something bordering on weird

I am not going to lie to you, for a second there in that episode I seriously thought Claire and the random chick from the bar were going to ditch out on the sketchy looking guy and possibly wander off to Oz with Charlie and Dorothy…

war flashbacks of Dean and Aaron at the bar

Honor on you, honor on your cow.

I mean, didn’t we all think it?

I was definitely getting that vibe.

Well, she is an obvious Dean mirror, it only makes sense.

There’s wank on my dash that Claire being queer came outta nowhere so I’ve just got to bring this back from the week of 10x10 airing, because it’s sooo not new.

I clocked a lot of subtext in my wayward sisters watch, most of which parallels her to Dean, once to The Chitters (in Nancy Won’s episode)… 

But take this as you will, the dude in the bar hung back, and the girl was the one who sweet-talked Claire into whatever sketchy plan they had for her…

Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t remember ever seeing Claire being into a guy. The show never told us in any way that she’s heterosexual. It’s heteronormativity that made people automatically think that she’s hetero, like straight is the default sexuality.

Anyway, sometimes it happens in real life, too. You come out to a hetero person and they’re surprised, tell you how you “don’t look queer”. You being queer came out of the blue for that person.

No, I don’t think we’ve ever seen her attracted to any guys. We’ve only seen other characters assuming that she would be, like the men who’ve been attracted to her, or maybe Jody when she was giving her sex talk (to be fair, 90% of that was directed at Alex, but still). Claire herself hasn’t actually said anything about it.

“I feel like I’m seeing him.”

This episode was SO ROMANTIC. Like, seriously, IN ALL SERIOUSNESS, how do the creators of the show explain away the COMPLETELY RAMPANT ROMANTICISM of the Dean & Cas storyline just in this episode alone? You can’t! You cannot make a convincing argument at all. There is no way that this level of explicitly romantic tropes are applied— to these characters, their story, and their relationship in not only the writing, but the lighting, the cinematography, the editing, and (yes) the acting of this episode— and it is somehow accidental. There is just no way! I mean, Dean standing in the darkness, extreme close up of his anguished face, lit as though by the moon, rain pours down outside, he watches it fall down the window as he thinks but cannot bring himself to speak about what happened to Cas, a flash of lightning illuminates his sad eyes as the storm rages outside— that is some Wuthering Heights bullshit right there, are you fucking shitting me?

“How the hell did you find me?”

“Angels are able to find those who pray to them.”

“Pray? Oh, believe me, I gave up praying a long time ago.”

“It doesn’t have to be a formal prayer, I can, uh, pick up on a longing…”

STOP

The more I think about it the more this works. Season 8 was so patchy in the lore because they clearly forgot Dean was warded from angels, and Cas just constantly pops up by him.

This is Cas literally getting out of Purgatory, presented as him barely even being in this plane until he finally manages to properly manifest behind Dean in the bathroom.

How did he even know to go to Dean? I always assumed because Naomi said she pulled him out that she dropped him there but it’s actually more patchy an explanation because Cas takes a day or two to fully come back to this world.

But imagine him being given the shove by the angels, unknowingly, back to this world, and the beacon that guides him back is the unconscious, unknowing prayer of the one human who misses Castiel specifically - his faith is negligible in every other regard, but his faith and need for Cas is off the charts, so much so he sends out this low-level call constantly in his grief. The one thing that can pull Cas back all the way.

In the end, Dean was the one who dragged every last one of them out of Purgatory.

Officially headcanon.

I mean

yeah

I mean, if you want to be that way, you can see what’s going on between them as a profound bond without sexual overtones (if you want to be wrong, it’s your right to be wrong, it’s a free country) but even so, this is literally the only explanation that makes sense. There is no other way Cas could have found Dean, especially not after they made such a big deal of Dean being warded so thoroughly not even Cas (with whom he has a profound bond) or a freaking archangel (who was specifically looking for him and destined to live inside his body) could find him.

Also, this means those people who felt Dean’s feelings changed in Purgatory (or that Dean admitted those feelings, to himself at least, in Purgatory) were right, and the thing is now canon. Cas could never find Dean before, could he? Wasn’t he following Meg when he kept popping in and out of existence in Season 7?

Someone needs to do a rewatch asap.

The only time Cas magically located Dean before then was the off-screen “naked and covered in bees” moment

Uh… no. Cas located Dean in 6x03 after Dean prayed to him (the profound bond scene). Dean didn’t need to call Cas or tell him where he was like he used to in season 5 when he was indeed still warded against angels. So I always assumed when Cas healed Dean at the end of season 5 he erased his angel warding as well; with apocalypse over there was no longer a need to ward him against angels. And other angels have been able to locate Dean as well, see Naomi in 8x19 I think.

