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@freedomisarope
So you're telling me endverse Cas had an entire cabin and a king size bed to himself. In an apocalypse camp where provisions are sparse if not non existent? I don't know guys either he fucked the fearless leader and got special treatment or he fucked the fearless leader and got special treatment.
anyway speaking of cas being a vampire boyfriend, there’s an important and meaningful difference with cas that i’d like to suss out that matters. both cas and the typical vampire boyfriend are at their core creatures of violence. but the typical vampire boyfriend is a predator, violence is something they crave, perhaps even lust after, it’s something with a deep emotional importance to them. cas however is a soldier, violence is something he does because that’s the logical solution to the problem in front of him, it is something he does without thought or emotion, completely second nature.
again this is why cas is the most fucked up and also ultimate vampire boyfriend.
#hm. hmm#which is also why he doesn’t have the same morality angst surrounding it#cas doesn’t *have* the ‘im impure and dangerous i am the monster’ complex (honestly sam is the one who has that)#if anything he begins as the opposite of that - i am righteous. i am holy#because he’s not the vampire - he’s an angel of the lord#the violence is not a metaphor for lust - the blood spilt meant to represent sex#he simply does as the soldier - as the angel does#his smiting is clean - holy#and again if anything DEAN is the one with the complex surrounding violence and repressed lust as we gotten into a little with the#intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men
YES YES YES although he does develop the i’m impure i’m dangerous i am the monster complex EVENTUALLY but not INITIALLY. cas’ sense of his own impurity comes from the fact that he’s slowly over the course of his first few seasons developing an approximation of dean’s sense of morality - a morality by which cas IS a monster. this is the thing about dean teaching cas repression.
Here’s the promised rant! It goes on for thirty years! The season 6 as i can’t unsee it because i rewatched it at a weird point in life!
Step one: if you have shipping goggles on, take them off. If you have a big sentiment towards Cas’s perspective in 6.20, for now, leave it at the door. It belongs in the trashcan, I hope you know that.
Welcome to season 6 and the gender-coded horror aka all the things that were done to Dean because he just wouldn’t stay in the kitchen.
Season 6 in its entirety stronger than any other season placed Dean into the role of a woman. It’s a thing since day one in spn, but s6 was all about it. Dean’s horror in that season strongly resembles stories about women being abused and belittled because they are believed to be less than men; simply because they aren’t men [and know jack shit]. Their feelings don’t matter, neither does their consent, not really, which the season’s vaguely threatening “can’t or won’t?” encompasses very well [women don’t get to say “no” or “can’t” and keep it. It will get dissected and disrespected. Which is also Dean’s story].
Re-watching season 6 I felt like I was watching Rosemary’s Baby but simply without the baby??? Everyone there is either lying to Dean or gaslighting him or both, all the while he’s being repeatedly told everything that has been done to him, everything that hurt him, everything that took his choice away, was done to him for his own good or for the greater good vaguely including his own (or not) . And maybe he should shut the fuck up and drink a cocktail [or, according to Cas, some more whiskey].
This pattern stars in the very beginning of the season where Dean is being told that an important truth regarding Sam was hidden from him on purpose because Bobby Sam and Cas knew better what’s best for Dean and they treated Dean’s arguments as emotional and unreasonable. Dean fucking spent an entire year suffering from grief after losing his brother whom due to abuse and brainwashing Dean couldn’t help but see as his own child (which is something that season 12 canonically confirmed). Like with Ro’s baby being declared dead at first but hey I digress, scratch that.
Unfortunately, this is just the beginning of his choice being taken away from him, since right away he gets guilt-tripped back into the hunting life and all the things that were supposed to be so good for him he got endlessly ridiculed for. Soulless Sam even drags Dean’s entire life when Dean chooses to stay with Lisa. Dean doesn’t know Sam doesn’t have a soul. He’s just supposed to take the abuse from the guy who pushed him into the domestic life in the first place and consider it normal.
Dean is also being called soft and too feminine, too weak to be treated as an equal decision making party in the hunting arrangement. He’s ranked below Gwen, only woman in the group, the lowest ranking member before Dean came.
Also very interesting that throughout the season Dean is heavily connected with taking care of children, bonding with them, and feeling for them deeply [Ben, 6.02, 6.03, 6.19], which again is something he gets criticized for every single time.
The criticism however doesn’t end there and an extremely important example is where Dean begins voicing his concern regarding Sam and his behavior. Even though Dean knows Sam best, Bobby insists that Dean is being paranoid. Even after Sam literally served Dean to the vampire, he gets ordered to stop being so weak and get dressed into a more reason-based professional approach to the problem and he’s supposed to put his trauma aside, basically he’s being told to man up. Because he’s being emotional. And probably wrong and hysterical.
Of course it’s no surprise that the game-changing moment for Dean too puts him in a woman’s position within the narrative. While sexual assault isn’t a problem only women experience, statistically and, especially in the media, this is the sort of violence that women are in a larger threat of facing than men. What’s more to it, what happens on screen in the episode only shows the girls being lured into a trap and forcefully changed. And all of this has extremely sexual connotations. Being unwillingly turned into a vampire and the forced feeding with a vampire’s blood is a blatant metaphor of rape. In Dean’s case the sexual undertone of the assault was heavily accentuated even in dialogue.
