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mittensmorgul · 7 years

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I'm the anon who brought up that quote from SotF. Boy howdy, epic reply! You gave us lots to think about so I'm writing back to clarify my question. I totally agree with you that Dean is not a mean person and I totally agree that both Cas and Dean have had passive/aggressive moments in their relationship, speaking of. :) My issue with having Dean shout at Cas in a room full of people that nobody cares about you and your pain is mean and out of character to me. 1/2

2/2 If motivation was the objective, then I also agree his approach with Kevin is more in character, “I know you’re hurting right now and we can work on it later, but right now we need you to step up and help in the fight.” Said in his still gruff manner, not mollycoddling, but the emotional support is there. That’s why the line to Cas bothers me. It seemed too harsh even out of the anger and frustration Dean felt because he thought Cas was running away from responsibility. Actually, 2/3 now.

3/3 Being a bit facetious about “words hurt” line, I was connecting it to the point they both have done and said things to each other that were hurtful and just ended up complicating their relationship. So those kinds of extreme words made me think that feeds into Cas’ insecurities. As desperate as Dean may be, it doesn’t feel like he would be pushed that far to say those words. Guess for both of them, you always hurt the ones you love. Hope you don’t mind my long reply, you’re awesome! Thanks!

Oh gosh, hi. :P

First off, apologies for going on and on and on… this has happened to me several times over the last few days of rewatches, where I took a short anon ask and just… got sucked into writing long meta while three or four episodes ran in the background… Sorry. Sometimes I have trouble pulling a single thought out of the context of the larger narrative it sits in. For reference, this is the very long reply:

http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/163454512675/survival-of-the-fittest-rewatch-airs-today-i-have

I think part of the reason WHY Dean “toned it down” a bit with Kevin is BECAUSE he felt bad about having been so short with Cas in essentially the same situation, you know? And with Kevin there in 8.01? It was IMMEDIATELY after he got back from a YEAR in Purgatory, an entire year spent struggling not only to get OUT of purgatory, but to get out WITH CAS.

And he’d failed.

This was also before Dean “altered the memory” of those final moments at the portal. He was honest with Sam there, or at least far more honest than he was with himself and Cas in 8.07, before he’d been forced to live with that reality for a while and just… could’t accept it anymore, you know?

So yeah, I do think that’s part of the reason he didn’t just bark angrily at Kevin the way he did at Cas. But he also didn’t have the 10 tons of emotional baggage going in to that conversation with Kevin that Dean had with Cas by 7.23.

Kevin hadn’t hurt HIM, PERSONALLY. Kevin wasn’t avoiding acknowledging some sort of personal failure that was directly harming Dean, the way Cas was in 7.23. Dean had been willing to try and let all of that go, at least while they were still scrambling to put an end to the Leviathan, but when they discovered that they absolutely NEEDED Cas to succeed in that mission, and Cas was refusing to participate, refusing to even acknowledge that he should have any personal responsibility in fixing the situation at all… well… That was something Dean couldn’t accept.

And sorry, but crazy!Cas isn’t “cute.” He’s not a precious lil bean that needs protecting. He was using that to avoid having to face the enormity of what his actions in s6 led to. I wrote another really super long post two days later on (among other things) how this came to a head for Cas in 8.08 and his outburst at Dean’s gentle prodding about why he didn’t want to return to Heaven.

http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/163529983575/so-many-nice-destiel-moments-in-87-but-i-have-a

Like, the “crazy” in s7 was EXTREME DENIAL. I mean, he’d literally suffered amnesia for months, forgetting he was even an angel at all and everything else… (including Dean). There’s no better metaphor for extreme denial. It’s like the tropiest version of “new phone who dis” that can possibly exist. And it takes him a LONG time to come back from that.

Late s7 “crazy!Cas” (and I have to say again how much I detest that being applied to this version of Cas, because again he is NOT crazy, he is in uberdenial and avoiding anything that might make him feel guilty/responsible for the horrific things he did, however inadvertently, in the name of trying to save the universe)….

Lemme start that previous thought again, since I got completely derailed by my own parenthetical.

Late s7 Cas was the first step back after his “penance” and subsequent recovery began. It’s Cas who is so ashamed of what he’d done that he couldn’t even face it AT ALL, until Dean started to pry his way back under all that denial. Dean acknowledged Cas’s feelings about being “poison” (to use Dean’s pet word for himself), and finally Cas felt like there might be a real way for him “to fix it.” Or at least start…

(He’d already “fixed” Sam at that point, which was something, but by no means the entirety of what he felt needed fixing… and remember that taking Sam’s Hell Trauma into himself is what drove Cas into that “crazy” state in the first place… the sort of trauma that had nearly killed Sam, and that he’d only spent all of s7 coping with by an extreme act of denial– pressing the scar on his hand and utterly rejecting the hallucinations his own damaged soul was inflicting on him…)

So, yeah, I have some pretty complicated thoughts and feelings about this, but I also feel like nothing else in Cas’s subsequent development arc makes any sense at all unless his absolute guilt and denial and yes, even his outburst in 8.08 about not wanting to return to heaven to face what he’d done driving him to thoughts of killing himself, are acknowledged for what they are.

It’s awful, it’s painful, it’s terrible all around. But I’m not in denial about it. It feels like doing a serious disservice to Cas and his later understanding and self-forgiveness and acceptance, and it’s really the foundation of EVERYTHING solid in his relationship with Dean (and Sam) over the next five seasons. It all had to come from this moment of hurt and guilt and anger and FORGIVING each other.

#spn 7.17 #spn 7.23 #spn 8.08 #castiel winchester #Anonymous

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