#but the way the writers are handling it isn't making me want to shrivel up and die! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

awed-frog · 7 years

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The frustrating thing for me, when people use Dean's issues to point out WHY he handles emotional situations badly is that the sympathy isn't with the people that suffers because of it (like Cas). It's with Dean. An explanation for Dean's behaviour shouldn't become a justification. If Dean loves Cas but treats Cas badly, why should we root for this relationship? Him almost killing Cas is about CAS' suffering, not his. But his reaction is not about what Cas deserves, but about his wants. IMO etc.

I’ve been trying to come up with something clever about this ask for a few days, but I got nothing, so I’m just going to tell you what’s going through my mind in the clearest possible way.

1) The viewers will often have a favourite and defend them to the death, and if you find it frustrating, there’s not much you can do other than unfollow people or blacklist some tags. I understand where you come from - I also get annoyed when people justify everything’s a character’s ever done, even the most twisted and problematic things, just because they like him or her. To be honest, I think I stopped caring when I saw a discussion about how Tate Langdon was the perfect boyfriend - some part of my soul just shrivelled and died and I decided that yep, some people are batshit insane and most people get unreasonable around stuff they love, and what can you do about it?

2) If you’re talking about the writers/creators of a show, on the other hand, I think it’s important to remember where is our POV and what kind of story those people are telling. Like, Supernatural is not House of Cards: whatever he does, Dean will be written as sympathetic, and since we see this world (mostly) from his POV, everything is reflected back on him. I know some people get angry about this - characters getting killed to make the Winchesters feel bad, or simply to advance the plot - but that’s how you tell a story (everybody does the same thing, and if you don’t see it, it means they’re doing their job right). Your main characters are the ones who matter, and the ones whose emotions we care about. So, even when it comes to someone as important to the story as Cas is, Dean will get most of the plot, and this is just how things work.

The next point might upset some people, so I’ll place it under a cut. Stay safe.

3) On placing sympathy on the abuser, rather than the victim - I think there are several reasons for this. One is that, traditionally, our stories in the West are about the conquerors and the victors, not those who have been defeated (when Euripides wrote a tragedy about the Trojan noblewomen being sold off as slaves after the war, people were not happy, and that play is still controversial today). At the same time, we all realize, because we’re not psychopaths, that violence is not nice, and that’s how you end up with this compromise narrative best summarized by Frankie Boyle.

Another aspect of this is that many victims are women (or people ‘outside’ a community, such as queer people or POC), and many abusers are men, and, again, traditionally we give less weight and importance to the feelings and wellbeing of women than we do to those of men. Combine that with the fact many storytellers (I use the term loosely) are men, and you get where we are today: a story about a woman being beaten by her husband is ‘boring’ and not something the audience will want to watch, but the story of a tortured man who can’t help but beat his wife because demons is ‘interesting’ and worth everyone’s attention.

Finally, I think there’s a combination of these two factors in play as well - we mostly want to see stories about people acting, not reacting; about people being brave and fighting and winning, because we generally identify with the main character and we want some sort of happy ending for them. And the problem is - a victim of violence who overcomes this violence - that can still be perceived as a bleak story, right, because abusers are often a solid part of the community (husbands and fathers in family dramas, soldiers and commanders in war movies), which means that this kind of stories are, in their very nature, unsettling and revolutionary, because what they’re telling you is that the community was wrong in trusting those people. It’s no wonder, really, that Francesco Rosi’s Uomini contro was threatened, sued, and had great trouble to find distribution in Italian cinemas: despite being a movie about a century old war, it sided - very clearly - with the soldiers who’d been brutalized by their own commanders, and while the situation was well-known and mostly accurate from a historical point of view, the backlash was still enormous. And this is the same reaction you get, not only towards fictional stories, but about real ones too. All those murder-suicides - ‘normal’ men killing their wives and children before shooting themselves - both the media and the public’s reaction is inevitably incredulity and a refusal to dig deeper. We want to believe our societies are healthy and we want to believe that men (unlike women, those fickle and untrustworthy creatures) are mostly right about everything, and this is what we get as a result. We’re so good at ignoring violence it sometimes comes back to haunt us (is it just me or all the latest US shooters had priors of domestic violence?). So, you see - a man coming to terms with his own anger and becoming a better person, that’s an inspiring story we’re all okay with; but a woman standing up to her husband, that’s a bit different. There’s a seed of revolt there, a sort of If she did it, why can’t I? that we really don’t want people to see.