But not just there. In the episode Dean takes the vampire book and refers to its cover [the vampire watching the girl sleep] as “rapey”. He’s uncomfortable with the whole thing. The act of staring at an unaware sleeping woman is presented as a monster vs woman thing to do, as an assault. When Dean gets turned, he watches Lisa sleep before she startles awake [6.05]. Lucky, the dog-skinwalker, watches his “love”/unaware owner sleep, then crawls into her bed [6.08]. Castiel, despite of knowing the sigils were literally meant to be a restraining order, enters Dean’s room, watches him sleep. Tries to convert him [620]. The same episode also brings up all the times Dean, completely unaware, was being watched by him. Just like the girl from the book cover was, just like Maddie was.
No surprise Cas takes the creepy cake because he resonates with the disturbing theme perhaps the most, showing through how in season 6 Dean’s relationship with Cas played out. Or, to be more specific, how Castiel’s relationship with Dean played out (and there is a difference).
The thing of the biggest import here, before I begin, is that power imbalance, the difference of species. The angelic mindset in the Angels versus Humans dynamics, which is rooted in the same arguments men use to establish their dominance over women and to later excuse it: according to Angels (and technically supernatural beings in general), humans are weaker, too emotional, definitely dumber, less experienced, less competent.
And what they deserve, at best, is patronizing treatment showing them where is their place, because they’re too fragile and too stupid to make decisions for themselves. Not worthy taking a meaningful position in a war, but at the same time they’re extremely valuable due to their souls, which to an extent kind of reminds me of how women are often seen as valuable only because they are capable of childbirth, which is an ability unique to them in the same way having a soul is something that angels just lack, so they use humans for that.
Castiel might say he values humans as his equals, but even if he believes that, his actions don’t reflect it [5.18 for example, pick ANY episode from s6]. The thinking is so ingrained into him like patriarchal perspective is in men’s heads by default. Castiel’s and Dean’s relationship in season 6 is solely gender coded in this regard. Castiel simply isn’t capable of seeing Dean as his equal because he’s, according to Cas, weaker, less experienced, too biased by his flawed - or castiel’s actual words - “crippling” - human perspective, therefore he should be put away from the fighting for his own good. No matter the cost, no matter Dean’s judgment on the matter, no matter his choice. Safety is priority, right? Early in s6 Dean, desperate, tries to protect Lisa and Ben like that too, but he understands, he backs off. They reach balance.
But when the narrative puts Dean in Lisa’s place? The only thing he’s allowed to do is to perform some basic tasks that are completely unrelated to what’s happening on the Big Front and only when Cas sees it fit, and only how he sees it fit. Dean, as long as it is for Castiel to decide, doesn’t even have to know what he’s doing. In fact, in the original plan it was supposed to go along the lines of: Manly Men (angels) Fight Wars To Protect Women (Dean) because they’re capable and strong and cunning and rational, while Women (Dean) Stay At Home And Rake The God Damn Leaves. What they do is keep the fire going for the Victorious Soldier when He returns from War and if they don’t get that, they’re just dumb because their human little brains are too small to comprehend the stakes. So they don’t get a vote. They’re supposed to trust blindly. Men (angels) know better. And all of it of course is because Men (Castiel) love Them (Dean) so much and They’re willing to do everything and anything to protect those poor, brittle things (favorite pets?).
The list of anything and everything includes: lying about everything all the time directly into Dean’s face despite of the crushing emotional pain Dean was in. And I don’t even mean burning Crowley’s bones-lying, but every single time Dean has voiced his worry that something is wrong with Sam. What Castiel does is to placate Dean, reassure him that he doesn’t know what happens but he’s so sorry and he’ll try to find out! Aids and encourages Dean’s alcoholism just to make him docile, while lying to him actively, by the way [6.06]. And when that stops being an option and Dean is determined to return the soul to Sam, Castiel suddenly stops being so understanding and sweet. Like a flip of a switch. He guilt trips and indirectly threatens Dean before he follows through [6.10] and after placing Sam’s soul back in its place [6.12]. And of course it has nothing to do with actual worry over Sam’s wellbeing.
Cas pulled Sam out of the cage and didn’t bother to check on him for over a year, even though soulless!sam prayed to him repeatedly. Not to mention that he later broke Sam’s wall without blinking, so he did the exact thing he “warned” Dean about and by “warned” I mean that he made sure Dean would know the blame, if anything happens to Sam, is going to be his. The point of the whole show of concern was to keep Dean busy and technically powerless because together, alive and kicking, the Winchesters, while extremely dysfunctional and codependent, make a much bigger threat for the supernatural because it’s so much harder to keep the game going when suddenly both of the brothers are asking questions and Dean is no longer being pulled down, preoccupied and controlled by T-1000. Dean is much more compliant when he has no support and when he has no moves to make, which Castiel knows.
So yes, maybe Castiel didn’t pull out Sam soulless on purpose but it is no accident that he was so determined to keep him that way regardless of how much it cost Dean, whom, of course, he loves so fucking much.
And when you are an angel loving a man/mother figure so much you are also going to hurt the child just to force him to accept his position and stand down. And later tell him that he had it coming because he didn’t listen and didn’t do what he’s told (if the babysitter is slapped, she’s clearly done something wrong). All of it in the name of freedom, of course.
While attempting to emotionally manipulate Dean into supporting his cause and agreeing that what Castiel is doing is right, Cas invokes values like caring, protecting, being a family - which are in our society values mostly associated with women. Even the Superman metaphor presents Dean as Lois Lane (which Dean knows, so he throws that hot ball away as fast as he can). Throughout the entire 6.20 Dean is shown as and approached to as the delicate hurt wife that can’t believe she’s being cheated on, so everyone’s just being soft and protectional on her, poor thing, which starts in 6.19.