Sorry to burst everyone’s bubble.

I swear I’m not just being precious about this, but the point was, from 10x10 (which this post is actually about despite being about 8x07 :P) the difference between praying and not praying when it came to finding people. It seemed to imply praying opened a direct line that would allow the angel to find someone, specifically because they were being prayed to, and the longing retcon which implied you could buttdial an angel; Buckleming new canon or not it was seeming to say prayer = location, and that’s supported by scenes like 6x03, where Cas only needs an open line to find them. In 5x02 and 5x03 he was the one looking for Sam and Dean, so they were not reaching out to him, and so he had to phone or someone tell him where they were. 

As a work-around to why Cas could find them it backdated every prayer where they didn’t explain where they were with an explanation, by also adding to the known mechanics of how prayers work, and the longing thing was thrown in as an afterthought to explain how Cas found Claire without her actually praying. 9x06 worked on similar mechanics of emotion = GPS signal that an angel could follow.

In 8x19 I’m fairly certain that was a plothole caused by Dean praying to Cas in the deleted scene; the full episode would show Dean did open himself up to that, and if Naomi tapped the line, even if she couldn’t find Cas, the link between them made by the prayer could at least tell her where Dean was.

I don’t know, I just find the longing retcon weirdly watertight from the way I look at it :P

And there was the side walk doomsday preacher guy in 5x18. Dean had him pray to Michael and the other angels, when he was planning to say yes to Michael. This supports the idea that angels can eavesdrop on prayers, and use them as a locator because that was how Cas finds Dean first (“You pray too loud.”)

Now, that begs the question of why Dean didn’t just pray himself. But you could argue that Dean didn’t *realize* it was as easy as that, especially since Castiel at the point rarely explained *anything*, and when he did it was usually under badgering questions. And he certainly isn’t going to explain the mechanics of prayer to Dean when they’re worried Dean’s going to commit suicide by archangel possession.

“I feel like I’m seeing him.”

This episode was SO ROMANTIC. Like, seriously, IN ALL SERIOUSNESS, how do the creators of the show explain away the COMPLETELY RAMPANT ROMANTICISM of the Dean & Cas storyline just in this episode alone? You can’t! You cannot make a convincing argument at all. There is no way that this level of explicitly romantic tropes are applied— to these characters, their story, and their relationship in not only the writing, but the lighting, the cinematography, the editing, and (yes) the acting of this episode— and it is somehow accidental. There is just no way! I mean, Dean standing in the darkness, extreme close up of his anguished face, lit as though by the moon, rain pours down outside, he watches it fall down the window as he thinks but cannot bring himself to speak about what happened to Cas, a flash of lightning illuminates his sad eyes as the storm rages outside— that is some Wuthering Heights bullshit right there, are you fucking shitting me?

“How the hell did you find me?”

“Angels are able to find those who pray to them.”

“Pray? Oh, believe me, I gave up praying a long time ago.”

“It doesn’t have to be a formal prayer, I can, uh, pick up on a longing…”

STOP IT.

The more I think about it the more this works. Season 8 was so patchy in the lore because they clearly forgot Dean was warded from angels, and Cas just constantly pops up by him.

This is Cas literally getting out of Purgatory, presented as him barely even being in this plane until he finally manages to properly manifest behind Dean in the bathroom.

How did he even know to go to Dean? I always assumed because Naomi said she pulled him out that she dropped him there but it’s actually more patchy an explanation because Cas takes a day or two to fully come back to this world.

But imagine him being given the shove by the angels, unknowingly, back to this world, and the beacon that guides him back is the unconscious, unknowing prayer of the one human who misses Castiel specifically - his faith is negligible in every other regard, but his faith and need for Cas is off the charts, so much so he sends out this low-level call constantly in his grief. The one thing that can pull Cas back all the way.

In the end, Dean was the one who dragged every last one of them out of Purgatory.

This is it, the final indictment of Dean Winchester (if he were there to hear it) he would agree. I am a monster. I am crap. Nothing worth saving.

And Cas doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t say, NO, Dean is the best man I’ve ever known. He says, Yes, but nobody is all black or white, we’re all shades, melées, I’m a monster to some degree (You, Claire, are about to become a monster as well, plotting murder)

And Claire, Dean’s mirror, having passed this verdict on Dean then also tries to execute him – the monster in her trying to kill the monster in him

But in the end she changes her mind, and Dean is saved by the goodness in her/him

Cas knows Dean. Who he is, what he is. Forgives him and loves him unconditionally.

