obsessed w the campbells bc they really are THEE killers. john signed up to fight but the campbells are like we ARE the war and always have been. which is SO interesting in the context of mary-the-nightgown because it emphasizes more than anything else that 1) mary was playing a role and 2) dean got subsumed by a role he didn't know WAS a role until much later in life. like the mary fallacy is also the campbell fallacy. there IS no mother mary there IS no loving normal campbells which means deans WHOLE role in the family which he thought he was filling he was actually creating. MARY is not even mary. ONLY dean is mary
hello hello!! i just stumbled on a gifset and got to thinking so I was wondering about your opinion? Dean at the start is a "hurt child hiding behind a thick coat of bravado" or something like that, but everytime they were supernaturally affected, Dean's fear manifested as him withdrawing and hiding, becoming smaller and quieter. vs Sam who flew into a rage and yelled and all that (Sam who is more like John canonically). sometime post Hell/Lucifer cage, the roles switched? Dean started growing angrier by the seasons, and Sam was becoming more... mellow? i was okay with this at first, characters change and it made sense at the time. but by s15 we have everyone under the sun pretending like DEAN was always the angry one? like he had anger issues and slept like a bear and woke up mean and pointed guns at kids (kaya, jack). like Dean wasnt established as the kid oriented one by 1x03, and many many cases after that, like he didnt sleep with one arm hanging off the side of the bed pointed to Sam just in case. (I get the narrative shifting and changing and more and more being pilled on Dean's shoulders specifically with no breaks. but acknowledge it like that at least?? dont try to gaslight us into thinking it was always true.) I also have this problem where I feel like JA tried hard to round out Dean's character and make even his senseless choice look digestible? I think MC also really liked Castiel, even when some people tried so hard to get rid of the angel. JP however, feels like he gave up on Sam after he was no longer the center of the story? I don't know how to explain this really, but s6 onwards all I can think about is that stupid huff breath he makes all the time when talking that makes his scenes downright impossible to sit through. in any case, in my perfect world in s16, post Chuck and empty rescue, I always think Dean has an easier time managing his anger. like its not upped to a hundred all the time, like he gets angry but it doesnt consume him. ("and this anger, its always been there, and i cant stop it" has it? has it really? i love the trap/purgatory 2.0 but... cmon) so yea. okay this is long lol sorry.
I reposted a really nice meta by @angelsdean you might like. I also have this here, about how the broad stereotype of Dean is doing a lot of shorthand for audiences who close their eyes and shut their ears.
I hope you don't read this as me pulling away from your broader point about anger, but I do sometimes feel like trying to point a finger at "which one's the John," can be... one of those fanon discourses that doesn't go very far. It runs a risk of flattening everyone, even John himself.
The thing about Sam's anger at the start of the series is that he was this bright-eyed, hopeful kid who could TASTE his future, right? It was laid out right in front of him: love, hope, success. And then it got ripped away. Of course he spiraled. Just because he didn't have a lot of time with Jess doesn't mean it wasn't devastating.
And the deeper he goes into learning about his dream, the more his whole college experience (hi, Brady!) looks like a sham. Friends pretending to be friends. Hostile enemies luring him towards the lover-of-choice. (Chuck does this later too, with Eileen!) It leads to a lifetime of problems for him. I feel like this is part of why he leans into the safety of Dean's judgment (and friendship circle) later.
Charitably, it's hard NOT to be angry at such a sham, you know...? He got cheated! So... he self-destructed, had a nervous breakdown, and then had more nervous breakdowns and let a bunch of people down... He did NOT handle it well at all. (To say nothing of the flimsy "resilience" John's cruelty he gifted them with. It's a resilience in name only, a battle prowess that doesn't hold up to basic water.)
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So, what's my point, I guess?
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Well, pulling out from a broader view, I think one of the meta traps that SPN WANTS to pull its character INTO is Hope. Hope is the whole point. It's the most devastating thing there is. You have all these dead-men-walking types of characters and you're throwing all these things and love interests and wrapped-up dreams at them to see if they'll bite.
People turn to God the most, maybe, when they Despair.
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So, Dean.
Dean gets baited time and time again, but he RARELY bites. As a (mostly) backward-looking character, he tends to meditate on the past grief and what could have been, and when he speaks of the future, it's pessimistic, "This only ends one way for me."
That said, as a character, he has so much secret, devastating HOPE inside of him, but he almost never FULLY lets the "light shine on his face," to borrow a phrase from my friend The Shadow Ruler of The Empty...
I think we begin to see this specific type of anger manifest secondary to a very deep kind of grief, and we don't see that out of Dean until maybe season 12? Because Dean is showing his hand; he's wearing his heart on his sleeve like never before. He's always been emotionally quite obvious to anyone who actually watches and engages with the show. But Mary coming into the mix makes him feel allowed to reach for his own happiness, his future.