And fuck lemme tell you a thing about 6.19, buckle the fuck up. The episode very telling in the context of this gender-based abuse reading. It’s because both Bobby and Sam immediately understood that something is wrong about Cas while Dean couldn’t. And, the way see it, it’s not the problem of Dean trusting Cas more and blindly because he’s in love with him and stuff, no. At least not mostly. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that technically in the presence of both (especially soulless) Sam and Bobby Cas didn’t put that much effort into playing soft concern and caring thing as he did during the brief encounters he had with Dean alone. Sure Cas determined when he made it clear to Dean that driving the boys to their uncle is not something they have the time for, but there is a difference between the way he spoke about it in Dean’s presence, to Dean directly, and the comments he made when only Bobby was there to hear them. Here, compare for yourself:
CAS: Dean, can I have a word? We need to find Eve now.
DEAN: Yeah. Go. Me and Sam just gotta make a milk run.
CAS: We need your help here.
DEAN: Hold your water. We’ll be back in a few.
CAS: Dean, Dean. Millions of lives are at stake here, not just two. Stay focused.
DEAN: Are you kidding?
CAS: there’s a greater purpose here.
DEAN: you know what, I-I’m getting a little sick and tired of the greater purposes, okay? I think what I’d like to do now is save a couple of kids. If you don’t mind. We’ll catch up.
Now, same problem, but with no Dean to hear it. I heavily advise you to dig 6.19 out and watch if not both scenes at least this one because the way Misha delivers his lines here is vital. I know just the words to describe that for you, but hear that for yourselves:
BOBBY: They won’t take long.
CAS: They might find more orphans along the way.
BOBBY: Oh, don’t get cute.
CAS: Right. Pardon me for highlighting their crippling and dangerous empathetic response with “sarcasm”. It was a bad idea, letting them go.
Now, a bit on both [I still insist you should go watch that scene i’m begging you]:
First scene? Castiel approaches Dean gently, asks for a permission to talk in private, gives him space. He speaks to him super softly. I threw up softly. Dean doesn’t notice the demand in the demand at all, so he just goes ok, you do you, I do me i don’t get it??? So Cas goes into the emotional territory [always works, don’t it], still soft.
Now dean gets it, but doesn’t budge. So bigger ammo goes off. And don’t even get me started on “Dean, Dean,” and how throughout the show only the villains do the variations of repeating Dean’s name to address him. The delivery slightly differed here but
It was followed by an order that was all the way patronizing. Only Castiel’s eyes reflect the irritation, his voice doesn’t - even though as scene with bobby makes clear - he’s pissed as shit. On dean specifically. He does say “they” but note that sam hasn’t spoken once on the whole issue? It’s dean who he was talking to.
He thinks Dean is crippled for being empathetic and bound to children and he isn’t rational enough to understand the stakes. Let it sink in. now think about it in the context of being a gender [species] issue. Let it sink deeper.
Something in Dean’s words, that thrown in “if you don’t mind” - that’s totally subjective but it kind of makes me think of this women-specific way of speaking from many decades before. Like 40s-50s wife thing? That implied asking for permission woven into their lexicons? Dean is, of course, bitter here, but still, you ever hear a man use that construction? I haven’t. Feel free to discard this point it’s just me trying to work with leftovers of my linguistic training and it’s subjective and i’m in no way saying that line went like that on purpose, ok? It just Bothers me on some crawling under my skin level.
“Letting” someone do something is Bad Idea - says dude who slaughters in the name of Choice and Freedom. Oops.
And a bonus: Eve lured Dean into her trap, relying on his maternal side. Then, she tried to reach him using Mary. The whole thing being a mother to a mother talk because as a “mother” you should get my feelings.
Another bonus because you probably didn’t dig 6.19 out. That wasn’t an impersonal, rationalish vaguely grumpy sarcasm. That was soft, belittling, ridiculing contempt, the exact one you will meet again in 7.01! I wonder why!!
say bye bye to 6.19, we’re going elsewhere now. Still within the realm of season 6 fucking with Dean’s agency, gendering his problems, and somewhat within the realm of Castiel’s soon to be kingdom.
All that talk about making sacrifices for Dean’s good [because of dean/for dean, mind you] and preserving free will? Oh man, that was to not even convince God [who was blogging about cats at the time], but to make himself feel good and justified in what he’s doing.
And if he really meant what he said by “i’m doing this for you, i’m doing this because of you”, that’s because Dean is his prized possession. Spoils of war from apocalypse no. 1 [5.18 anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Entitlement?]. His trophy wife.
And no one can lay a hand on Dean and hurt him [michael, raphael, balthazar, atropos, crowley, demons] or even insult him [rachel]. Except of him, of course [ignoring him for a year, not even to say sam isn’t dead, grabbing and slicing Dean’s arm without asking and warning, guilt tripping him as hard as it gets re: Sam, agreeing to put him in harm’s way during crowley-related errands, keeping the lisa blackmail going due to convenience, re-making Dean’s reality and life without his consent BUT when that didn’t pan out, making him keep the knowledge just because he wanted to? Um, yikes? And of course hurting sam to get specifically to dean?]
