as something pathetic while on the other side the intimacy between dean and cas was presented not only as something serious but also as the most natural and casual thing in the world and man, considering how the dynamic was treated recently, this is a lot
That’s a positive, optimistic, and perfectly valid reading.
I think there are several audiences which the conglomeration of forces which produce an ep of SPN have in mind.
The “Dean checks out a chick in an alley” and the “Dean still likes fetishised Asian women in his (straight) porn” lest we forget moments in 11×03 are, at the most obvious, surface level of reception, made (in my view) for the following audiences:
1) Members of the crew/ writers’ team who find them funny make them for themselves, fully imagining/ assuming themselves in the place of their imagined audience (this often results in a failure to conceptualize their impact on the female audience, given that the crew/ writers’ team is majority male)
2) Members of the producers’ team include them, periodically, because the CW wants to hold/ increase its 18-35 male audience share, it considers SPN skews male relative to some of its other shows, and the received wisdom is that this is how you speak to that audience
3) Members of the crew/ writers add them in order to satisfy edicts from the Standards and Practices folks at the Network/ A.N.Other suits who have requested a dial back on homo-eroticism in the show (someone, somewhere, clearly did request that, going from S8 to S9)
Dean Winchester has, textually, not had a meaningful sexual relationship with a woman since Lisa Braeden back in S6. He has, textually, been grief-stricken to the extent of hallucination over losing Cas to Purgatory in S8 and b®omanced the King of Hell in S10. Someone – writers, directors, show-runners, actors (who knows?!) feels the need to ice that cake of homo-erotic subtext with a frosty layer of hetero-normative icing every now and again.
Do other creative elements on the show attempt to subvert that broad “icing” script? Yes, I think they do. The subtext in a Berens or Edlund episode, for example, feels qualitatively different to that in a Buckner and Ross-Leming episode, because far more of it is in the actual writing, rather (as in this episode) than in the acting/ directing.
But yes, the moments here are self-subverted to some extent. Alley woman tells Dean to “get a life”, Cas looks at the “Asian Nookie” porn with absolute puzzlement rather than any kind of arousal. But, they are still there…11×03 to me, falls into a well-established SPN holding pattern, hetero on the surface, homo-romantic in the subtext. Personally, I am always disappointed when lashings of homo-erotic subtext come wrapped in a bow of (gratuitous) female objectification, however knowing the text is about that gratuitousness.
The show has been using pornography to signal subtext since pretty early on, and there’s always more to it than what the surface reading reveals. The Asian pornography has been shown in specific scenes, and since the new Carver era, the Casa Erotica has likewise been used to signal subtextual content.
You indicate that Buckner and Ross-Lemming don’t write in subtext, that in their episodes the subtext is more in direction and set design? I felt that was always the case with Adam Glass, not with the terrible duo. They write subtext. They write anvilicious, sometimes pretty offensive queer subtext, but they write it.
And Fortune Nookie is a great example of this. They wrote in Castiel finding a pornographic film and uttering the words, “What’s a Fortune Nookie?“ It’s a film title of both a straight porn film and a gay porn film, both pretty high profile. I’d say the gay porn film is the better know of the two. The set design then further aided the ambiguity, because the fact that the title is in Dean’s “last search results“ is dealer’s choice on how you interpret its being there.
Yes, I saw the collective detective work post earlier, which used 11×03 episode stills to arrive at the conclusion that the “Fortune Nookie” website came up on-screen as a result of Dean’s last search results, meaning that he might therefore have been watching the gay porn version.
That kind of screen-stills detective-work is one that I enjoy as much as the next unusually text-obsessed fan. It involves an appreciation for image-based subtext, which must, in this case, be supplemented by sleuthing, definitely not accessible to the GA (general audience).
What I dislike here, is that the subtext is packaged in a surface, easily accessible, wrapping which objectifies the female body and fetishizes the female Asian body, for shits and giggles.
I see that as qualitatively different from the subtext in (in my view much better written) episodes like Edlund’s 7 x15 Repo Man or 8×13 Everybody Hates Hitler where the dialogue and the visuals work together (”the love of my life, actually”, “he was my gay thing”).
As @deanirae says, there is a certain hollowing-out of these “no homo” moments within 11×03, BUT they remain, at the most accessible surface level of the text, hetero-enforcing, moreover in a way which reduces women to the status of sexual cyphers, passing sexual objects.
That leaves a nasty taste in my mouth when it comes to subtext appreciation here – because of the packaging it comes wrapped in.
Okay, I know a lot of people have a lot of trouble with this bit, so I was trying to see if I could make out the expressions frame by frame, and I noticed that ROAD CLOSED sign.
