Chapter Text
I mean he’s out there having the worst year of his life so far, but at least he’s starting to figure out who he is a teeny weeny bit more. Probably because he’s too stressed to bottle down the gay panic like normal along with everything else, but you know. Gets the job done.
(All transcripts as usual grabbed from here)
Watching 2x02 last night though, and then scanning ahead on the episode list, I got really mournful just about how, like, the whole gay panic thing shakes out in this season…
I mean the obvious is here in 2x11:
DEAN
Of course, the most troubling question is why do these people assume we’re gay?SAM
Well, you are kinda butch. Probably think you’re overcompensating.DEAN
(mocking a laugh)
Right.
(my 2x11 tag is probably half analysis of those 3 lines of dialogue and Dean’s subsequent overcompensating :P)
which is why I’d even call this his gay panic season in the first place (And I feel like you have to get maybe as far as Carver era before you can start interpreting that he begins to seem on a path to understanding himself as bi/being remotely comfortable with it)
But to go back to 2x02, since that’s the one I just watched and it’s following me around today like that creepy ass clown, there’s a couple of things in it sticking with me.
One is obviously the Ash vs Jo side of things that I don’t want to get loads into, but they’re both at the very least shown both making a serious impression on Dean (while Sam hangs back and laughs - it’s not like since there’s 2 new side characters, they get assigned one each to Sam and Dean or something, they’re both kind of connected to Dean). Since I’ve also just wandered through season 8, what’s sticking out to me is Dean turning Jo down after already half-heartedly bottling out of hitting on her earlier in the episode:
DEAN
Hmm. Can I be honest with you? See, normally I’d be hitting on you so fast it’d make your head spin. But, uh, these days… I don’t know.JO
Wrong place, wrong time?DEAN
Yeah.JO
It’s okay, I get it.
and in my head I’m comparing it to 8x14:
DEAN
I can’t.ELLIE
What? Okay. Uh, embarrassing.DEAN
Oh, no, no, no. No, I want to. [Chuckles.] Believe me.ELLIE
No, it’s okay – you don’t. I guess I’m gonna…DEAN
Ellie, um… Rain check?
In both cases I do kind of see it more as Dean just being generally fucked up (the state he’s in over John’s death speaks for itself) but in both instances I think motivations aside it just gives a moment where you’re forced to evaluate how Dean’s acting when it comes to hook ups, and it’s asking for reflection on it. (I said 2x02 speaks for itself, but I still can’t get past the Ellie thing happening right after Aaron :P) Since it’s such early days all it has to do is ask you to re-evaluate Dean’s season 1 persona, and I think a lot of his stuff in season 2 from several directions is asking you to do that.
The other thing takes a bit more of a run up, but as long as you hold in mind that I feel like season 2 on Dean’s side for most his emotional arc stuff is all heading to 2x20 (What Is And What Should Never Be) the entire time, I hope you can follow my train of thought.
There’s this conversation with the funfair owner in 2x02:
MR. COOPER
You see, this place, it’s a refuge for outcasts. Always has been. For folks that don’t fit in nowhere else. But you two? You should go to school. Find a couple of girls. Have two point five kids. Live regular.DEAN is about to say something, but SAM leans forward, eyes serious.
SAM
Sir? We don’t want to go to school. And we don’t want regular. We want this.DEAN looks at SAM.
I think I talked in my original rewatch notes on this or at least scenarios like it last year how Sam and Dean are kept in perfect balance through the first 2 seasons. If something is strongly defined for Sam, Dean works in exact opposition and vice versa. This episode has a strong focus on Sam, and his character exposition is mostly delivered TO him by Dean, questioning his new “loyal obedient son” approach.
Of course that’s working in opposition to Sam as Sam swings around to take Dean’s season 1 role, while Dean spends season 2 quite rebellious and fed up and frequently showing little interest in hunting and questioning basically his whole life purpose re: the job.
Which makes me think if they swapped sides on big stuff like that, they also could have swapped sides on “live regular” and Dean’s reactions in that conversation (thinking of swapping) remind me of this conversation from Swap Meat:
DEAN
You ever think that you’d want something like that? Wife, rugrats, the whole nine?SAM
[shakes his head ] No, not really my thing anymore.DEAN
Yeah.
which was the first indicator of the arc which eventually had Sam packing him off to Lisa for the season 5-6 hiatus. I have a lot of thoughts about the way Dean got emotionally hooked on the idea of Lisa as the perfect endgame and I actually collected all my rewatch note thoughts on it here:
but tl:dr he fixates on her over season 3 and it’s largely a subconsciously planted desire from 3x02 facing him with what he couldn’t have, and the timing with him mournfully contemplating “what should never be” in his life thanks to the whole “going to die in a year” thing. I sort of tracked this thread through all the Gamble season 3 episodes, including Jus in Bello and 3x15 which didn’t even have Lisa in them.