Because
CAS: I’ve earned that, Dean. [6.21]
*mic drop*
anyway speaking of cas being a vampire boyfriend, there’s an important and meaningful difference with cas that i’d like to suss out that matters. both cas and the typical vampire boyfriend are at their core creatures of violence. but the typical vampire boyfriend is a predator, violence is something they crave, perhaps even lust after, it’s something with a deep emotional importance to them. cas however is a soldier, violence is something he does because that’s the logical solution to the problem in front of him, it is something he does without thought or emotion, completely second nature.
again this is why cas is the most fucked up and also ultimate vampire boyfriend.
#hm. hmm#which is also why he doesn’t have the same morality angst surrounding it#cas doesn’t *have* the ‘im impure and dangerous i am the monster’ complex (honestly sam is the one who has that)#if anything he begins as the opposite of that - i am righteous. i am holy#because he’s not the vampire - he’s an angel of the lord#the violence is not a metaphor for lust - the blood spilt meant to represent sex#he simply does as the soldier - as the angel does#his smiting is clean - holy#and again if anything DEAN is the one with the complex surrounding violence and repressed lust as we gotten into a little with the#intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men
YES YES YES although he does develop the i’m impure i’m dangerous i am the monster complex EVENTUALLY but not INITIALLY. cas’ sense of his own impurity comes from the fact that he’s slowly over the course of his first few seasons developing an approximation of dean’s sense of morality - a morality by which cas IS a monster. this is the thing about dean teaching cas repression.
also re: cas being a creature of unrestrained desire like...... this is why he reacts SO badly to being told that there is something that he wants and can't have. like he does war crimes about it. and eventually he gets some character development and learns that sometimes we don't get what we want but it does take like. HUGE amounts of violence and destruction hdhdgdhdhdhdgdg
this is also why getting together with dean is the only logical conclusion of cas' character arc. he wants something, but then he is forced to make his peace with not having it even though he wants it. then he gets it anyway once he's moved beyond throwing cosmic tantrums about not having it gdhhdhjdhgshsb
like this is why when Dean says to Cas ‘you’re a child’ it doesn’t strike me as an intentional insult or barb the way ‘baby in a trenchcoat’ is. more......almost Dean coming to terms with the reality of what’s happened what introducing the concept of ‘free will’ without any active teaching of what such a nebulous concept really means can result in (and granted they were facing an apocalypse and there could have been some off screen coda work I know I’ve read and loved that fic - but ultimately there was less active seeking of ‘teachable moments’ when Cas was first falling it’s like yeah free will is great and all but then what do you do with it and in season 6 Cas ultimately chooses what to do with his own and he’s brand new at this - at making choices by himself for himself and experiencing their outcomes I’m not trying to get too crazy into this but it’s sort of the victor frankenstien complex of being so tunnel vision focused in what you’re creating/what the ultimate goal is (free will) that when it ends up becoming something that scares you (which comes back to control - it has life of it’s own now) you have to reconcile with your own input in this creation (and we could get into the mother coding and teaching and ‘you’re a child’ and victor’s creation but I’m already losing this thread and don’t want to come off as completely crazy)
i have nothing to add these tags just fuck extremely hard
ben edlund said castiel is a being of limitless hungers!
bonus: a cas so broken that he is no longer hungry
but like the fucked up thing about cas being such a vampire boyfriend is that he doesn’t have like…. the excuse. the allegory. like the point of a vampire boyfriend is they wanna fuck you so so so bad but it’s put into allegory. they wanna eat you which is somehow less threatening. cas doesn’t have that. he truly just wants to fuck dean.
he wants to feel things, one of them is fucking dean for sure, but imagine how addictive emotions are if you’ve never experienced them before, and there’s this man in your life that truly runs the gamut on getting emotions out of you, you’re fond of him and he smiles at you and your heart has never felt like that before do it again, but also he tried to sacrifice himself like a dumbass so you feel true terror and rage for the first time ever, and you accidentally go oberblard on beating his ass over it, anyway it mellows somewhat early deancas is like fallen cas with the burgers, never felt it before and it feels really really good,
yeah like cas’ whole deal especially in early seasons is unrestrained desire. most of it directed at dean but it’s directed everywhere. it’s a fascinating thing to introduce into a show about repression. cas just wants things. openly and with abandon. even if he doesn’t always know what it is that he wants.
the burger thing is like really illustrative, actually. sam wants something (demon blood) and suppresses the desire with all his will because he knows it’s wrong. dean has destroyed and repressed even his capacity to want so thoroughly that he wants nothing. cas just wants, and so he takes.
this is also why he is the most incorrigibly horny character on television.
