#dean&mary.txt

[eileenguy]

1x09 // 2x20 // 4x21 // 12x02 // 12x22

happy mother's day ❤️ (2/2)

(pt. 1)

#sam winchester #dean winchester #mary winchester #spn 1x09 #home #spn 2x20 #what is and what should never be #spn 4x21 #when the levee breaks #spn 12x02 #mamma mia #spn 12x22 #who we are #sam & mary #dean & mary #sam&mary.txt #dean&mary.txt #mary.txt #dean.txt #sam.txt

[soupernatural]

mary took dean for his first drive in the impala. he was soooo small but she held him in her lap and let him wrap his little fingers around the wheel and kick at her legs instead of the gas pedal. he laughed and laughed. she thought “hey, maybe i can do this.”

#and she never tells john. #mary found out she was pregnant with sam and grabbed dean and hopped in the impala and she ran. #they stayed at a motel for the night and in the morning she takes dean out to the car. he’s 3. #mary is not normal about anything including bonding with her toddler son. #marynatural #mary.txt

[castielcommunism]

it’s frustrating that they never go anywhere with mary reading john’s journal in the show, because I think it would be the catalyst to a comprehensive re-evaluation of john’s role in her sons’ lives, and is probably the only thing that would get dean to properly question his relationship to his father.

like there’s a dual refusal to accept reality going on with mary and dean - mary doesn’t want to accept that her children are grown adults and that her absence destroyed their lives. it makes her feel powerless and incredibly guilty. and dean is using mary to displace all of his unexamined rage at his father. it’s a lot easier to be angry at his mom for dying than it is to get angry at his father for abusing and neglecting them for years, especially when mary seems hellbent on retreating into fantasy where her children are still babies. but mary reading john’s journal would undo both of those things - she would be confronted with the man her husband was and the things he did to their children as a result of her absence, and she would be able to recuperate some sense of agency in her own life by getting angry at this. she can’t undo the past and she can’t fix what happened, but she can be a zealous advocate for her children and rage against what their father did to them.

and dean would have no choice but to listen, because the only person he would hear any criticism of john from is his mom. she is an authority figure he respects and wants to listen to, and on top of that she’s on his side. like for the first time in his life he would feel fully empowered to admit that he was mistreated. because his mom is telling him that it’s okay to feel that. this isn’t even something he could let himself do with bobby, I think partially because bobby isn’t biological family and partially because mary feels like a much closer authority on the subject of their father, despite the fact that bobby actually knew him a lot better.

and hilariously I think this is how sam and mary would connect and form a relationship. like she wouldn’t be able to just walk into the room one day and say well I read john’s journal and your dad was an abusive asshole. if I’d had been there I wouldn’t have let any of that happen. because dean WOULD push back and it would probably cause a fight. a serious conversation about john would have to be a slow, uneven process of untangling what the fuck happened in their childhood, and sam would happily entertain his mom asking him questions. like she can’t get straight answers from dean because he wants to both protect his mom from the reality of their life AND he wants to protect his father from the wrath of his mother. but sam would absolutely have a frank and honest conversation with mary about their childhood (at least what parts he remembers). It would be painful and messy and enraging, but he would finally have someone who wants him to talk about what happened to him and his brother. and like I’m sure mary would resist some of this at first, too, because the reality of what john did is horrifying and accepting that means accepting some kind of responsibility for it, even if she didn’t actually do any of the abusing and would have prevented it had she seen it occurring.

but like eventually all three of them would arrive at a shared set of facts, which is that john was neglectful and abusive to his kids. dean would be given permission to be angry about it from someone he loves and respects, and he would even be allowed to give up responsibility for his own anger. mary started it, so he doesn’t have to drown himself in guilt and self-doubt over thinking his father was a shitty person. he’s being handed down this mercy by his mother. and sam would finally have someone fully on his side, allowing him to present his case and explain himself. he would be given absolution for all the fights he started with his father, and for the deep-seated self-disgust he felt for being “unclean”, not to mention john’s own disgust. and mary would finally be able to feel like she knows what’s going on, and that she can take control of some element of her family’s life. she can redeem herself to her own sons by being their champion, even if it’s thirty years too late. they can do this autopsy of their own family history together and move forward with the knowledge that what happened wasn’t okay.