(In case it’s not clear, I’m violently against all of this. I’m sick of this kind of stories, and I do think that we need some waking up and some revolution in our communities.)

4) You say an explanation shouldn’t mean a justification, and I totally agree, but I also think it’s hard to do this right, both IRL and in fiction, because the more you know about someone, the more you empathize with them, which means any villain can become redeemable with the right background story - just ask Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. As for Dean and Cas, I don’t think Dean ever justified his own behaviour; in fact, he even atoned for it, in his own Dean way, when he allowed a crazed Cas to beat him up and insisted in keeping the bruises. It wasn’t perfect, but, then again, neither is Dean.

5) Why should we root for this relationship if Dean treats Cas badly - does Dean really treat Cas badly? I don’t think so. Dean is a MESS, all capitals. He tries his best, and I really feel for him, but the truth is, he doesn’t know how to do this. As far as we know, he didn’t have any friends or significant relationships growing up, and by the beginning of the series, the only person he seems to connect to in any healthy way is Bobby. Honestly - it takes years for Dean, who grew up as a soldier and a conman and a loner and never had a right to his own childhood and a life that wasn’t taking care of his brother and helping out his father, to get better at this. And, sure, the relationship with Cas is no different - at the beginning, Dean is confrontational, a sarcastic little shit, occasionally cons Cas into having his way - but the magic of what happens between them is that pretty soon, all of Dean’s traditional walls and posturing take a step back. What’s really special here is that Dean is honest with Cas in a way he isn’t with anyone else, and despite the fact he loves Cas so fiercely, he mostly tries to respect his decisions, and is never harsh with him if not in very extreme circumstances. Personally, the one moment between them I truly hated was Dean’s Nobody cares that you’re broken, because, OUCH - looking back, I can see that this was Dean channelling John, but still - it was an incredibly dickish thing to say (and it must have haunted Dean in Purgatory, especially since, as far as he knew, Cas had died - because of him). As for the rest of it - I doubt we’ll ever have fluffy lines between them, but that doesn’t mean they’re not incredibly soft with each other. I don’t know if you were referring specifically to S12E19, but Dean pushing Cas against a wall in anger - that’s not abuse. He knows he can’t hurt Cas (physically) unless he really tries, so that scene was about Dean needing to put his hands on Cas, to feel him, to make sure he was there and he was okay; and also a harmless way to let his frustration out, to say what he doesn’t know how to put into words (that he cares, that is, and that he doesn’t need Cas to bring him back any win, the dumbass, because that’s not what actually matters). And maybe that reaction doesn’t seem soft to you, but this is Dean Winchester, right, the killer even demons are afraid of and the guy who basically doesn’t trust anyone - Cas just spent weeks MIA, never bothered to call, didn’t tell them he had a line on Kelly, stole the Colt form Dean knowing full well how much that weapon meant to him, collaborated with Heaven without telling him one word about it - and, on the whole, Dean’s not even angry. He’s worried, and he’s frustrated (with Cas; with himself), but he understands why Cas did what he did, and that makes all the difference.

“Dude, if anybody else - I mean anybody - pulled that kind of crap, I would stab them in their neck on principle. Why should I give him a free pass?”

“Because it’s Cas.”

You know - I always felt that for Dean, who’s always been coded as the ‘female’ character both with Sam and with Cas, the Mark of Cain was the ultimate undoing precisely because it took from him all those ‘feminine’ traits which are such a profound part of who he is. The fact that it all culminated in him beating the hell out of Cas, in a reversal of their traditional ‘fights’ (I’m inverted commaing this because most of those happened under some sort of mind control, so they weren’t really fights), was, in a way, a complete assertion of his new role of Alpha Male - while Cas had stepped back into a more traditional ‘feminine’ role the whole season. In this sense, I understand that the narrative focused way more heavily on Dean, because he was the one acting out of character and doing ‘weird’ things - but ideally, yes, I would have wanted to know what that beating meant for Cas, what he was thinking as he healed himself, and everything else. So, yeah - it’s a mess, and it’s not a traditional love story, perhaps, but I still think they’re right for each other and they do make each other happy, so personally, I’m rooting for them. There are tons of abusive relationships on TV that are passed off as normal, even romantic, but this isn’t one of them.

#ask #destiel #deancas #spn season 12 #spn 12x19 #domestic violence for ts #traditional narratives #not sure if this is clear or not #but it's mostly how i feel about this issue

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