Things between Mary and Dean certainly aren't perfect. Mary's not the load-bearing parent he wants, but she's here. She is working through it. She's TRYING (and failing so, so hard lmao). But it's the effort Dean respects, that getting up after you fail so hard you don't wanna show your face ever again. Mary is like a boxer you just keep hitting. ANd here she is.
And so, we get the Everything Dean ever wanted of it all rearing its head. It feels rather like, "His true weakness is revealed! THIS is the REAL shape of Dean's happiness." He's not trying to force-fit himself into being the truck; he's just Baby.
It's why you get Dean saying stuff like this in 12x23 like, "This'll work. It HAS to!"
Because, for the first time, maybe ever, you get Dean thinking, "I want to experience things differently than before. Maybe even for the first time." He's become a future-looking character. That spirals EVEN further later, with Jack. Yeah, he hated the kid at first, but then you get Jack being extraordinarily like Dean in the deepest ways, and you get Dean settling into the mommyblogsphere, and dreaming of retirement. Verbalizing that, even. Out loud. (Dangerous thing to do! The writers and audience can HEAR you, Dean.)
So yeah. Dean got angry. He spiraled. He had a nervous breakdown. But because Dean's the caretaker character, the audience doesn't take that lying down. They skewer him. (Haha! Look at you now! You FAILED! Hypocrite! Daddy's little girl broke!)
They'd put his head on a pike if they could.
But here's the thing... Dean's own family understands why Dean is angry. Even Sam, for all his "Don't be like dad! I need you stay with me and support me!" stuff in s12, gets IT when it comes to season 15. Cas and Sam stick with Dean, even through his anger, because they're already been through respective vessel trauma, loss of faith in the FUTURE*, and identity crises.
Maybe I'm off here, but I THINK what's bothering you is people are using anger as shorthand for "the John Winchester," and "the failure." It's not that. It's just a part of grief, and yes, Dean is working through it. He loses sight of the future, he's CAGED, and all he can see is the light out. Doesn't matter what shape that light takes. It's very much like Kelly's, "I don't see a happy future for either of us, so..."
That's why Kelly is, especially when she's killing herself and Jack, as much of a Constance-and-John mirror to me, as she is a Mary one. If the best part of John is ANYWHERE alive inside of the John we see on our screens, he's screaming. And that's an important lamentation.
x
EDIT: I have some links to add to this... can't find em.
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He's stellar at remembering a person's MO/objective, and his hackles raise when things don't add up.
(ex: with Metatron; he didn't trust Nao
I am always thinking about how the end of season 12 was devastating to Dean in particular because it echoed the smashing of his happiness in
personally I choose to believe that jack has no idea dean and cas aren’t married.
I think whatever explanation of marriage he encountered initially was very vague and about, like, Life Partnership and stuff, so it happened to apply pretty well to dean and cas and jack just kinda filed it away.
and then later on he asks sam if all married people wear wedding rings and Sam gives him a long winded answer about the variety of marriage traditions across cultures (#loreboysam) and ends with an add on about how a lot of people have jobs that might mean they can't wear rings. and jack asks “oh is hunting one of those?” and sam is like yeah I guess some people choose not to wear rings if they're going under cover a lot or something. and jack is like got it! 😊 👍and took that as confirmation. sam of course has no idea these are the conclusions jack is drawing.
they were like. dean has a cowboy fetish (said by his actual brother). he has a doctor fetish. his parents bonded over led zeppelin. then they made castiel dress up as both a cowboy and a doctor and dean made a mixtape of his favorite zeppelin songs for him. ON MAIN.
By the end of the show they weren't even hiding the fact that Dean and Cas were married, were they? I mean look at that:
Dean is in his robe, domestic, he came from work earlier and is waiting for his husband and kid to come back. Cas just came back from "take your kid to work" day. Everybody else (their kids) is asleep, they are alone in dim lighted, quiet home and debriefing. Cas gets closer and closer as they talk
it's like. he's a son. he's a daughter. he's a bad man. he's a serial killer. he's a cowboy. he's a xerox machine. he's a mother. he's a loose cannon. he's bad writing. he's good writing. he's a swiftie. he's a hero. he's an antihero. he's bad bisexual rep. he's han solo. no he's not. he's a father. he's his father. he's an alcoholic. he's a control freak. he's the michael sword. he's a child. he's a husband. he's a housewife. he's a mechanic. he's the last great american queerbait. he's a soldier. he's a redditor. he's a violent urge. he's a failed man. he's a construct. he's a parody. he's a revenge arc. he's a tragic hero. he's a widow. he's a divorcee. he's a dancer. he's a righteous man. he's a photocopy. he's never wrong. he's always wrong. he's irredeemable. he's redemption. he's a pop culture geek. he's kinda butch. he's a painted whore. he's an archetype. he's an homage. he's a drag king. he's just a guy. he's a hooker with a heart of gold.
he's a christ figure. he's a deadbeat dad. he's the final girl. he's some guy. he's a scammer. he's a ladies' man. he's a sacrificial lamb. he's an aquarius. he's a game of thrones fan. he's a note on camp.