I didn’t think anything about it until about the sixth time through when I realized that the second Dean steps directly in front of the sign,the girl steps out from behind the building. And I mean literally the exact moment. supernaturalfansonline didn’t have the whole sequence, but @almaasi, bless her, caught it in this post:
the writers aren’t the only ones who shape a scene. The director can define what the motivation should be behind a character’s actions and last night’s director was Jensen, he knows Dean well. I feel like … last night’s scene was directed as if Dean was trying to get her attention to ask if she’d seen Cas but when she reacted aggressively he chose not waste time going after her. I do think the scene was written as Dean hitting on a woman in the middle of searching for Cas but I think Jensen tried to present it differently.
Another odd thing I noticed about the scene is that the visuals don’t quite match the audio–I can’t see the girl’s lips moving when we hear her, “Get a life!” line, and I suspect those lines were looped later and added in post.
I have absolutely NO confidence that Bucklemming meant anything by this scene but a dudebro moment for Dean, but I completely agree that the production team was trying to ameliorate that.
And in an episode that featured SO MUCH Destiel goodness–that Jensen put in there–I’m leaning toward the notion that the ROAD CLOSED sign and the girl’s perfectly timed entrance may be an example of surface readings being misleading this season.
Because signage very frequently means something in this show, and what I get from that one and the subsequent dialog is that Dean’s go-to coping mechanism of casual sex with women (which he actually hasn’t engaged in for quite some time now as a human, just sayin’) has a Cas-shaped ROAD CLOSED sign in front of it.
I don’t know how they wrote the scene (I mean, there’s barely any dialogue to go on by), but how the set design team interpreted could not be clearer. I mean, it’s not just the ROAD CLOSED sign, there’s also the FORBIDDEN DIRECTION sign.
I literally don’t know how to function anymore do I cry tears of joy over Dean and Cas finally having screen time together and tender moments like they used to or do I cry tears of gut wrenching heart stomping agony over Dean refusing to be healed because he thinks he deserves it for hurting Cas
Why is everyone calling Dean’s “Hey,” to that random lady in the street a “no homo?” Because Dean’s looking for Cas. He wasn’t like, “Hey baby, lookin good tonight!” Because if she hadn’t shut him down, if Dean wasn’t obviously NOT AN ASSHOLE TO WOMEN, and NOT THE KIND OF GUY THAT WOULD HOUND HER WHEN SHE’S OBVIOUSLY PUT OFF ABOUT BEING BOTHERED BY A RANDOM DUDE IN A “BAD PART OF TOWN” LATE AT NIGHT AND ALONE.
*deep breaths mittens use your words*
If Dean wasn’t a decent human being, you can bet the next words out of his mouth would’ve been “Hey, I’m looking for a friend of mine. Have you seen him? Might be acting a little weird? Blue eyes, brown hair, trench coat?”
#spn 11.03#spn s11 spoilers#yes i know it’s bucklemming and this is what they’re famous for#but dammit that scene actually put dean in a good light and i refuse to force it into an ugly place just because bucklemming#man and woman meet in dark alley at night#man legit needs help and approaches woman to ask for it#she shuts him down aggressively before even finding out what he wants BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT WOMEN ARE TRAINED TO DO IN THAT SITUATION#DEAN RESPECTED HER PERSONAL SPACE#he didn’t try to follow her#or call out to her or beg for her help#because no matter how true it was that he needed help SHE WOULD SEE THAT AS A PLOY#because that’s how I WOULD see that#wank probably#WHEN THE FUCK HAS DEAN WINCHESTER EVER STOPPED IN THE MIDDLE OF AN URGENT HUNT ESPECIALLY FOR CAS#TO HIT ON RANDOM WOMEN FOR NO APPARENT PURPOSE? HINT: NEVER
You know, I think I figured it out. Everyone I’ve seen calling Dean out as skeevy for that? IS A WOMAN. We saw what we expected to see as women, because we’re trained to see men in that situation as a threat. So yeah. Y’all are forgiven for this one, just try to see it from the other side. From Dean’s side, looking for Cas, and trying to ask for help and still refusing to frighten an innocent bystander by pressing her for info in a situation he can understand she feels uncomfortable in.
THERE we go. Yes.
And there’s something about the sound track that doesn’t match up with the visuals, too, but I can’t quite pin it down.
But yeah, Dean taking time to flirt when we’ve seen him so worried about Cas doesn’t make sense.
So what was the point of this scene? Why have it in there at all? Seemed rather unnecessary, that’s all.
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