#mary.txt #bro.txt #mary & dean #sam & dean #season 12 #meta

[castielcommunism]

godddd season 12 is so good like throughout the show multiple different demons and angels all use mary as a figure to torment dean about how everyone he loves abandons him. he’s such a horrible burden to everyone that even as a child his mother wanted to get away from him. and then mary comes back from the dead as a flesh and blood person and dean is like omg yes finally someone who is honour-bound by familial duty to love me and never leave me. AND I’m a total stranger to her so my mom doesn’t know enough about me to hate me. and then mary is like this is kind of a lot to process can I have some space. and leaves

#dean.txt #mary.txt #mary & dean #season 12

[eileenguy]

pls tell us ur prequelcrit opinions btw

ANON IM SO FUCKING SORRY THEY DELETED YOU OH MY GOD. anyways here's the answer under the cut that i had to rewrite in its entirety<3

so um. this must feel very weird because it was just announced that the prequel was cancelled by the CW so i rlly don't think me airing my problems with it remains fruitful but STILL. as a marygirl and johncrit/john-understander AND frequent participant of toxic tragic maryjohn """"shipping"""" i have to say (as someone who has not watched this show keep that in mind pls this is just from what i have seen on the dash). it's very weird that the writers and producers decided to focus on how dean's feelings must be hurt and on dean's need for a hashtag apple pie normal happy domestic home life and dean's closure and ignored basically everything about the actual mary and john.

i thought it was very disrespectful to mary in particular, who had to marry a man she despised (and vice-versa on his part) because of divine manipulation from heaven. one thing about mary's story was that she did not want to be a hunter in the end and that she craved safety for her and her loved ones instead of the dangers for hunting. despite this she could never get out of the hunting life because her destiny was to be used as a pawn in the celestial game leading upto the apocalypse and the end of the world which like! fucking sucks! and she loved her children and probably also her husband (how much of the latter was genuine and not the aforementioned celestial fuckery we'll never know) but that doesn't mean her life and marriage were happy or normal.

john as well. he was forced to fall in love with a person he "couldn't stand" due to higher forces orchestrating it since the beginning of humankind apparently. but unlike mary he didn't stop believing in his destiny. before her death we know that mary was considering divorce but we don't know if john felt the same. what we do know is that immediately after her death he spiralled so hard that he decided to risk him and his children's lives to seek revenge against her murderers, which unfortunately led to him discovering hunting and raising his kids up to be hunters, which is the only thing mary didn't want. infact, ending this cycle of hunting was the main reason she made sure he remained ignorant of hunting and her past life as a hunter. and we know that instead of doing any of this, john could've easily talked with mary's ghost (see 1x09) and consulted with her on how to parent their kids, or heck, even just straight up ASKED her who her killer was, but he didn't. because talking with mary would mean having to talk about their cringefail marriage and life together. he held up an ideal of her as the perfect wife and their relationship as the perfect marriage, and he sacrificed his life and his sons' lives at this fake altar. (keep in mind, it is very IMPORTANT to his character that he does not know shit about hunting before mary's death)

mary also does this, in a way, when after being brainwashed by the bmol (boooo!) she retreats into a mental fantasy where she's younger, dean is a toddler and sammy's an infant and refuses to "look at" the older dean who repeatedly asks her to see him and hear him. tellingly, john isn't a part of this fantasy.

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so obviously all of this affected dean. knowing that your father would rather choose a life of danger and uncertainty over a healthy and safe childhood for you and your brother, knowing that him and your mother never "truly" loved each other, knowing that their marriage was on the verge of ending before your mother's death all fucking sucks. knowing that because you turned out leading the life you mother did not want for you to have, having your mother come back after so many years but she's about a decade younger than you and would rather go back to what's known and comforting to her (i.e. hunting) over parenting your adult ass and confronting her new reality has also got to suck. after being traumatised and put in harm's way his entire childhood and early adulthood by his father, who was acting in the interest of protecting the perfect made-up ideal of his angelic mother and their perfect life before her death, he was even denied the closure of having a mother and regaining that type of life when she was actually present for it.