that post where it’s like Cas doesn’t understand what he’s feeling or that he’s not supposed to want it so he just stands close to Dean because he wants to when he first falls he hasn’t been taught the mortifying ordeal or shame or restraint (not yet) the message hasn’t yet progressed past the nebulous concept of ‘free will’ so he simply *wants* …..which leads perfectly into the season 6 arc
yeah like season six is about cas learning the hard way that he can’t always have what he wants and reacting terribly, and being punished for that. and then he learns his lesson in a way that actually culminates in the 15x18 confession perfectly: he’s learned to make peace with wanting what he can’t have, and just be, even though he wants. HOWEVER, the next logical step in that character arc is to get what he wants anyway. but mssrs dabb and singer were like “no <3″
#this is why my bloody valentine makes me so crazy#imagine how addictive emotions are when you’ve never truly felt them!#imagine how HUNGRY you would be if you hadn’t been taught that hunger is shameful!#dean with his emptiness and one-night stands and ‘when we want something really really bad we lie’!#and sam with his cholesterol and his salads and his demon blood#but cas is just so hungry and he doesn’t know what to do with it#spn#castiel#hunger
aren't we overreaching with the sores
like first of all did she write it into the script or was it like "oh too much power it's fucking up the vessel" and the make-up department just did whatever
besides Lucifer has his vessel detoriate too because he was too powerful
like no the sores thing is like. i am pretty sure it was unintentional but i sit up awake at night wondering if it wasn't, you know? also like. fundamentally still kinda fucked even if it was. like, the way its aggressively emphasized, like he heals that blind panhandler and then the panhandler reacts with disgust. that's the thing about it, for me. the way it's emphasized. the way we're meant to find him disgusting.
and like it’s an unconscious association, too. like, this reply that @lesbianyuugi left on this post:
it’s very much a cultural trope that exists. it’s like i said about lucifer being queercoded, actually: it’s in the cultural water supply, it doesn’t need to be conscious.
like, hell, it’s homophobic on lucifer too! just not NEARLY as much because lucifer is like. a little queercoded because he’s a bad guy who is a white man, so he needs to be deviant in some other way than gender or race. godstiel is a LOT queercoded because he turned evil because he was in love with dean and then once he was evil, well. all that.
like..... it may in fact have been intentional especially since we know that it was almost certainly decided by sera herself, since it’s mentioned in the dialogue (”your face...”) and like. let me put it this way. sera gamble is one of the few people in the spn writer’s room who i think was always conscious of and intentional about queercoding, and the only one who was both conscious and persistently actively homophobic. like i would not put it past her to have done that intentionally.
the thing is that spn lucifer is in fact a queercoded villain. like not HEAVILY queercoded but, you know, queercoded in the way that villains who are not nonwhite and not women often are on careless, hegemonic shows like supernatural. this kind of queercoding can be done very heavily (see: crowley, who is not textually queer i don’t think, but any straight person could look at and immediately clock him) but it can also be done more lightly. and it’s not usually the result of the creators saying “i’m going to imply that this character is queer.” it’s a result of them saying “what would a villain do?” or “what would skeeve people out?”
like, do i think jeremy carver was thinking about trans women when he wrote the bit in free to be you and me where jess is in bed with sam and turns into lucifer? no, i think he was thinking “boy it would really freak me out if a woman i was sleeping with turned out to be secretly a man.” do i think every subsequent writer who copied that trick with lucifer was thinking about trans women? no. do i think mark pellegrino was thinking “gay people are creepy!” when he decided to play lucifer the way he does? no, i think he was just thinking “what would be unnerving and villainous?” and settled on unmasculine and flirtatious.
like lucifer isn’t a queercoded villain in a “the writers intended him to be read as gay” sense. he’s just queercoded because of like. ambient homophobia in the water supply. but he IS queercoded
like you guys are so convinced spn was gay on accident and like it WAS at the start but like. from at LEAST season eight onward spn became an exercise in seeing what they could get past the network. like, jeremy carver was, along with ben edlund, one of the og destiel warriors. like he wrote both 5x03 and 5x18. he knew what he was doing. all that shit in season eight onward was intentional. like, benny lafitte exists kjdfbgkebgkebg. they may not have intended to go anywhere with it (though my secret conspiracy theory is that mr carver was planning, if spn was cancelled after season eight, which iirc looked like a possibility at the beginning given the Sera Situation, to at least try and go canon) but like. season eight and beyond, the intentional subtext is firstly that dean is queer, and secondly that dean and cas are in love
spn writers room hivemind voice, planning season eight: okay so, the gay subtext that we put in partly by accident and partly because there are moles among our ranks has kind of taken over the show both in terms of being the in-text driving force and in terms of being the thing the fans are here for so, you know, we should probably just lean into it and do it intentionally. however, it also transpires that we have uh? it seems like we’ve written our male power fantasy as the, uh, as the wife? and that uh, we can’t stand for that. we had better make it very clear that the other guy is the wife, and continue hammering this point home for uh, you know, the next eight seasons.
like this post is a joke but it’s also kinda what happened, like, not as intentionally as this. but like.
basically from a combination of cas just being written normally as a male character, and supernatural being a bodice ripper (for men!), and cas needing to be a slightly menacing presence, and the being-gay-makes-cas-evil homophobia being specifically predicated on the type of homophobia that’s like, “gay men are scary because they treat other men the way men treat women, which is threatening because men treat women horribly,” and like, probably other stuff as well, cas ends up being written as a classic male love interest. a typical vampire boyfriend.
but then, starting in season eight, the supernatural writers start writing cohesively with destiel in mind, they start writing cas as dean’s love interest, and so they start considering the situation from dean’s perspective. the question they’re asking themselves is what would make cas a good love interest for dean. and that ends up placing cas in a lot of classic female love interest tropes, because dean, as the main character of this love story, is the character by which the writers set their bar, and since dean is a man, he fills the male role, so cas must fill the female.
and that’s one of many reasons why the gendering on supernatural is SO fucking batshit and also destiel is wife4wife
#malewife4malewife#i’d argue it started in s7 where they started shrinking misha and had cas hospitalized for hysteria though#spn
supernatural is about being saved from your inherently toxic Man Nature by the gaze of someone who loves you. i'm torn about this because on the one hand these ideas about gender are so poisonous but on the other. spn really said the only thing that will save dean is cas being in love with him.
