Fandom really misreads Dean Winchester, and /sorry not sorry/ but lot of it comes down to probably classism and aesthetic bias. People love to paint Dean as this emotionally repressed, hyper-masculine tough guy, because I mean, just LOOK at all that beer, flannel, and motor oil, am I right???
IMHO fanon seems to project more stoicism, repression, and even aggression onto him that what is often actually there, almost like they're assuming that masculinity from a rural/poor background = de facto emotionally stunted.
But what we see on our screens is that Dean is loudly emotional. He CONNECTS. He cries, begs, clings, says “I need you,” and breaks down in bathrooms and graveyards. (Aside// He even considers giving his newly disabled foster father a backrub to help with pain. Deep down, he is so fucking sweet!)
He’s raw and expressive, constantly reaching out to the people he loves. In fact, more often than not, his family tells him to “shut it down” because they're SO afraid of that emotionality getting him killed (SEE: Bobby's speech in season 7).
And I'm not saying that Dean never suppresses or represses, or that he never struggles with anger or never shuts down, or that he's never living up to the classic hero masculine archetype, because he so often IS with flying colors...
...but IMHO he is the most expressive and emotionally literate of TFW, with Jack as a pretty natural second.
Fanon turns him into a caricature because of his class signifiers; it's like it overrides what we see with our own eyes. :(
Meanwhile, Castiel fits the archetype of the emotionally restrained man way more—not modern tryhard bruh-ha-ha masculinity, but the classic kind: think noir detectives, samurai, old-style Hollywood, lone frontier cowboys. He’s the trench-coated loner who speaks in soft, loaded silences, who says more with a stare than a paragraph.
Cas is stoic hypermasculinity—not because he’s heartless, but because he doesn’t know how to express that huge supernova-sized well of emotion that sits in his chest (Aside/// and yanno... feeling was punishable by death in Heaven).
AND that's not to say that Cas isn't sometimes emotional, or failing spectacularly and slipping into a his loser outsider dork nerd status, or expressing moments of astonishing gentleness...
It's just that fandom often flips their defaults in such a cartoonish way, calling Cas the soft, emotionally open one and Dean the hard-ass. Why? Because Dean’s coded as rural and working-class, and fandom has a long history of distrusting and aestheticizing that kind of masculinity without engaging with it honestly.
People love the look of Dean’s pain—the Impala, the leather jacket, the worn-out eyes—but not the truth of it. They don't SEE him. They romanticize his trauma while ignoring how open he actually is. Dean isn’t repressed. He’s exposed. LIKE A RAW FUCKING LIVEWIRE NERVE.
Cas is the bottled-up one, the one who hides behind duty and silence. Dean begs to be chosen. He shows up, again and again, with his heart in his hands.
If you drop the fanon filters and actually watch what’s onscreen, it becomes super clear: Dean is the most emotionally transparent of the trio.
Fandom just isn’t always ready to admit that working-class vulnerability actually counts.
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