this absolutely does not mean we should write and produce shows where dean's form of "closure" is travelling the multiverse (you will NEVER be spiderverse etc etc), finding a perfect reality that exists where we retcon his parents as better people who DID love each other, actually, and they ALSO had brown and queer friends and they were like, totally cool with that, and the impala is a time travelling car now. maryjohn is not a love story. it is a tragedy. it is a horror story. it can even be a fucking comedy if you think about how absurd it all is, but it is NEVER a normal happy romance.

they fundamentally cannot end up together and be happy about it. and you cannot ask me to be happy about such a story! i would've even been ok with the show if they presented us with dean who is dead in heaven, refusing to meet his similarly dead-and-in-heaven parents, completely dissatisfied with how his life was and instead of finally resting, choosing to time travel across multiverses to find a reality where his life had the potential to be happier, where his parents stayed together willingly and resolved all their conflicts, where he had a better childhood. and presented us with all of this as the insanely tragic, terrifying thing that it is instead of some nostalgic, forever 21 wardrobed, 70s scooby-doo-esque, retro funfest.

i don't fault people (especially dean fans) for liking this show. i understand how seeing dean again, and seeing him happy, seeing him finally "save" his mother, could be cathartic or even just plain enjoyable for a lot of people. but im unhealthily obsessed with a lot of the source material this show plays so fast and loose with and it's so unacceptable to me lol.

#muku askbox #anon #mary.txt #john.txt #dean.txt #mary & dean #mary&dean.txt #dean & john #dean&john.txt #IGNORE ALL TYPOS AND ERRORS

[castielcommunism]

mary is constructing a false idol of her dead husband to process her grief for the family she lost. dean refuses to take that away from her while he watches the false idol he constructed of his dead mother fall apart in front of him. they are both mourning the ghosts of people they didn’t know

#mary.txt #dean.txt #mary & dean #i am unwell to say the least #my caps

[castielcommunism]

This scene is interesting because I think it's actually meant as a kind of backhanded apology on Mary's part. Dean emotionally responds to her comments as if he's watching a real past event unfold (I hate you, I was just a kid, you lied to me), but directly before this exchange, he realises that Mary is deliberately choosing to retreat into this "memory", which is meant to be an imagined prelapsarian period where their family was still Whole and Good. Dean isn't watching her passively act out an old memory, either; Mary is fully aware that he's in the room with her and what's going on, and is consciously refusing his attempts to get her to leave.

But I don't actually think this is a depiction of a "real" memory. As in, I don't think the conversation Mary is having with her four year-old son ever took place in reality. Dean is interpreting this as Mary actively deciding to lie to her children and tell them nothing bad is going to happen to them or their family even though she knows that isn't true, and he feels (understandably) betrayed by this. But I think Mary is actually talking to Dean-the-adult in this exchange, she's just using Dean-the-child as the intermediary to deliver this message. She isn't literally saying nothing bad will ever happen, but rather, "I want to be in a situation where I can promise you these things. I want to have enough control over my life that I can protect my children the way I've always wanted to. I don't want what has happened in the real world to ever happen to you." So much of Mary's arc in Season 12 is about her feeling completely out of her depth, unmoored from reality, and unable to control what's going on around her. She can't hunt effectively, she doesn't know how to use her phone or a computer, she can't talk to her sons without a fight breaking out, and everyone she knows is either dead or thinks she's lying about being alive.

So Mary is now retreating into a fantasy. John is not present in this entire scene, and we know from 5x16 that Mary was pretty unhappy with their marriage already by this point. But again, this isn't a memory, it's a constructed fantasy - one where she has full and total control over the situation, one where Sam is a pristine and perfect baby, Dean is a responsive and loving child, and John is absent. She looks at her four year-old son and promises him that nothing bad will happen, but really it's an apology to the grown man standing in the doorway. Over the course of the season, Mary has seen the full consequences of her decision to make a deal with Azazel, and she is unable to her face her sons because of it. Like she quite literally cannot handle reality, so she retreats into fantasy.

But it is, also, a failed apology, because it is a rejection of Dean-the-adult. She doesn't want to face him because she is horrified by who he is. He grew up to be a hunter, and later on in this scene Dean lays out exactly what that cost him and the rest of their family. Like Mary is being a coward in this scene, unable to face what she's done or who her children are, but she can't say that to him. So she turns towards the constructed fantasy of her four year-old son and says I wish I could have been in your life. I wish I could have been there to protect you. I wish you weren't the man you grew up to be.