(ETA: to drag out of this post and put here for the sake of a clean argument, also very important that 3x10 emphasises both Dean’s apparent desire for Lisa in a “live normal” way AND in the same sequence, John’s influence on him and his desires. 2x02 coming RIGHT after John’s death and starting with his funeral, I think it’s safe to say there can be some influence on what Dean thinks he should have coming from that direction in the same way Sam adopts the “loyal son” approach. John says in 1x20 he wants Dean to have a home, so the idea of Dean living a normal life is planted BY John as one of HIS desires for Dean too, while Dean spends season 1 talking about wanting to stay together hunting as a family and not thinking they’d quit even if they got revenge.)
Anyway there’s the whole thing as well in 6x01 where I talk about Lisa and Dean’s time with her as a not quite reality which also harks all the way back to 2x20 (this episode is so ridiculously important)
… again, “what is and what should never be” applies heavily to the real version of their relationship.
All this to say, Dean’s strong sense of what he should do and the desires he feels he has to have are explored, thoroughly, and eventually put to rest by the end of season 6 with him finally on the other side of them, and I see 2x02 as the first time Dean seriously seems to contemplate it for himself, under the shadow of an episode strongly focused on Sam’s reaction instead.
Anyway, all that in mind mostly just for later parts of the show massively fleshing out parts of Dean’s character and desires in a way season 2 never could on its own, and to explain why Dean’s gay panic could endure all the way to Carver era since he has to kind of put it all to rest
(2x03, for example, starts a pattern of episodes that goes via the siren episode and which is only positively subverted in 8x13:
to FINALLY get back to 2x20 properly, it occurs to me that if season 2 can be so easily read as Dean’s gay panic season wherein there are obvious characters he reacts to and prominent moments which are now long entered into the annuls of bi!Dean meta… And I think there is a serious narrative of Dean vs identity anyway that season but I think this forms a clear part of it if you’re here for all the bi!Dean stuff… Let’s think about Carmen, Dean’s imaginary, perfect, conflict-free girlfriend.
Wait, no, let’s glance back up at 6x01. Because after writing that meta about comparing Lisa to Dean’s imaginary girlfriend, I had nothing to talk about in the real rewatch notes for the episode, so I spent the entire thing laughing and shipping him with Sid, his neighbour.
DEAN
Frigging suburbs, man.
(8x08, Carver era at it again :P)
Sid is one of the key differences between 2x20 and 6x01:
Sid:
Come on. You – what, you moved in, what, about a year ago?Dean:
Yeah, thereabouts.Sid:
So I been buying you beer for a year. And I think that means you owe me a couple of gory details.
In Dean’s wish!verse he has a job, he has a house, he has a mom, but he has no dudes in his life whatsoever. John is dead, Sam’s off at college, fair enough, but his relationship with Carmen is the only piece of Dean’s internal life we get of outsiders: there’s no workmates, there’s no neighbour… And yet we know Dean gravitates towards male approval (how Gordon gets so deep in his head in one episode in 2x03) and forms strong bonds with dudes.
You’d think he’d at least have a mention of his drinking buddies or friends from work, but the alcoholism subtext of 2x20 seems to imply Dean can be a weird lonely drunk who ends up badgering his family and they’re all wearily used to it, rather than any indication he at least semi-constructively blows off steam drinking with friends.
But Dean’s precariously structured inner world, which turns out just to be a dream reflecting some of his most emotionally painful desires, centred on Mary’s not dying as the butterfly effect of the world change but still built around his own expectations and other lesser desires, keeps his life sterile and free of the confusing presence of men who he’d have to deal with their place in his world, when he’s mid-crisis and would have to define his attraction to them… They fundamentally upset the wish!verse and its easy instant emotional gratification: the creeping feeling of wrongness and the burden of the world on Dean’s shoulders is too powerful for the dream but until the civilian deaths push him to act, he was willing to accept the world, even with Sam not being that familiar with him (he would be able to build that relationship back up if he’d stayed, after all) just for the self-sacrificing sake of everyone else being happy.
