Deans Self Acceptance & Chekhovs Grenade Launcher

Dean’s Self Acceptance & Chekhov’s Grenade Launcher

If you aren’t here for a deeper look at episode 12x22, metaphors, and Dean being bi, keep scrolling because we’re going to get into that holy hand grenade - Supernatural’s Grenade Launcher, the weapon that Dean has loved since season one but always got shamed out of using; shamed out of using UNTIL 12x22; an episode literally titled, ‘Who We Are’.   

After which Dean loses Castiel and goes into the Widower arc … ok. … Cool. I’ll just read nothing into any of that shall I?

(cont under the cut)

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you will never get away from the sound of the woman who loves you

Dean Winchester + Emotional Intelligence (8/?)

Just another early example of Dean’s emotional intelligence. He doesn’t push Sam to talk about things. This is very much a statement of I’m here, I see what’s going on but I’m giving you space right now. Not forever, because you need to talk about it eventually, but you’ve got the space you obviously want right now. This is a huge marker of emotional intelligence, the ability to not only listen and understand what another person needs, but to give it to them too. And Dean has this ability in spades. From the beginning, he’s had it in spades. {1.05}

I wanted to make a separate pose to big up these excellent tags on this post about how a show can be about misogyny when it's about men from @deangirlism101 :

#by virtue of watching the show long after it stopped airing and after years of exposure to the fandom#I've experienced a very interesting phenomenon wherein i went in expecting a very straightforward male fantasy#specifically in regards to dean#and was continuously surprised by how dean was around women who were actual characters and not caricatures#with caricatures of women dean also becomes a caricature of a womanizer#but with woman characters? with victims and friends?#dean is constantly paternal/brotherly#endlessly protective and respectful#in fact dean's utter lack of sexualization of the complex women around him in the first few seasons#kind of had me thinking he might just be straightforward gay#additionally it's interesting to point out that dean is the only one of the three winchesters who does not have a#''symbolic woman'' that drives his narrative#i.e. of the three winchesters he is the one who engages with the women around him as people and not someTHING to give him ''purpose''#which ties pretty well into his own role in his family being a typically femenine one#john endlessly relies on dean to serve the role of his mother yet he resents him when he does it so naturally#which from a queer lense is pretty much spelling out ''john can't put his finger on it but something (queerness) about dean bothers him''#anyways it just surprises me how#the fandom has perpetuated this image of the characters#and how#ironically#that image is the exact caricature dean so obviously puts on and we so obviously are supposed to KNOW he puts on

Some really nice points here, and bang on target:

Dean is not called to his adventure/journey because a symbolic woman dies like John and Sam are; he is put upon it by his father and his own sense of responsibility and love before he has the agency to choose. He wants his father's approval, his brother's love, and he wants not to be alone in a world of monsters...and...is HE a monster? A killer? Is everything his fault?

John resents Dean because what he needs from Dean (obedience, domestic work, emotional labour) is feminine. It's what women are for. Dean internalizes that resentment. Sam defies John and is driven by his own losses, and John can respect that, but Dean becomes the family repository of what they've lost. Dean is the eldest daughter who can never do enough.

John has chosen to abandon normal life and live on the fringes to pursue his revenge quest, and Sam is fighting to get back to the center -- left his family, hot girlfriend, Stanford Law, credit in the straight world, friends. But Dean? He has accepted that he will never be normal. He has accepted that he will always be a lonely, liminal weirdo who knows something terrible about the world that most people are spared from knowing.

Like:

If you leave Supernatural season 1 without realising that everything Dean pretends to be is pretty much the opposite of what he is, then you are not watching it right, full stop. The Dean Winchester he pretends to be is a character invented by a terrified, homeless, wounded little boy who doesn't know how else to protect himself.

Second, if you can't see how totally fucking queer all that is, I CAN'T HELP YOU. And,

you cannot hit that many nails on the head without knowing where you're swinging your hammer, and in conclusion, Dean was always deeply queered, and that was in the DNA of his character.

The truth is, that Dean is a very cohesive character. He is written and performed beautifully, and with intention. He is not an accident, he is an artistic creation, and he is excellently drawn. I am not "giving the writers too much credit", I am taking an Occam's Razor-type view of it, and coming up with the simplest explanation for what I see on the screen.

That said, if by some insane magic trick they managed to make Dean this queer by accident? It doesn't matter what they intended, because THE TEXT IS WHAT IT IS. I don't need the permission of the authors to see a church by daylight, and Dean is THAT OBVIOUS.

I do think it's so interesting taking note of the different MoL weapons that catch the brothers' respective interests.

Dean immediately latched onto the grenade launcher Ketch used back on the highway. It's a "fun" weapon. Exciting. Dangerous, yes, but in an almost cartoonish way. It's a weapon for an action hero in a movie, not in any way practical for everyday use, even in their profession. There's a sort of adolescent giddiness associated with Make Big Explosion there, and that's even before you get into the grenade launcher as a metaphor for Dean's gender and sexuality journey (shoutout to @deanwasalwaysbi for writing a meta that rewired my brain back in 2021).

Sam, on the other hand, is fascinated by Ketch's explanation of the radiation gun they use to make vampires' own blood fatally toxic to them en masse. It's a nightmare weapon built with only one purpose in mind: mechanically efficient eradication. It's practical and terrifying because of the implications behind the fact that someone even thought to create it.

It's such a sharp difference in what catches their respective interest, one that really highlights some interesting differences in the brothers' worldviews and approaches to their jobs.

it’s been a while since i did a drawing in this style, sorry it ended up kinda messy!!