And the final resolution of this scene is that this is an impossible wish. It is a fantasy in every sense of the word. They can't turn back the clock, they can't undo what happened, and they can't even pretend nothing has happened no matter how badly they want to, because it means abandoning the people they actually are (this episode is literally titled "Who We Are"!!!!!!!!!!). Dean is begging Mary to look at him and acknowledge him, interpreting her cold shoulder as abandonment, as rejection. And it is, in a way, but it's Mary rejecting herself and her own role in Dean's life. Her self hatred and regret is being externalised to her children, who just want her to look at them and see past all of that. Dean tells his mother he hates her and Mary is, in a way, saying I hate you too. They hate each other because they hate themselves because they hate each other. But they also love each other because, as Dean puts it, "I can't help it."

#mary.txt #dean.txt #mary & dean #meta #my caps #fellas do you ever use 30 years of unresolved familial trauma as the arbiter for every one of your conversations with your adult sons #season 12

[castielcommunism]

it is actually legit hilarious that people think mary is a bad person. her sons are two forty year old serial killers that she’s suddenly forced to parent on her own after being dead for decades. you show up in droves for dean apologism posting yet spare no sympathy for a milf. the gall of some people

#mary.txt #in my experience it’s terminal deangirls and john apologist who hate her. both of which are bad for different reasons #I will make excuses for dean but I will ALSO make excuses for his mom. a better future is possible

[castielcommunism]

simply mind boggling to me that you can be a deangirl and not like the mary & dean stuff in s12. every scene between them is so awkward and earnest and tense and melancholy. dean has a tangible stake in a relationship that he could very realistically lose if he doesn’t behave right and he has NO idea how to act in front of her. he certainly can’t be himself, he can’t show his mother who he is because he hates himself too much to do that but he can’t help but lay all of himself completely bare at her feet anyway because he so badly just wants to be her son. he would be finally proud of something because he could be her son and that’s something good that he can do. and mary is an authority figure in his life, the first one in a long time, and yet she refuses to tell him what to do and refuses to be reduced to A Mother. and by the same token she’s also a person he can’t tell what to do. they have to meet as equals but there’s way too much baggage for that to ever really happen. they are strangers who love each other intensely and don’t know how to talk to one another because they’re way too much alike and they don’t even realise it. WHEN was the last time spn had this much tension and juicy family drama

#mary.txt #dean.txt #mary & dean #dean studies #it genuinely makes me insane. like I become incoherent this is like 2% of what is going on in my brain I can’t handle it #season 12

[castielcommunism]

mary & dean ARE my favourite relationship in the show outside of the obvious bc it subverts the entire foundation of dean’s life. his father sanctified their dead mother and constantly dragged her perfect corpse around to justify all the harm and abuse and neglect he put his children through. and dean accepts this and says okay, my dad mistreated me and my brother but it was only because my mom was the most perfect and wonderful person on the planet and she had to be avenged. I can swallow all this harm because I love her. I’ll never be as good or perfect as either of them but I can serve them dutifully and then maybe I’ll be worth something.

but mary ISNT perfect she’s just a woman and now thirty years later she’s forced to live again, and the moment she comes back dean demands that she not only be their mother but be The Mother that they lost. and when she doesn’t do that and is like uh this sucks actually lol I’m stuck in a house with two grown men who are strangers to me and all my friends and family are dead and I can’t stand being alive, dean now has to live with the fact that not only is his mother a flawed human being who has desires and needs outside of her children, but also that his father lied to him about literally everything and dean and sam were abused for mundane, boring, everyday reasons. their father was just an asshole and their mother was unremarkable. and now dean is left completely by himself, both of the shrines he built to his parents destroyed, and he has to face reality and rebuild his life from there.

