imasyon replied to your post: What is one thing (or more) that you wish the show...
@diminuel I agree on everything though what strikes me even more about Dean’s grief is that the poor guy must’ve had so many whiplash moments. Cas dies, and he clearly suffers, and then he’s back again pretty soon. But Sam, jfc, the guy dies and before Dean has even 5 minutes to process and tell their mom, Sam just comes back like that (I mean good, I don’t want Sam dead any more than Dean does but wtf). I’d have had 20 breakdowns already with those quick resurrections.
But I think the lack of process time was mostly for the viewer, because if I remember correctly the trip to the camp did take a total of three days, right? While we don’t know how long it took them to reach the tunnel, Dean was forced to complete the rest of the three day track without Sam. When they reached Mary he clearly was still very shell-shocked about it and I assume he hasn’t processed it at all (and we don’t know if Cas tried to talk to him about it. We simply have no idea, which is irritating).
And now I think about how... I don’t know. How Dean didn’t properly process Cas’ resurrection. He was just from a state where he wanted to die and has no faith left to normal again, maybe a bit more than normal. But we didn’t see him process anything at all. Cas was back, they got to the Bunker and then they rush off against on a case. We as viewers haven’t seen Dean properly process Cas’ return and neither has Cas had a chance to process it properly. We see later on that he’s clearly still struggling with his resurrection and his place in the world and Dean doesn’t really seem to want to get into a deep discussion about it. For him it’s just “we needed you back so you’re back” and that’s enough for Dean to function again.
Like... I know the life and deaths and resurrections of Dean have probably not given him the tools to process what’s happening properly. Sam and Dean both repress and fix things on a surface level but below it’s all messed up. They don’t know how to process grief properly, usually they just fight on but Dean couldn’t anymore at that point. Cas is back, now he can go on. It’s just... bandaids on deep wounds all the time and the bandaids have smilies on them so it’s all good.