every day. every day i am haunted by the mere concept of the braedens.
like in a doylist sense the reason ben is weird is that he isn’t a character, he’s a joke about dean. like he’s a metatextual joke about the mere concept of dean. and he was never intended to come back. in a doylist sense lisa is weird because… like this is complicated lisa IS weird because of sexism but the sexism she’s weird because of is a very special spn brand that is responsible for lisa braeden and daphne allen but also for the line “not many women here since the wars began” in apocalypse world, like, this idea that women are somehow……. static resources. how do i explain this. also it actually relates back to spn’s whole flat madonnas/complex whores thing: madonnas are nonsapient static resources. whores are basically men you’re allowed to fuck.
but from a watsonian perspective they are insane, like. how does lisa braeden make her money. why did she let this incredibly traumatized stranger into her house. why is her son spending his time pretending to be a caricature of a man from an action movie. what the actual fuck.
#genuinely i love the braedens#we talk a lot abt holes vs negative images vs carboard cutouts in spn#and the braedens are cardboard cut outs#like you said theyre caricatures of Wife and Son#and that makes them fascinating to me because you can’t discount their existence because theyre caricatures of DEANS Wife and Son#and the narrative revolves around Dean supernatural is#supernatural is the Dean Show he is the god of supernatural#so it’s weird that The Archetypal Wife and Son are only that and only cardboard cutouts#they don’t stand on their own- only when propped against Dean do they even exist#but even then they don’t make sense. they’re not real#lisa#ben
#ah yes not many women since the wars began my FAVORITE line on soup of natural#‘whores are just men you can fuck’ took me OUT though like. yeah. yeah. fundamentally bela and mary are so compelling because they’re#written the way spn writes men. the only characters I can think of that don’t fit the flatly-written-or-whore dichotomy are Rowena and#Charlie#because they don’t fit into the mother/whore dichotomy (Rowena is both Charlie is neither)#spnposting#obviously Mary is technically both too but she reads to me like they put her in the ‘whore’ bucket when writing her#and when she’s boring to me (like 14x17) they were like ‘wait no shit remember she’s a mother too’
YEAH YEAH YEAH. i do disagree about rowena, i think she’s firmly a whore; that’s why she’s a bad mother. it’s not really about whether you have kids or not on spn, it’s about your archetype, and rowena is the whore. actually, i was talking about this with @saunzguerdon earlier, and we were talking about how all the madonnas on spn are synecdoche for homes. that’s why they’re static resources. original mary, lisa, fucking daphne. they’re all synecdoche for homes. the whores are rootless, which is why they’re basically men.
i also feel like there’s maybe a third category for women who are just like. aliens. this is most of the female angels definitely but also like. tessa the reaper? billie maybe? anyway there seems to be this third space. i realized this when i realized that most of the whore women were, for lack of a better term, deanish. like ruby and meg and later mary and bela talbot and and and are all like. performing this same… persona, that dean is. @saunzguerdon pointed this out to me. it’s this like intensely male-gazey concept of cool which is both hypermasculine and gender neutral. the main real exceptions are all, for want of a better word, casish. except rowena and a few like her, who are crowleyish, but that’s still firmly whore in a way the casish ones are Not.
a collection of my favorite tags:
#Lisa IS the beer bottle girlfriend. she is!!!!!!!!!!#also once the suburban family gap year hits ben ceases to be a mini dean bastard joke charicature and just turns into like#generic stepson on white bread. fully#the whole thing is suuuuuuch a joke I could scream#they’re a charicature of ‘’normalcy’’ I guess which is a whooooooooooole thing#we could talk race class etc#I’m literally forced to discount it and excise it from the canon in my brain or the show is unwatchable#and if I think about Daphne for more than 3 seconds the floodgates will open and I’ll have an aneurism and die so let’s not#spn#spn meta#oatmeal wife (via @zudilio)
lisa is LITERALLY the beer bottle girlfriend!!!
#lisa and ben are hilarious bc they are supposed to represent the concept of Normalcy but lisa is functionally insane#lisa is supposed to be the Archetypal Normal Woman she’s a mother she’s a stand-by wife#but NONE of her actions make sense in the context of how Real Women actually act#even if ben IS dean’s son the decision to let him back into her life after speaking to him twice in 10 years is bonkers#and ben is just funny because he’s. well you said it. he’s a joke#and the joke is MEANT to be ‘haha what if dean had a bastard son that acted exactly like him’#but the joke ends up being look at this 8 year old boy performing masculinity better and more effortlessly than our Adult Male Action Hero (via @donnasweett)
ben is a better dehumanized masculinity action figure than dean! what the fuck!
#the braedens and that whole plotline are weird#because suddenly it’s theatre#like you aren’t supposed to get too close to the stage#you’ll see how the set is 2d and they’re all wearing too much blush#and it’s extra weird bc spn doesn’t always ask you to consume it like theatre#it’s just that it gets folded flat for a bit to make a point#which is of course not what they intended#but it’s fascinating that the sexism and the metatextual joke that is ben#end up working so well when looking back on it (via @jenderossackles)
yes yes yes it’s about dean becoming a paper doll. it’s about giving up your humanity and playing mr and mrs sitcom complete with laughtrack.
