Ryan Reynolds having staff hype up his new tumblr account to users and then realizing that a shitty CW show that ended almost two years ago is trending over him in anticipation of the 5th
y’know, as a kippa-wearing jew, there’s a lovely kind of fond, warm kinship i feel whenever i am out and about in the world and i see someone wearing religious headgear. hijabs, turbans, taqiyah, tichels, etc, i love seeing people in them like. yeah. me too :’).
something very sexy and spiritually intertwined about the girls who get never let me go and the girls who get vice versa...
something about finding yourself in an unfamiliar world and clinging to a stranger who oddly enough doesn’t feel like one; something about choosing to be kind, to be good; something about opening your wary heart to love and discovering, to your anguish, that once you have you can't live without it
something about separation; something about returning "home" only to find that the person who was once a stranger to you has become your home instead; something about "please don't leave me"/"don't disappear on me again"
something about second chances; something about soulmates; something about ‘maybe it was fate all along, but even if it wasn't, i'd still choose you’…
i like how dean's impatience to get through these trials mirrors both kevin's situation and his own inner desires. kevin really is, in a way, a manifestation of dean's current state: he's a guy forced into a life he doesn't want and who wants to get it over with so he can move on (to what? who knows).
the bunker was introduced at probably the perfect point then, because it represents a kind of stability dean has never had, and so it only serves to make him crave that alternate life more desperately. it feeds into his impatience and fucks him over in the end.
and on the other end of this is sam, who, like he says at the beginning of episode 8.14, is treating this life as a marathon, not a sprint. there's a marked difference between how sam is using the bunker and how dean is: for dean it's stability and home, an ideal he's never really had. sam, on the other hand, is largely indifferent to this idea of stability, represented in his indifference to maintaining his space (i.e. not caring that he misses the trash can when he throws out his wrapper) and his irreverence toward dean's lifestyle changes (i.e. mocking dean for "nesting" and cooking and generally becoming something of a homemaker). this is a running theme throughout supernatural... over and over sam completely abandons the idea of a normative life, even when he claims to want "out" so badly. he's more willing to give everything up, to avoid forming attachments, to simply not care about what he could have instead.
it's expounded on again and again throughout the show that dean and sam are opposites in this regard. dean has resigned himself to the hunter life, but he secretly craves normalcy. sam tries to get out of the hunter life, but he is more willing than even dean to commit himself fully to it.
and so the fact that this culminates in sam undertaking the trials is delightfully poetic. dean wants out, and so even though he wants to protect sam and take the trials on himself, he fails to rise to the occasion: his own impatience to leave this world behind, his desire to get out, becomes his undoing. sam, committed to this life for the long haul and fully resigning himself to everything that means, is the one left.
so in the end, dean fails to protect sam because of his own inability to give everything up. it's just another reason to hate himself. and how fucked up is it that despite dean going on and on about how attachments are liabilities, it's those very attachments, those deep-seated desires, that backfire on him thoroughly. he can't even live up to his own ideologies. in this way, sam and john are far more similar; dean is the black sheep of the family.
benny and the bunker both are great ways to set up this plot line and symbolize dean's inner psychology. it provides great setup and tension that's been building across the season, so that when the final hour approaches and dean fails spectacularly to protect the one person he's devoted his whole life to, there is a whole list of everywhere dean went wrong to look back on and regret. it's a perfect tragedy because it's entirely preventable, and yet doomed from the start—because how can you really blame someone simply for wanting something he can call home?