Now that s7 was made 10x worse, not to mention Cas' I didn't just lose my grace line in 9x06 by 1 little word like longing, I can't stop thinking about the parallels between Dean and Daphne of all things, how they both took him in when he had nothing, be it loss of grace or memory, it was still a loss of identity. Both having to let him go/give him up, in Dean's case, which is much more tragic as we KNOW how much he cares about Cas, having to send him away when Cas was at his most vulnerable &
it kills me that he couldn’t even have the - I can’t say comfort, but at least he would’ve known how it tore Dean up inside to see him go & know that he was still wanted, even human and frail and not able to help in the way he had before. Also, hello parallels between Dean’s heartbroken longing post-purgatory being so strong Cas found him even w/ everything Heaven was doing to him & Cas’ heartbroken longing being so strong Ephraim found him & set out to kill him to make his soul stop screaming.
What strikes me reading this excellent little piece of heart-stabbing meta is how all of these incidents have all been things we’ve wept and tore our hair and gnashed our teeth about already… Honestly nothing *new* new has appeared out of the mists of old canon from this (with the exception perhaps of Cas getting out of Purgatory as that one just plain didn’t make sense until this came along and neatly explained how he found Dean again).
Just that… being given that line about longing has sort of tied a new context and narrative through all the old emotionally heavy moments that’s brought it into a different focus… Honestly it’s mostly just causing us a retrospective of all the best and worst of the ship, with this new filter where we can get a new emotional kick out of it all (which in the end is a really robotic way of trying to work out why we’re invested in fictional characters and their love lives in the first place for any ship). It just gives us a sort of focus point to build the new narrative around as we make a more coherent picture of the story and what it means. All these old moments had sort of faded in emotional intensity as some of them date back four or more years. There’s only so many times you can harp on the pain of raking leaves (she says after consistently tagging it as ‘never over this’ :P)…
I mean this will probably largely remain something that lurks only in headcanon and the language we use as shippers and fans… Even if Destiel does go canon to every degree there’s only so much they could actually cram in, given the show honestly isn’t about that (in that it’s not got its focus as a love story, no matter how important the way Cas and Dean relate to each other has become to the plot over the last few seasons), so this will probably just remain a secret gift to the side of the fandom that’s interested in the exact painful details of how these two dweebs relate to each other, and even if it does go canon and even if the media blows up with this, they’ll be talking about obvious plot stuff: “Omg how did we not realise raking leaves crypt scene all for one human was happening” while we’re many levels deeper with our head start on pouring over what’s already canon, so only people who go back and look again closely will find this gem of a hidden emotional storyline.
I’m just fascinated by the ability for us to have an enormous canon subtext retcon where we have written ourselves this new story through the entire subtext of their relationship, which remains exactly the same as the old one, but now includes this canon-supported romantic what-the-hell fact you can use to turn any old moment into something painfully emotional to contemplate in ways it never was before, and as a raw fact seems to fill a few plot holes and generally improve average non-shippy comprehension of things like Cas getting out of purgatory… (thinking of Cas showing up without asking, do NOT ask me what woke me up in a cold sweat at 3:30 am this morning thinking about Cas *leaving* at the end of 10x03… I’ll give you a clue, it’s this freakin’ retcon.)
I mean there were always a sort of series of levels of stories going on in the show: all the casual viewer layers, the layers of people who have agendas one way or the other, shippy or non-shippy…
But right now, honestly, every time I see a new post like but what about Emmanuel or stuff like this which links together events from across 3-4 seasons, I’m just thinking about how we’re actually rebuilding Destiel from the ground up, with this new thing which belongs to us. I mean talk about handing fans the story and letting them have the subtext in 10x05. That was nothing compared to this. :P
"I want you to put as much sub in that text as you possibly can." And then they handed us the perfect way to do it.