#sometimes i feel like lisa and ben were some dollhouse apple pie white picket fence set piece made by the angels for dean#something to behave himself for? to fight to protect?#and he keeps coming back because they’re what he wants but he keeps leaving because they’re not enough#anyway this meta. yes. GOSH YES.#i’m glad to see people were similarly offput by their whole subplot#and not just because lisa is a canon het LI#she’s a love interest but in such a contrived way that it feels like a statement all in its own right and in ways the writers never intended#lisa braeden#ben braeden#spn#long post
my jaw is DROPPING lisa was MADE BY THE ANGELS
Just here to say Angle Autism is the most powerful phrase.... please tell us more.... I know you have that God Tier Autism Content 👀👀👀
so i actually have a lot of thoughts on this. first, read this essay, it made me think many thoughts years ago when i read it.
anyway, there’s two really interesting things about angels established in canon. first of all, they’re not all ambiguous disorder weirdos. lots of angels are just regular people with no particular disorders. and it’s unlikely that it has to do with how much experience with humans they have, given the huge amount of experience with humans cas accumulates over the course of the show, and how much he remains an ambiguous disorder weirdo (even if a better adjusted one). also, anna is definitely also an ambiguous disorder weirdo (if a less obvious one than cas) like, her bluntness and her coldness and her hyperrationality and her somewhat weird mannerisms..... and like, she lived as a human for twenty years. it’s not about experience. it’s about being an ambiguous disorder weirdo.
at the same time, a number of angels are ambiguous disorder weirdos, that seems really common. it’s not just cas. anna, rachel, hannah...... there are others but i’m blanking. from a doylist perspective, this makes sense: those are all angels who need to be sympathetic, and the thing about angels is that they follow a rather alien system of morality that causes them to think nothing of committing a lot of really terrible crimes, so portraying them as naive to the evil that they do is kind of required, and like. cas is already there, pulling the naive because of ambiguous disorder shtick with his whole heart, so like. that’s kind of the path of least resistance. angel you need made sympathetic? make them cas-ish. (this also helps because the audience loves cas and maybe if these angels remind us of cas we’ll love them too). the doylist perspective also explains why, other than cas, all the ambiguous disorder weirdos are “””female””” (angels don’t have genders, but from a doylist perspective the perceived gender of the angel influences both their treatment by the writers and their perception by the audience) angels: women are more likely to be perceived as helpless and therefore sympathetic, so good angels tend to be female, and giving an angel ambiguous disorder is another way of keeping them sympathetic, so good angels tend to be ambiguous disorder.
on the other hand from a watsonian perspective this is has some wild implications. like it seems that ambiguous disorder is just really common among angels? does it have something to do with status? also the implication in lily sunder has some regrets that female-vesseled angels like, experience sexual harassment drives me SOOOOOOO crazy, that combined with female-vesseled angels being more likely to be ambiguous disorder weirdos is like!! especially since we know cas used to have a female vessel (and we know he’s come up in the world since then, he was given his own command). there’s so many things, like. i know i personally have a history of walking eyes wide shut into situations where men are creepy to me because i, an ambiguous disorder weirdo, don’t realize that this is a creepy situation until FAR too late. like i am very trusting and gullible. and we know certainly that that’s a trait cas shares, but it seems likely that this is common among ambiguous disorder weirdo angels. would only a stupid, trusting angel choose a female vessel? i think about angels and gender constantly. and also ambiguous disorder. what the fuck.
anyway i love referring to myself as an ambiguous disorder weirdo it’s my favorite phrase. the joke here is that i have a professional diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder from a psychiatrist which i received as an adult. i am, in my own extremely humble opinion, very funny.
post about lily sunder has some regrets and angel gender
okay so lily sunder has some regrets is the best episode of late season spn and maybe the best episode of spn right? right? i’m glad we’re all agreed. anyway lets talk about how batshit the gender implications of this episode are. i’m going to be slipping between watsonian and doylist interpretations like soap through your fingers so keep up. i don’t have a point here i’m just obsessed.
anyway the thing is that benjamin is the first angel we ever meet to be gendered against his vessel. benjamin is referred to by male pronouns even though he’s possessing a woman. they even talk about it. “so benjamin is a woman?” “no, benjamin is an angel, his vessel is a woman.” but it’s not like all angels are referred to with male pronouns. in general, angels are referred to either by the pronouns of their current vessel, or the pronouns of the first vessel we met them in (i’m preeeetty sure raphael stayed “he” after switching to a female vessel, and hannah stayed “she” after switching to a male vessel). now obviously the reason for lily sunder doing this is twofold, one is that our friend mr yockey wants us to think about angel gender, and two that mr yockey wants to make it clear that the relationship between benjamin and his vessel has some kind of sexual connotation because, a, he wants us to think about angels and humans fucking because that IS the theme here, and b, he wants us to think “oh, so benjamin and his vessel are fucking!” and then hear SAM say “so she was his….. friend” calling attention to the naming of relationships, and how inadequate a terms “friend” seems in light of what cas has said about benjamin and his vessel, and causing us to pay attention to the name we give to whatever dean and cas are to each other. what i’m saying is that steve yockey said “wanna be boy best friends?”
and then there’s ishim’s line “i liked your old vessel better” which doesn’t scan as weird until a few minutes later when we find out that cas’ old vessel was a woman! and then a few minutes after that when we find out that ishim is a creep. like upon rewatch that line reads like sexual harassment. and yet that’s insaaaaane because angels are genderless!! what the hell difference does it make!! except it does. also side note i don’t think we ever heard hot girl castiel referred to in the third person but i would have liked to hear some she/her pronouns about cas pls and thank you. that would have fucked. that is the only way in which mr yockey has ever let me down.
