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awed-frog · 7 years

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I love your 'love tropes everywhere' tag! And right now something came to my mind (Sorry I can't look it up by myself right now, but) might it be that most of these love tropes aren't recognized as such because of the music? At least I can't remember any "lovely" music in DeanCas-scenes, if you understand what I mean.

Hey! Thank you - that’s one of my most depressing tags, but it also makes it so clear what they’re doing with Destiel, doesn’t it?

(Sigh.)

As for the music - that’s a very interesting theory, but unfortunately, music is something I mostly know nothing about, so I don’t know if I can answer your queston. My opinion on that - and I presume that in this case, you’re wondering specifically about the parallels highlighted by this post - is that music can influence the way you view a scene, because even I know that, but I wonder if it can truly override our collective #NoHomo mindset. As I explained here, even for me, someone who grew up with a borderline hippy family reading weird books and watching weirder movies, both IRL and (often) on screen a gay couple is not a couple until they cross some line - and that line is much higher than it is for a straight couple. It’s unfair, but it’s apparently how brains work. For instance, yesterday a Facebook contact I haven’t seen in forever and ever posted a new picture - you could see these two guys, okay, arms around each other, some kind of beach in the distance - and there you see it again - if my friend had been with a girl, I would have assumed, 100%, that that was a romantic partner - a girlfriend or a wife - because something in the picture was very intimate and soft and that’s not how you pose with friends. But since they were two men, and I’d never heard anything about him being gay or bi, I just - I don’t know. You think best friend, you think jokey picture, like those best men playing bridesmaids and screaming at the ring. And whenever this happens, I’m not happy with myself - I tsk and roll my eyes and everything else - but our brains have this weird way of functioning statistically in how we see the world (in movies, 99% of couples are straight and 99% or bros are just friends, so that’s what you see) and then ignoring statistics as soon as there’s a rational decision to be made (a lot more people are killed in traffic and changing light bulbs than they are in terror attacks, and yet it’s the bombs we fear). So in the case of Dean and Cas I’m not exactly sure that even music can change anything, if simply because everything else really didn’t (all those I need you and breaking mind control spells and mixtapes and the platonic staring - if this had been a man and a woman, everybody to the Moon and beyond would have accepted it as canon asap).

I mean, Sam and Jess were a couple, and this is the data our brains have been given - they were in love, they lived together, they went to parties and whatever - this means that what they’re doing with them - Sam seeing Jess by the side of the road, Lucifer pretending to be Jess, Sam rushing to save Jess from the fire and everything else - that’s not subtext - it’s text, and it supports the coherent and honest narrative we’ve seen from the very first episode. For those mythological creatures, the ‘casual viewers’, there’s no ambiguity there, no math to do in their heads. They’ve been told straight out that Sam loved Jess in a ‘I want to have babies with you’ way, so when Lucifer slips into her skin the situation is abundantly clear. Dean and Cas, on the other hand - what is missing, and mostly the reason I’m so angry, is that there is absolutely nothing textual there. Everything we have about them are things that can either be read both ways, or are so ‘unimportant’ that a normal viewer wouldn’t even notice them. This means that when Lucifer pretends to be Cas, the situation is very different (maybe not for us, but for a ton of people out there). And, frankly, not even Céline Dion could change this - after seeing the media’s reaction to the mixtape, for instance, it was clear to me that the next season could open with a montage of Dean teaching Cas how to dance with My Heart Will Go On blaring from some jukebox and it still wouldn’t be enough.

(Ugh.)

And the thing is, part of me understands this reluctance or obliviousness we’re seeing about realizing Destiel is a thing, because there is no reason, none, not to insert it in the text. If they want to preserve some UST and general misery, which is always a good idea, they could still have Dean talk to Jody - they had the perfect opening this season in her You can tell me anything speech - or, whatever, they could have filmed the magnificent episode someone (sorry, I never remember who) wrote here on tumblr about a case featuring some ex boyfriend of Dean’s. Seriously, it’s not that difficult.

(But, yeah.)

So, I’m sorry - the only thing I can offer here is that I checked out the first parallel (because I can’t bear to rewatch that last episode, and I do remember Casifer talking to Dean wasn’t framed in any particularly romantic way).

When Sam sees Jess in Bloody Mary, the background music is The Rolling Stones’ Laugh I Nearly Died, which starts well before that scene and seems to be more about Sam’s feelings of guilt and ‘unmooredness’ than his everlasting love for Jess. Jess appears during the guitar solo and disappears over the last refrain - I’m so sick and tired / Trying to turn the tide, yeah / So I’ll say my goodbye / Laugh, laugh / I nearly died. As for the Destiel scene that was heavily paralleled to that one, well - it’s neatly done, isn’t it, because in this case, Dean sees Cas right at the beginning of the episode (Sam and Jess, that was the very last scene) and, again, the scene is framed by a classic rock song, The Animals’ We Gotta Get Out of This Place. Now, the interesting thing is that the Destiel scene is played in a much more insistent way - that song is way more romantic, for starters (‘Cause girl, there’s a better life for me and you), and when Dean sees Cas, the lyrics go Now my girl you’re so young and pretty / And one thing I know is true, yeah / You’ll be dead before your time is due, I know it. The second thing is that Dean, unlike Sam, acts upon this vision - he stops the car, drives back, gets out, and looks around, whereas Sam simply stared in awed desperation at Jess before the screen went black. And, third point: when we saw Jess, that was filmed from Sam’s point of view, but when we saw Cas, that wasn’t Dean’s point of view - it was the external narrator’s (so to speak), and that generally means what we’re seeing is objective reality. Now, I’m not saying that’s yet another indication that Dean loves Cas (or maybe a little bit) - I think what’s happening here is that Cas, unlike Jess, was not dead, and that Dean actually had a glimpse of him walking along some road - maybe not the one he was driving on, but that scene - and this is confirmed by how it was filmed - was real. Dean saw Cas, and Cas saw Dean. That wasn’t a vision. As to what it means, subtextually, if anything - I am reminded of that Fanfiction thing where the two girls playing Dean and Cas were a couple in real life. External narrators and objective reality outside the theatre’s stage usually means, this is actually true, pay attention - but, again, it’s subtext, so, whatever.

Anyway, if you’re interested in this I can recommend TV Tropes, which is devouring Supernatural with a vengeance (see for instance their Ho Yay! page, which features many examples of barely subtextual homoerotic moments).

(By the way - I rewatched bits of Bloody Mary to find that Jess scene and there he was, baby Dean waking Sam up from a nightmare and saying, ‘Sooner or later we’re going to have to talk about this’ - and that’s another example of viewer bias, isn’t it, because when I first started to watch the show, I didn’t really like Dean and mostly saw him as some insensitive fuckboy - and yet I bet there were plenty of little moments like that one which already contradicted this alpha male façade Dean was trying to cling on to. I guess I just didn’t see them, not until later, because I’d already decided in my mind what this character was like.

Brains are funny things, aren’t they?)

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