Hi. I really enjoy your blog and thank you for being so positive. All the negativity about last night's ep bothers me. I would love to see Dean/Cas finally have that big moment, but it wouldnt make for good story telling if we got it so easily. I have felt since s12...we are getting real personal growth! I also feel something big is coming for Dean/Cas with how they have kept them apart and all the emotional baggage getting adressed. There has been no hug either and there is so much unsaid. ❤

Yeah, I mean... I watch the show with the full knowledge that no matter how important Dean and Cas’s relationship is, even to the actual structure of the narrative, the way they’re writing the story and the actual focus of the main plot... will never focus that directly on destiel. This doesn’t mean I think destiel isn’t A Thing they are writing, just that Who Dean Is As A Person and Who Cas Is As A Person both take narrative precedence over the potential for a textual romantic relationship going forward for them.

I have no idea how to say that without sounding negative about it or drawing wank on it, which is why I don’t usually attempt to state it so blatantly in public. But I am 100% not negative about this. I’m just speaking about it from a narrative structure perspective here, which I’ve been yelling FOR LITERAL YEARS bears a close resemblance to the structure of 1001 Nights, and the Scheherazade/Shahryar relationship. Their romance is NEVER in the foreground of the tale, and yet somehow the entirety of 1001 Nights IS THE OVERARCHING STRUCTURE OF THEIR ROMANCE. Other aspects of the story are more pressing (like Scheherazade having sacrificed herself in the attempt to stop other women from being killed every morning, but not actually wanting to die herself because She Is Smart and Has A Plan and showed up with a buttload of awesome stories to slowly guide her plan to fruition). All those stories she weaves, in the gaps between them, she and Shahryar slowly fall in love. It’s not something they confess out loud, but it is something they both gradually begin to feel and to understand. Their interpersonal side-plot grows slowly, over 1001 actual nights of storytelling and companionship, and it takes nearly THREE YEARS of constant nightly stories, never letting one story end at the wrong time (at daybreak, when Shahryar might choose to kill her, but always timing it JUST RIGHT so that he’d ask for another story to fill the hours until dawn... which would inevitably be interrupted on a cliffhanger with words unspoken still between them... interrupting moose, anyone? That would be Scheherazade’s sister, Dunyazade, who accompanied her on what was supposed to be Scheherazade’s literal last night on Earth, but whose prompting and strategic interruptions actually furthered the romantic tension growing between Scheherazade and Shahryar, preventing their story from coming to an end too soon).

So while Scheherazade and Shahryar and their slow fall into love with one another is literally fundamental to the entire narrative, there was no way for any of it to pay off before the end of the larger narrative, you know?

If Scheherazade can patiently continue spinning out her stories, setting her own eventual (hopeful!) personal happiness aside because she sees the bigger picture at stake, then I can certainly wait until the end of Supernatural, however long it continues until its story is finally done.

Does this mean I’m saying that romantic love confessions and a clear, undeniable canon romantic relationship will factor in to the ending of the series? Nope. I have no guarantees to offer. But it does mean that as long as the show keeps factoring the fundamental importance of their relationship into the larger overarching narrative, as well as their own personal character arcs, and continuing to poke at it both through narrative mirrors and textually laying Big Questions for them out on the table, then I’m gonna be Scheherazade about it.

Every episode begins (emotionally, for me) with the Dread Pirate Roberts having spared Westley’s life because of True Love, and telling him “I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.” But then he doesn’t... and he continues not killing him, because it was all about true love. (yes, I’m saying the Princess Bride is a twist on the 1001 Nights narrative, at least insofar as The Dread Pirate Roberts persona goes. I mean... the parallel goes a lot deeper than this, into so much more of the metaphorical journey, the Hero’s Journey to prove himself worthy to his True Love, the quest for justice when he doubts the strength of that love to transcend death, after it was literally stolen away from him... I mean, this parallel also runs deep).

So that’s where we are with destiel. I’m perfectly 100% happy with that. Because I’m content to engage with the narrative they are actually presenting, and not delusionally projecting my own desire for Dean and Cas to just be happy now onto it in a way that it just does not exist in canon, you know?

All that said, YES. How long has it been since we’ve had a simple, “Hello, Dean.” Or even a HUG between them... since 13.06? YIKES THAT IS A WHILE. And we didn’t even get to hear the Hello, Dean at the end of 13.05 that we all yelled at the TV to fill that silent gap when Dean answered the phone and it was Cas calling him.

I choose to believe that the show is following their own unofficial theme song in this regard, though. They’ll be able to be happy at the end of the road. “There’ll be peace when you are done.” And until then, they’ve got a lot of road to cover, and a long way to go, and a lot of extraneous baggage to deal with. But they’re getting there, because they’ve always been headed there, even when they weren’t entirely sure where “there” was, you know?

But now we know Dean DOES know, at least in a general way. He’s not longing for a life that isn’t his anymore. He doesn’t feel cheated out of the white picket fence, apple pie life anymore. He’s made his own family (which absolutely does include Cas), and he recognizes there’s still work for them to do, but Dean himself is good with that. He’s in a strangely healthier place than he’s ever been in his whole entire life, including 4-year-old him who never knew death and fire and tragedy.

And that’s absolutely something to carry forward, wherever the road may lead.

And that’s also why I’ll eternally be frustrated with fandom bitterness over the literal structure of the entire narrative. I mean, this is not gonna change. This is the main story they are telling, and how they’re telling it. I only hope that being able to get some perspective on that will help people keep all of this in mind and truly appreciate the beauty of it all. This is why I personally feel this has the potential to be the greatest love story ever told, because it’s so much more than just an angel falling from heaven and raising a man from hell, and then meeting in the middle. It’s about BOTH of them, their choices, their failures and successes, and this entire process of understanding who they are in the larger structure of the universe, and who they could potentially be to one another.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.