and then there’s like. this episode also does the thing that annoys me where angels receive gendered names that line up with their gendering that spn does? like every day i wake up and am annoyed that hannah, rachel, naomi, hester were named those things while male-vesseled angels get to have like, weird and kind of sexless angel-y sounding names. except that mr yockey is doing it intentionally, like, first of all this is the first time that a male angel has gotten that treatment (benjamin) and second of all he does it with mirabel, which is a pretty feminine name, right? except then we meet a male-vesseled angel, akobel, like, that’s clearly on the same naming convention. so it’s kind of deconstructing that as well.
there wasn’t a point to this rant it’s just something i think about constantly. i’m not sure if i even like all the things mr yockey added to the canonical concept of angel gender they’re just like, fascinating to me.
SUPERNATURAL | First Born / The Prisoner
was talking to a friend just now and we were thinking about how cas pov, as like, a general rule, is a fantasy of control of the angry man in your life. either you’re so powerful that he can’t hurt you, or he can, but you love him so much that you don’t mind if he does. that moment in lucifer rising where dean punched cas in the face and it clanged like metal really set the tone for their entire relationship. dean can sink so much anger and violence into cas and cas just doesn’t care. this is why the fight scene in 10x22 hits so hard. because even though cas can be hurt by dean, he still just doesn’t care. dean can kill him if he wants and that would be okay. he loves dean so much that he’s fine with that. and like. enjoying that dynamic while identifying with cas is very much this fantasy of control over the angry man in your life. both aspects are. like obviously the physical imperviousness is but like……. i’m not the only person in the world who has ever coped with things by thinking “if i just decide not to mind if people hurt me then it won’t bother me so much.” like the “i don’t mind if people hurt me” mindset is an attempt to maintain power over situations in which you have no other foothold, or a coping mechanism that you learned when you had no control and is now inappropriate when you do. also this is like. a metatextual thought. i’m not saying dean in-text is abusive to cas i’m more saying that cas pov serves a specific function. y’know. identification with cas serves a specific function. not to be insane or anything.
identification with dean in the context of destiel also serves a psychosexual purpose but it’s a much more traditional one. like that one post about supernatural being a bodice ripper (for men!) is exactly right, but the thing about a bodice ripper (for men!) is that it’s still a bodice ripper.
and like for his first three seasons cas isn’t really ever meant to be a point of identification. one of my friends (actually same friend as above, different conversation) called him “more of a weapon than a character. during 4/5/6 cas is very much an object. this isn’t entirely true; he’s kind of a character in like, mid season four? like, in the “for the first time i….. feel…..” bit where he’s developing. but after 4x20 he’s definitely back to being an object for the winchesters/dean to use.
certainly in all of season five cas is half weapon, half large adorable dog who dean can pet or kick to show his mood. like, even in 5x17 when cas is drunk and angsting about god it’s entirely for either exposition, jokes (”don’t ask stupid questions”) or for dean to have like, pet the dog moments (giving cas the headache pills when he’s hung over).
and this object not character status, combined with the fact that cas is meant to be a slightly menacing presence who we can’t always predict but is on our side in the end, means that huge amounts of the eroticized violence towards our protagonists that exists because supernatural is a bodice ripper (for men!) comes from cas. big stuff directed at dean like the wall shove in 4x22, or the alley scene in 5x18, obviously, but little things too, like cutting dean’s arm for the spell in season six, or stuff directed at other characters like every soulfisting scene (especially the one in 6x07 which is like intensely eroticized), or hell, even “i learned that from the pizza man”: meg may be a woman and a villain but she’s still more of a point of identification than cas, the pizza man line is a joke, yes, but it’s also there to establish cas’ alienness. we understand meg’s motivations in that moment, we don’t understand cas’ until he explains, and when he does explain, we’re meant to go “oh, haha, that’s so WEIRD.”
and this whole “not being a point of identification” thing shows in how like. lots of violence is directed as cas but it’s never eroticized in the same way. like, cas is KILLED, TWICE between 4x20 and 6x20, and one time it’s entirely offscreen, and the other time he explodes into bloody chunks, the least sexy way to be murdered. compare on the head of a pin, where he is very much like, Sexy Beaten, because he’s kind of a character there. even in 6x20, which is where he kind of becomes a character again, if only for one episode, it’s very much like…. yes, we see him bloody and beaten after his fight with raphael, but the fight itself happens offscreen.
like cas is never the object of the kind of eroticized bodice ripper violence as the other characters (in the early seasons. when cas becomes a character rather than primarily an object in the carver-dabb era, this changes). he’s a conduit for eroticized, bodice ripper violence. this combined with the fact that he’s also like, fixated on dean makes him very much like…. a traditional male love interest. like even before he was ever written as one, he just sorta comes out that way, because of the role he serves in the narrative. this is why he’s the vampire boyfriend. and like. the psychosexual purpose identification with dean in the context of destiel serves is the same one as identification with bella swan, basically. like it’s about a big scary man who loves me very much but is also very scary. and it’s like…. what if i had to be erotically beaten up by an angel of the lord? how would that go? would it maybe awaken something in me a little bit? without having to ask for it (because you’re not allowed to).
