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ywhiterain · 3 years

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"If you try to follow me, I'm gonna put a bullet in your damn leg”

After I finish my season eight rewatch, I’ll address the ways Sam and Dean’s suicidal ideation is presented in the text this season and their relationship with one another, but this little speech is an interesting nugget in context of how SPN ends.

You, with a wife and kids and – and – and grandkids, living till you're fat and bald and chugging Viagra – that is my perfect ending, and it's the only one that I'm gonna get.

I do think this is an overcorrection on Dean’s part. What he did with the phantom text and how Sam chose to stay with him anyway did unsettle him. Dean has always, always had a complicated relationship with Sam getting out of the hunt. He’s proud of Sam, but resents him. He wants Sam to be happy, but he doesn’t want to be without Sam.

The obvious solution here is to compromise. There’s literally no reason that Sam couldn’t, say, marry Amelia and be a home base Dean goes back to every couple of months for a visit. Sam can go for easy hunts on the weekend. Or Sam could set up shop a la Bobby (where he’s got both a day job and connections with the hunting community) while Dean LARPS in between hunts. Or a zillion other ways that they could both get a life that would satisfy them.

But the problem comes down to this: Dean wants Sam to be in the passengers side with him while they’re on crazy street. He wants that domestic partnership with Sam. He wants to be able to control/protect Sam on his own terms. Dean’s purpose is Sam. Say what you want about John making Dean a coparent, but at some point, that becomes Dean’s choice.

At the end of the day, Dean does get his wish. He gets several more years with Sam before he dies on a hunt. Sam lives out his life by making his own family and choosing very very terrible wallpaper to decorate his home in.

It never had to be like this. I agree that there was plenty of room for Dean to have more. This very episode has him nesting and cooking and decorating. Dena has a lot of potential to be more than a hunter and a grunt.

But I don’t think that was ever going to be Dean’s story. As I’ll point out until the day I die, Supernatural genre was ultimately horror. It certainly had influence from fantasy, science fantasy, superheroes, and honest to god sitcoms - but that’s was always going to be the framework Supernatural lived in.

The idea of Dean deserving a better ending is.. fine. But I don’t think that’s in line with what the story being told. Dean is given options beyond the hunt and his relationship with Sam. He’s flirted with these options. In the end, he found himself back in the Impala with Sam in a life where people tended to die young and violently.

Dean isn’t a real person. He’s a construct of dozens of different writers, directors, editors and several different actors (though JA is obviously the biggest influence there). Criticizing constructs is an important way of interacting with the text. Here I’ll do it.

ISN’T IT INTERESTNG THAT RAPHAEL, THE ONLY ARCH ANGEL PLAYED BY BLACK ACTORS, DIDN’T COME BACK IN LATER SEASONS LIKE HIS BROTHERS. I WONDER WHY HE’S THE LEAST DEVELOPED OF THE FOUR OF THEM. I WONDER WHY.

But one of the parts of interacting with stories is to buy into the fiction and surrender to it, to a degree. To allow yourself to see characters as something more than constructs. Dean’s ending may not have been what one wanted, but I don’t think it came out of nowhere. And I think it’s probably the most honest ending we could have gotten as the series went on.

#dean winchester #supernatural #spn meta

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