And by doing so helps Claire (Dean) to ultimately accept himself, at least enough to let him live.

And Claire takes off to find a way to live with the monster inside her. And so will Dean.

Of course Cas would like Emoticons. 

Enochian is largely pictorial in nature. 

Haha yeah! I’ve been playing around with familiarizing myself with Enochian recently because of the Gabriel’s Horn sigil and yeeeeep.

"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.

#the hunter games#spn spoilers#spn#brother feels#ok ok ok let me tell you a thing#do you see dean’s face in those first two gifs?#that’s the face of a man who is admitting failure#to the only person he’s always felt he can not and should not fail#i’ve seen so much crap about the impala scene#at the end of ask jeeves#where dean snaps and refuses to own up to the fact that something is wrong#idk in which world anyone would assume#that dean’s snaps because he doesn’t care about sam’s opinion#that he’s trying to belittle sam in some way#when he’s only trying to hide his failure from the only person whose opinion he actually cares about#that face right there in the second gif#that’s the face of a man who’s reached the last bit of rope#and is finally saying#i have failed you#i am yet again less than what you believe me to be#it’s a stone expression of someone who thinks so little of himself#that he will never understand why sam doesn’t return his admission of failure with derision he believes he deserves#people say dean holds sam to an impossible standard that he’s too hard on sam#but the fact is#he holds sam to the same standard as he holds himself#which implies they are equal#the only problem is#that standard is way too high for any human being (via honeysweetsam)

I do love the way we’ve had emphasis on the ~group effort~ nature of helping Dean.

(first, of course, Dean started on the MoC path at a time when he had isolated himself away from Sam and Cas, and thus was vulnerable to Crowley’s manipulations)

The solution gets set up in 9x22, with the conversation between Cas and Dean:

Cas: “You really believe we three will be enough?”

Dean: “We always have been.”

10x03 — Dean is the one who reverses the lockdown in the bunker*, which opens the doors back up to Cas, who grabs him and subdues him so that Sam can complete the ritual.

10x10 — Cas trusts Dean with Claire despite what’s just happened in 10x09, Sam tells Dean that Dean needs to be part of the solution himself, and then Dean is able to choose to restrain himself. We see both Cas and Sam extending trust to Dean, and then Dean is able to trust in himself.

* it is very thematic that Sam’s initial, instinctive solution to the situation getting worse (Dean escaping) was to lock down the bunker and, essentially, trap the two of them alone together without any outside help. That’s what the boys have always done and Carver has gone to great lengths to show what a bad idea it is. This is what the two of them did in 8x10 when they cut off communications with Amelia and Benny — they cut themselves off from the world and locked themselves up alone together.

Punk!angel actually getting along really well with her vessel (a girl named Sarah)

She didn’t expect to at first- she was an angel, created for blind obedience. She wasn’t about to Stick it to the Man- she didn’t even know who The Man was. But Sarah made her listen to a Ramones song, and all the sudden Sarah’s got this angel - a being older than the concept of time- on her hands, who is like Advocate #1 for punk subculture

So I was initially just going to make this post to talk about what’s on her shirt—a dragonfly?  And maybe a pair of wings or just some miscellaneous details at the top?  But they put her in something that looks a lot like the red/maroon hoodie (previously worn by Cas, Charlie, and Kevin) and … I just can’t.

So, Dean’s three-part mirror in his bedroom — it made me think of TFW, and how we’ve seen that the support of a group effort is very important to saving Dean, but it also made me think of Dean’s three mirrors this episode.

Other people have mentioned that the two drifters Claire hooks up mirror Dean, and Claire herself is, of course, a Dean mirror, too. And it breaks down pretty elegantly, actually — we have a scuffy, kinda sleezy looking and acting dude (he carries the axe, the blade-edge); we have a much more charming con-woman (who carries a blunt instrument — a bat, in an episode where both Metatron and Dean use the word ‘slugger’); we have the rage-filled wronged child who was being used by her parental figures but feels emotionally lost without them (she provides the motivation for the other parts of Dean’s mirror to go ‘hunting’ for Dean, but then she also provides the part that says, ‘no' and rushes out to warn him).

Claire is Dean’s inner core while sleezy dude and charming lady are the shells that Dean placed around himself to protect him in the very kinds of places that Claire also found herself in. They’re the facades he developed to keep the world from hurting the inner core.

Looking at 9.10, I think the “saving” of Dean may work the same way even if it plays out differently. Getting Sam free of Gadreel was a team effort. Dean was in a state of panic and despair, Sam might be dead if Cas hadn’t been there to make suggestions and offer support, Crowley was their wild card, their Ace, but when it came down to it, it was Sam himself needed to boot Gadreel, his taking back his own body and will.

