she felt as if she had lived a long, long time

insert sadness, anger and loss here;

But you’re all alone

#i miss the pure lyrical americana-struck-through-with-ghouls of the early seasons #i love the complexity and grandeur that came #but it came at the sacrifice of this elegaic kind of visual and narrative poetry #i miss that 

2.03

dean + talking about hell

really when you think about it is it any wonder dean acts so alpha male butch, i mean these are the comments he gets NOW, and he's only got more rugged as he's grown up,it must have just been non-stop when he was younger,pretty pretty girly precious feminine princess etc etc, no wonder dean modelled himself physically off john, john's handsome but he's very much traditionally masculine features-wise, john was the rugged manly archetype dean desperately wished he was instead of being the pretty one,no wonder dean based his persona off the hyper-masculine square-jawed womanizer hero type you see in tv, if he acted manly enough people would be forced to respect him as a hero, so he buried the stuff like the panty kink and the cooking and the nesting and the liking nice clothes down as far the fuck as they would go, and they're only just surfacing, but he's still semi-constantly getting the reinforcement that he's feminine in looks, and that's setting him back every time (via neraiutsuze)

These tags are everything and I feel the need to clumsily invade them. I was having this discussion with Vee about the continuous objectification of Dean by the narrative (it's a discussion I tend to revisit quite often) - he is often literally spoken about/traded/regarded as a kind of object, as a body because of the ‘blunt little instrument’ idea. it’s actually really fascinating to me because I think it plays SO MUCH into his self-worth (or lack therein), his perception of his own personhood. He continually defined himself in very specific ways growing up, most often through aspiring to be like John, but never quite making it - music, clothing, car, he still didn’t think he ‘measured up’ to that ideal (because he’s inherently dissimilar to his father and tied to his mother, and his parentification only underscores that). He had the craving for home and comfort and emotional attachment but had to repress it, and the only way he knew how was to adopt that outer layer of the soldier. and at some point he learned to use his physicality as an advantage, tricking adversaries with either the guise of attractiveness or brute strength, and then blindsiding them with intelligence or emotional capacity, but the latter qualities often went unnoticed.

And she said, "it’s not even the objectification it’s the kind of language /used/ to objectify him, you know? ‘pretty’ ‘delicate’ — arguably ‘feminine’ compliments that in a hunter’s world are associated with weakness. And so Dean pushes against that as hard as he can, using ‘girl’ and ‘bitch’ as insults (against Sam mostly). Like, his body is all he has, it’s the only thing that he sees as having some value and he guards it, he weaponizes it, and as you said, uses it as a tool to pull off plans and think up strategies that other people couldn’t."

(Sam is much more that masculine ideal, and much more akin to John - all that fury and reckless impulse, so of course psychologically Dean projects, but that would probably lead me on a tangent. The point Vee made stands, though.)

Dean knows his vulnerabilities well, understands his depths, but doesn't feel he's allowed them, so outwardly he has the need to belittle those aspects of himself that he constantly was led to believe are flaws or wrong or weaknesses. It's only recently that we've even seen him branch out a little more in something as basic as clothing (and the fact that he immediately views the Men of Letters' bunker as a home, wants a place to keep things, finds the need to make real food - facets that also all lead into another discussion about his underlying connection to his environment and desires, but I digress).

And I've definitely discussed this before, but under extreme duress, he seemingly doesn't have a lot of attachment TO his body because he began at some point to view himself as an extended weapon, he puts it out there all the time as a sacrifice and allows himself to be brutalized, but when it happens with someone he LOVES, there’s a paradigm shift there from sacrifice to sacrament, it’s when damage to his physical body somehow lets his soul leak through and that pulls his loved ones back from the brink. and obviously there’s a very disturbing element to the fact that he has closely had to tie physical abuse to expressions of love/salvation, and an unsettling aspect to how often people who claim to love him have beaten him down, but I think it sort of stands as this testament to what a powerful spirit he has, that his physical presence doesn’t contain it.

tl;dr he lives in a constant struggle between learning to value his individuality as a physical being and thinking he deserves a certain amount of pain to that physical being, regardless of how damaging it continues to be to his self-worth, and it becomes this very interesting identity crisis - a soul continually used as a body, a heart and mind overlooked for sinew and muscle and clenched fists and pretty green eyes.

September 18, 2008

Dean Winchester is saved.

S P N   M E M E →  seven RELATIONSHIPS:

x I wish I couldn’t feel a damn thing.