Looking at this scene and thinking: yeah Dean and Cas were good platonic buddies is pretty insane. Because this isn't a friend grieving his friend. This is a husband grieving his spouse...
the craziest thing about the widower arc is that dean thinks mary is dead too but that is so clearly not the thing he's losing the will to live over. do you understand how fucked up and crazy-making it is that that happens on the show that is conceivably about the winchester men avenging mary winchester's untimely demise? do you get it? he wanted to die and then he was dressing up like a cowboy and his mommy was still dead AM I GETTING THROUGH TO YOU
oh my fucking god dean had to carry cas' body to get him onto the pyre he had to carry all of cas' dead weight while the grief still clung to his shoulders he wrapped up cas' body himself and when sam mentions the meadow, he says it's where dean spread the ashes, excluding him and jack because dean wouldn't have let anyone else handle cas so dean had to be the one to carry cas from the house table to the pyre they all lost something in cas, a friend, a protector, a father, but dean lost half of his soul that night oh i am unwell and unstable with these thoughts—
Carrying Cas is one of, if not the most intimate gesture Dean could ever bring himself to do for him, it’s the closest they could ever be, and it’s only when Cas is DEAD and he’s ALONE and there’s nobody else to see—not even us—that he gets to do that.
widower arc dean is soooooooo special to me. he is so hopeless and miserable alllll the time. he makes pb&j sandwiches for breakfast because his dead wife (Cas) loved them. he cant find joy in anything despite his little brother offering him special treats like a owner gives their pet hamster things to chew on. he is literally milliseconds away from ending it all and eventually does kill himself. love and peace on planet widower arc dean.
you know that post that's like, "widower arc Dean would punch divorce arc Dean in the face?" PLEASE tell me there's a fic where that happens, I have a mighty need
Sam needs sensitivity training or an anti work place harassment seminar. Offering to take your brother to a strip club as comfort after the death of his boyfriend is bad form and a micro aggression, possibly a hate crime
Never getting over the fact that both Crowley and Cas's deaths in s12 are completely useless. Like, as far as Crowley is concerned, they clearly just wanted to kill him off, which okay I can get that, but they did it in a very stupid way. The dude sacrificed himself (totally ooc, but he's been so for at least the whole s12 so not a news) to close the rift but, surprise!, in s13 they will have to open it several times to go to the AU to save Mary. Uhm, okay. Crowley joins Bobby, Kevin and Charlie and their completely useless deaths from a narrative pov (if you delete their deaths the storyline stays exactly the same). His death doesn't even serve the purpose of "pathos", like the others did, because it gets completely overshadowed by Cas's death.
So Cas's death in s12. Zero sense. He dies and goes to The Empy. Now, that could've been interesting since we discover that there's Hell, Heaven, Purgatory and now... The Empty. But s13 doesn't deal with The Empty at all (and I'd argue no other season really deals with it at all but that's for another story). So what was the purpose of Cas's death? Ah, yes. To show us how Dean is devasted by it. Okay, fair. A tad cruel and also we've already seen this but okay, at least there's some sense. But NO! We spent the first 5 (beautiful) episodes of s13 literally watching Dean dealing with pain, it's fucking clear that this is about Cas because when he turns up alive again the guy is completely over the moon and forgets his mother might still be alive *waves in vague directions* somewhere. So, as a viewer, I'm led to think that Cas's death is A Big Deal, but again NO! The angel is alive, rebuilt and ready for... WAR? Like, I'm sorry, what? It's in this exact moment that I realized how much the show has betrayed the viewers' trust. There needed to be a payoff between Dean and Cas, it wasn't gonna be romantic we all know that, but the fact that everything was swept under the rug enrages me to no end.
Gosh, I could talk for hours about how season 13 has let me down. What a waaaaaste!
it's never too late to start all over again + dean's shadowed face being lit up by cas' call + romeo and juliet cross + welcome home + face caress = my sanity going out the window
My own personal headcanon is that once it started to sink in for Dean that Cas is dead, he switches from being unable to say “dead” to being unable to say his name.