At the end of the episode Carmen joins wish!Sam and wish!Mary trying to talk Dean back from waking himself up:
MARY steps away, and CARMEN walks up to him, taking his face in her hands, kissing him.
CARMEN We can have a future together. Have our own family. I love you, Dean. Please.
promising him the most generic easy heterosexual future ever, where he can have a cool respectable wife, have some kids, the guarantee of being loved in a really normal, boring way. It’s all that “Live regular” stuff from 2x02. And I think it’s the easiness of it and how uncomplicated Carmen is for Dean that calls to him, that even if she’s a shadow of a personality, she can stand with Sam and Mary, and make an appeal that comes across as tempting as the appeals from his most beloved family members. Like, the siren call of heteronormativity or something.
TL:DR I guess, Dean briefly entertaining a fantasy of making out with Andy in his cool van has knock on effects that take six seasons to start unravelling?
and all of this brings us right back to the present where Mary has suddenly walked back into dean’s life and i think this is going to dredge up some of this again for dean in a way he can finally deal with it in reality instead of in the pseudo-realities he’s confronted with in the past yes please bring on s12 (via @mittensmorgul)
Yes! I’m not overly fond of the idea that her presence can magically fix everything as even if her death is the source of all the drama in their lives they’ve picked up PLENTY of extra baggage along the way… but I think that 2x20 is again going to prove itself one of the most important episodes ever through season 12 for whatever reasons, and like right after 11x23 I was thinking about how it’s never really been subverted as such, in the way where at least for how when you re-watched it until the end of season 11 it’s been completely emotionally resonant in an unchanged way, but seeming to give Mary back finally puts some new hindsight on the emotional drama in it that unlike many episodes where later canon makes them softer or changes the way you interpret them, 2x20 has never been “softened” until now, which I think has been part of what makes it such a great, lasting, classic episode.
I think if Mary is honestly back in their lives, it’s going to have to call for a subversion (I can’t imagine her being the sandwich-making quiet sad woman we saw in 2x20, who seems in hindsight to have been based off Dean’s memory of her in 5x16 as that interaction strongly paralleled how she treated him as an adult in the wish!verse… the young!Mary from the time travel episodes suggests she has a lot more personality stored up in there, but she was kind of not technically their mother yet in those episodes, so the way they interact has got to be a blurring of everything we’ve seen so far, really)… I guess the sickly sweet wish!verse suburbia Mary and that life has to be what’s called into question. But I hope there are shades of the episode around, even if it’s just discussion and self-reflection… Even if she’s not like wish!verse!Mary, she’s connected to these themes in Dean’s mind…
I guess the “what’s it like settling down with a hunter” thread from season 11 never ended with an obvious resolution, and that’s also already leaning to a very different sort of balance and subversion of the expectation of “Live normal” and it will be interesting to see where it goes from there and how the discussions of their future are phrased. Hm.
Like every time I mentioned Mary either in this post or the stuff I was reading before linking it, I was going “Hmmmm” thinking about season 12 but I don’t want to speculate more than saying I think it might be interesting :P
also other replies:
ruiniscrazy replied to your post:
Hah, you mentioned Andy. No one ever mentions Andy. Even though Dean spent the entire episode fawning over him.
I know, right? Dean has a few different sorts of guys who are his type (and pfft Cas somehow or other gets to be all of them one time or another :P) but thinking of Aaron, he’s very much in the same mould *stares hard at the writer of both episodes* I wonder whyyy~
but Andy seems designed to tick every box for Dean as we watch all the intro stuff where they’re snooping on him and getting to know him - and Andy even appreciates Dean’s taste in turn by stealing Baby from him and Dean - it’s been a long time but I swear this is how I remember it - is like eventually more like “can’t fault him for that” :P And they both make the same Star Wars joke at different points in the episode!! I don’t believe in love at first sight but come on.
(Actually thinking of Edlund vs Dudes Who Are Dean’s Type, remember in season 7, Ranger Rick who hit both the uniform kink AND lovable stoner trope in one go? I know Dean was stoned on the sandwich too by the time they found him dead but he really seemed to go for the guy despite only a minute of interaction :P)
The Trickster was 2nd season. Dean was straight up hitting him up.
*clears throat and gestures at all the rambling about Dean having a type*
I know Sabriel shippers also get a real kick out of that episode, but he did also offer Dean an orgy to lay off the hunt in their showdown, which was all his own custom manifestations :P I’m unclear of the legal grey area of how gay that is.