Dean’s sense of self has hit rock bottom. He’s going to need his brother and his best friend, and there’s likely going to be a wild card (not Crowley again I don’t think…but who?). Like Sam, he can’t do it alone, but ultimately it will come down to Dean himself. I’m guessing emotional realization might play out via an external supernatural plot and physical gesture, not ousting another possession necessarily. But…something.

Reblogging myself, from just about this time last year, because I’m so happy this is still viable and relevant especially the “team effort” and “it will come down to Dean himself.”

Okay I just wanted to run around and flail a bit, but SERIOUS META TIME, the “powerful force” as Dean himself concept is now out there in dialogue. & I love that SAM says this. <3 Sam who used to panic when Dean stumbled and resorted to thinking Dean was weak so he had to step up (thinking of S4), but that’s not how things are going now, if Dean stumbles, Sam steps up but sees Dean’s strength and believes in it. I think I said (somewhere) recently that despite his self-worth issues Dean has a strong sense of himself and personhood already, it’s just buried under so many layers of trauma and hurt and buried anger/resentment and the need to soldier on and be the best son/brother/friend/hunter he can be to everyone. This way this MoC storyline is allowing him to show so much vulnerability to Sam and Cas, and how Sam and Cas are stepping up to be his support system—his net or rock or ropes in the storm—are all really important. Dean’s been the protector and the moral compass and the anchor that stays in place while things crumble around him. It’s amazing seeing him be the crisis, frankly. I don’t think it’s misunderstanding Dean or what the show is doing to be alarmed at how the MoC can control him into committing an excessive level of violence. Or what it would do to Dean’s psyche to enact these things. (And why would it not be okay for Sam and Cas to let Dean use himself as a weapon against Metatron, yet good if Dean turns the MoC into a weapon). 

The idea of Dean living with the MoC is really interesting, I’m hesitant about it being a “good” thing turned into a positive because there’s been too much with Sam, Cas, and Dean on this theme of you are more than the hammer, the blunt instrument, the boy with the demon powers, and turning yourself into a weapon isn’t a great idea. However, things right now are pointing towards Dean being able to assert his sense of self over the MoC and if he can do that, it may not need to be removed.

So it does seem like it’ll come down to something within Dean and the “love…and love” is relevant too. Dean + his ropes in the storm. The “people who love me.” I’m still not sure about the “wild card” I thought might come into play. But this storyline seems to be both about Dean’s strength as a person + the role support & love plays, people who believe in Dean and are worried and will pull Dean back from the edge so he can save himself.

“I feel like I’m seeing him.”

This episode was SO ROMANTIC. Like, seriously, IN ALL SERIOUSNESS, how do the creators of the show explain away the COMPLETELY RAMPANT ROMANTICISM of the Dean & Cas storyline just in this episode alone? You can’t! You cannot make a convincing argument at all. There is no way that this level of explicitly romantic tropes are applied— to these characters, their story, and their relationship in not only the writing, but the lighting, the cinematography, the editing, and (yes) the acting of this episode— and it is somehow accidental. There is just no way! I mean, Dean standing in the darkness, extreme close up of his anguished face, lit as though by the moon, rain pours down outside, he watches it fall down the window as he thinks but cannot bring himself to speak about what happened to Cas, a flash of lightning illuminates his sad eyes as the storm rages outside— that is some Wuthering Heights bullshit right there, are you fucking shitting me?

"How the hell did you find me?"

"Angels are able to find those who pray to them."

"Pray? Oh, believe me, I gave up praying a long time ago."

"It doesn’t have to be a formal prayer, I can, uh, pick up on a longing…"

STOP IT.

The more I think about it the more this works. Season 8 was so patchy in the lore because they clearly forgot Dean was warded from angels, and Cas just constantly pops up by him.

This is Cas literally getting out of Purgatory, presented as him barely even being in this plane until he finally manages to properly manifest behind Dean in the bathroom.

How did he even know to go to Dean? I always assumed because Naomi said she pulled him out that she dropped him there but it’s actually more patchy an explanation because Cas takes a day or two to fully come back to this world.

But imagine him being given the shove by the angels, unknowingly, back to this world, and the beacon that guides him back is the unconscious, unknowing prayer of the one human who misses Castiel specifically - his faith is negligible in every other regard, but his faith and need for Cas is off the charts, so much so he sends out this low-level call constantly in his grief. The one thing that can pull Cas back all the way.

In the end, Dean was the one who dragged every last one of them out of Purgatory.

How is it possible that they managed to make S8 retroactively even MORE damn romantic?

**whale noises**