On Dean, The Concept of Overreaction, and Neurodivergence
See, the thing about Dean, is that he’s just so much larger than life. He doesn’t do things by halves. Everything he feels, he either expresses to the fullness of his ability, or he represses it deep deep down until it either explodes out of him or sits in the pit of his stomach and rots.
He’s overprotective, over-enthusiastic, over-sensitive, over-angry, over-masculine, over-everything. Hell, watching him is almost like watching a cartoon character most of the time.
And Sam, stuck with him twenty-four-seven, Sam does watch him, for lack of any other options or company, and he shakes his head, or hides a fond smile, and often doesn’t think anything of it. Doesn’t think to look past it, because that’s just Dean.
Or rather, it isn’t the way Sam thinks it is. Dean is larger than life because that’s the way he is — more on that later — and he is larger than life because that is the way his experiences have shaped him.
It might sound obvious, but once it comes down to it, every emotion he over-expresses is a way of compensating for something: Overprotective because he’s deathly afraid of losing Sammy, over-enthusiastic because he never got to be a child even when he was one, over-sensitive because he’s convinced that everyone he loves would be better off without him and hates himself and them for it, over-angry because he feels too much and that’s the only way he ever learnt to channel it, over-masculine because he was never enough of a man to make his dad proud of him.
And now we get to the bit about neurodivergence. Because when a person is over-something, people don’t exactly tend to take them seriously. Like, ever. I’m serious. Lethal killing machine, whip smart hunter and all-round scary motherfucker that Dean is, people still don’t take him seriously. Or rather, Sam doesn’t take him seriously. And who can blame him, really, because Dean is his brother and god forbid a younger sibling take their older sibling seriously. And also, Dean’s just so fucking over the top, all the time, and how is anyone supposed to deal with that?? I mean, really, how is anyone supposed to take that level of emotion seriously?? It’s just too much. And what happens is, it’s SO too much that it becomes. funny, because hyperbole is funny. Drama is funny. That’s why we have theatre and that. That’s when Dean’s behaviour isn’t downright dangerous, of course, then it’s just annoying, and irresponsible and a whole host of other bloody unhelpful things, none of which add up to encourage anybody to see him as a functional, multifaceted, three dimensional adult.
And so, Dean becomes the comic relief character, because he’s theatrical in his emotions sometimes to the point of complete ridiculousness, the kind of reactions that make you laugh in disbelief because come on. No real human being reacts like that. That’s something reserved for cartoons and anime.
Fictional as Dean might be, he is not unrealistic in his emotional reactions.
He’s just neurodivergent.
Fellow autistics on the Autism App, back me up here. Dean is a perfect example of how, no matter how much you try to suppress your emotions, no matter how hard you try to compensate for things that have happened to you, for the way you are, no matter whether it’s something you actually feel (Dean’s protectiveness over Sammy) or just another part of the mask (Dean’s hypermasculinity) your reactions will never read as an “acceptable level of emotion”. And that’s either because your neurodivergent levels of emotion are simply too much for neurotypicals, or because you are trying to fake something you don’t actually feel and have gotten it wrong, as you always do, because neurodivergent masking, however good you are at it, however effortless it appears, will never measure up to the neurotypical experience of just living without thinking.
And that’s what I see in Dean. A deeply emotional neurodivergent person who was never socialised or even once parented properly, giving him all the trauma that comes with being neurodivergent in a world that was not built for us, and, on top of that, he’s been through hell and back — literally — adding a whole lot MORE trauma to an already inherently traumatising existence.
So, he’s fucked, basically.
He is “over the top”, unappreciated, ridiculed and taken for granted, and worst of all god he’s a fucking mess. The boy’s all over the place! He has more cracks than the smashed mirrors that started this six hundred years of bad luck in the first damn place. He is victim and villain both, parent and child, chosen and discarded. He’s got a lifetime of trauma and a pile of unhealthy coping mechanisms and dysfunctional behaviours to prove it, and he’s autistic.
So, let me reiterate: he is, was, always has been and always will be, fucked.