#dean.txt #mary.txt #mary & dean #dean studies #i think this is also around the time when dean can fully accept the fact that john was just your dime a dozen asshole #he wasn’t a god or a warrior or even really a father. he was just an asshole #MAKES ME SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO CRAZY!!!!! #season 12

[castielcommunism]

I very much enjoy the “mary and dean come out to each other” fics and they’re very sweet, but realistically I feel like mary would simply tell her son that it’s not gay for her a fuck a woman and enjoy it because she only did it like twice. and dean would be like oh good then I’m not gay then either hahaha

#mary.txt #dean.txt #dean studies #just swapping mental illnesses with each other #mary & dean

[castielcommunism]

I love that mary is emotionally distant and cold and “isn’t much of a hugger” and talks awkwardly and can’t look her sons in the eye except when they’re yelling at each other. it fucking rules

#mary.txt #1 because it makes dean more mentally ill #2 it’s a great deconstruction of mary’s own image in the show and mother figures in general #3 I love ice queens

[castielcommunism]

like it was inevitable that dean was going to have his heart absolutely broken by mary. the pacing of their relationship in s12 is a little goofy and I know there was some behind the scenes/actor availability stuff that played into that, so I wish the fight where mary left happened later even though realistically it couldn’t, but the emotional beat is still correct. which is why I’m generally quick to handwave her decision to leave and work for the bmol, because like even if the literal details of the plot feel kinda absurd and overly dramatic, the emotional landscape makes perfect sense. dean laid himself completely bare at her feet, emotionally responding to her as if he were still a desperate little four year old who needed a hug from his mommy, and that level of emotional intensity from a strange adult man she doesn’t know was always going to eventually drive her away. and like from dean’s perspective, regardless of what she actually ended up doing after she left the bunker, her leaving may as well be her sleeping with the enemy. the betrayal he feels is narratively justified by her doing something legitimately sketchy and wrong, but like dean would feel that way even if mary left to work at a coffee shop.

and like dean has this habit of deifying people he loves and then being fucking crushed when they don’t live up to that expectation. and I don’t blame him for that really, his father did it with mary and it was the foundational logic of his entire life, AND he’s so socially underdeveloped because of how isolated he was growing up that boundary setting and healthy social expectations are things he genuinely needs to build up over time, but that also doesn’t mean mary isn’t allowed to find it overwhelming and exhausting and terrifying. the whole point of their conflict is that they’re two people grieving the 30 years they lost together and the destruction of their family. neither of them are innocent, but that doesn’t mean there’s a correct “side” to the conflict. it’s a situation where the only way forward is for them to both reconfigure their expectations of what life is going to be like. mary does on some level have to accept that it was her decision that ultimately killed her and jumpstarted this entire thing, and she has to accept that her sons are strangers and her husband is dead and take responsibility for the situation in front of her. heaven for her was this escapist fantasy where she could pretend her history as a hunter would never come back to haunt her. and dean needs to realise that mary can’t be a replacement for his father and she can’t be this perfect Mother who will fix all of his emotional problems and rescue him from himself. like mary is not his salvation and he still needs to live with who he is and who they are as a family. but it’s GOING to be messy and fucked up and they’re going to fight and get their feelings hurt. recovering from the trauma that is their own family is going to take time and effort and energy but the point is that it’s worth it!!!!!!!

#mary.txt #dean.txt #mary & dean #meta #dean studies #they are. the best thing to happen on the show ever #season 12

[castielcommunism]

this isn’t really ever explored in season 12 that much, but the brothers have almost the exact opposite dynamic with Mary than they did with their father. Sam is the one who defends their mother to Dean, because Sam is the one who desperately wants Mary to like him and to stick around. Like Dean also wants those things obviously, but he openly fights with her and has all these complicated and contradictory expectations of who Their Mother should be, so they’re butting heads a lot, in part because of how similar they are. Which then puts Sam in the middle trying to play mediator because he just wants them to be a happy family. He finally has a mom for the first time in his entire life and he wants her to acknowledge him as her son and love him as such, even though beneath all of that is the rotten foundation of the deal she made with Azazel. Whereas Dean has prior history with Mary that makes him combative because he wants her to conform to his idea of parenthood.

Now obviously this isn’t 1:1, and I don’t want to imply that Mary and John have committed similar sins against their children. John was abusive and his behaviour came from a place of simultaneous neglect and strict control. Mary is not those things, but she is absent, and because of the age of Sam and Dean, there isn’t this expectation for her to take care of all their material and emotional needs the way you would with small children. They’re meeting each other almost as peers, so the power dynamic is very different (and if anything, Sam and Dean have a net power over Mary). And her response to losing her family and the life she thought she had isn’t to take it out on her sons, but to retreat inwards and shut herself off from reality by running. Still obviously not ideal, but that’s not abuse.

