i think it absolutely is interesting to look at dean’s female coding as one of the reasons why he became the unintended focal & POV character of the show for so much of its audience, comprised mostly of women. sam’s such a dudebro, but dean?
the complexity—the trauma inherent—the unrelenting, all-consuming emotion that rolls off him in waves at all times but that’s at the same time a private thing for dean, an intimate thing, a function through which he processes the world but not something to share and pass around lest he gets told he’s too much, (lorde voice) a liability, too emotional to make decisions, hurting others by the mere act of being hurt himself.
dean is a tightly-wrapped ball of everything, every thought and trauma and expectation and every feeling, bundled against the cold air. he is quiet but he is loud. he is overlooked but he fills up a room with his presence. he is everything anyone ever thought he couldn’t be, constantly underestimated, he carries the world—and his brother—and the world—and his brother on his shoulders but is expected to not speak about it, to not make decisions about it, he’s only there to carry.
his constant fight for agency is absolutely definitive and it started way before fate came into the picture. it started at four years old, mother and father and child at once, his needs so deprioritized they were not even on the map anymore from the moment he acquired a baby.
all these interactions where he makes clear: it is wrong for anyone else to be treated the way that i was, but i know this is my lot in life, who else is going to carry if not i? if they hurt you this way, let me carry you too, so only one of us has to do it.
that say: you have been hurt by the same things i have been hurt by but i feel like it shouldn’t have hurt me to begin with, and you showing your hurt is a slap in the face of every year i have clenched my teeth and not said anything. you’re saying i needn’t have done that, needn’t have eaten myself? how dare you.
that say: i absolutely resent that this was done to me but i will only ever say it in a roundabout way, because my personal pain is something that i carry as well, and if i can’t hold on to it, i’ll let go of everything else too, and it’ll all topple to the floor.
that say: i didn’t birth this world—or my brother—or this world but i carried it to term and i bandaged its knees and i let it feed from my breast, on my life force, and if i rip that away, it’ll starve and that’s filicide. doesn’t mean i don’t know i go hungry.
the love and the anger that live in him don’t contradict themselves. they’re there for each other, they prop each other up. he trembles at his very core with life, for all that he was never meant to have one of his own. he knows he’s alive, and that fundamentally he wants to be alive. even when he was suicidal: the life that he had wasn’t his own, and he wanted his own but didn’t know how to get there. the frustrated helplessness, the rattling of chains. the spark that no one can put out.
a woman’s plight. a woman’s war.
and to recognize all that in a MAN?
a male character, who by all expectations should have had his agency handed to him on a silver platter, but instead passed it over to his brother—child—the world—brother instead so he won’t go hungry (and he took that agency to leave you in its absence. and you wanted that, no? if that’s what you wanted, then why does it hurt? did you expect him to half the agency you gave him neat with his baby fist and pass a portion back to you? did you really think—?) to see THAT in a MAN, it makes it all that much easier to root for his struggle to regain his agency. he as a man was supposed to have it, and it is righteous of him to fight for it now. as a woman watching, it’s easy to be like Yes. YES. and process all that injustice through a frame and a medium that mirrors your own struggle and that of your foremothers in a way that underlines its injustice, finally, that validates the fight. to be a woman watching a man carry the weight that women carry, and say: this hurts. to be a woman watching a man slice off heads and wield sawed-off shotguns and throw knives. to be a woman watching a man use his body to wage your own war. to be a woman watching a male power fantasy that’s a female power fantasy more than anything else.
(to be a woman and watch him die. to be a woman and grieve for it like you would your sister who fell in battle.)