BUT, I think on an emotional level, their dynamic is an inverted mirror of the relationship they had with their father in a lot of ways. Sam is agreeable, eager and desperate for approval with Mary; Dean is argumentative, angry, and deeply hurt by her behaviour. And the complicating factor is that unlike the relationship they had with their father, nobody is really “in the wrong” here. They’re all coping with the situation in different ways, but I think it’s very interesting that they don’t default to the dynamic they had with John. It’s fundamentally different.

#spn.txt #mary.txt #sam.txt #dean.txt #meta #sam & dean #it’s so hard to read sam in the later seasons bc he barely does anything but. society if

[castielcommunism]

yeah i rly don’t think ppl give dean enough credit with the mary of it all in s12. the whole “oh this 40 year old man expects his mommy to make soup for him” type of take is boring like ok putting aside that maternal resurrection is an insane situation that would likely destroy one’s psyche, dean is also trying to unlearn so much…like yes the situation IS both funny and depressing, both for dean and mary (and sam to a lesser extent). but like you, i think deans reactions are a testament to the good parts of him, not the bad!

yeah like the expectations Dean puts on his mother ARE unreasonable don’t get me wrong but they’re deeply sympathetic. Like this is a parent who he has exclusively good memories of and has heard only good things about. She also doesn’t know Dean at all, which I think excites him. John was constantly disappointed in him and withheld his approval, and I think on some level Dean figured that if he could just be My Mom’s Oldest Son then he would finally have a parent who would properly love him and take care of him the way he needs. In some ways Dean is emotionally still a four year old because that was the point at which he lost his childhood and was treated like a resource by his father. I think Dean does want Mary to make him food and tell him everything will be okay and tuck him into bed. Not literally, but like emotionally those are the things he wants from her because they’re things he’s never had.

And in 12x22 when he watches her say that to his four year old self he realises he doesn’t actually want that because it’s a lie. They can’t reverse time or undo the damage in their family’s history, but they can start fresh and try again (which is exactly what he says to her).

And Sam wants those things to! Like he absolutely wants A Mom. But he doesn’t put all of his emotional expectations on Mary or like bare his soul to her immediately the way Dean does. Dean places all of his emotional baggage at her feet and demands she deal with it, so when she decides to leave he’s not only completely devastated by it, it also retraumatises him (my mom is leaving again) and confirms all his worst fears (once my parents know who I am they hate me). Which is, again, unreasonable and unfair to Mary, but it’s understandable. Sam doesn’t do any of that. He’s sad his mother is leaving but like he’s not going “oh my god my mom hates me and wants to leave me, specifically, because my lot in life is to be abandoned by people I love when I let them down” the way Dean does. Sam definitely feels a lot of resentment and anger towards Mary for making the demon deal, for not preparing him or their family for it, for dying and destroying their lives, but she never really fell from this high mantle for him. She’s just an utter and complete stranger that their father was obsessed with.

And obviously like Mary is not blameless in this. She did make a deal, and her actions did destroy her family. She had children with John and she does have a responsibility to them, even if they’re suddenly these grown adult men she doesn’t know. But the tragedy of it is that none of them are really at fault for what happened, or for Mary coming back, they just have to deal with these circumstances the best they can.

So yeah back to the original point of this ask, a very compelling part of s12 for me is watching Dean try really hard at making his relationship with Mary work. And like he’s kinda bad at it! He fucks up and they argue and he gets his feelings hurt but he still wants to try. We don’t really see him do that in the show with the other relationships he has, and it infuses a lot of much needed sympathy to his behaviour and just makes him overall a much more interesting character. I wish the other relationships he had with Sam and Cas had similar stakes, but this is supernatural etc etc.

#dean.txt #mary.txt #sam.txt #asks #meta #mary & dean #season 12

[castielcommunism]

I am still not over the fact that mary told her four year old son that angels are watching over him, and then when she meets him as an adult, a fallen angel is his closest friend and confidant

#mary.txt #cas.txt #like. nothing about their family mythos turns out to be true #but the ONE promise mary makes to dean happens to save his life. AUGH