To put it in the simplest words Castiel’s rebellion in regard to Dean was never about replacing heaven and God with Dean. It was about how now Cas belongs to Dean. Castiel’s role in heaven was as a soldier, his only purpose to serve. Being associated to Dean Castiel got what heaven never offered, unconditionality. Castiel doesn’t simply rebel from Dean. Dean chooses to remain with Castiel as an ally, a friend, as family. Castiel being off path or fishy wouldn’t lead to Dean lobotomizing Cas. It is made clear in Season 7 Episode 23 when Dean says, “I’d rather have you, cursed or not.” The dialogue has its own layers of interpretations, but one and perhaps one of the most positive ones can be, I know you fucked up and I know you are messed up in the head but you still belong with us. Interestingly the nickname Castiel earned from Dean in his most early episodes is Cas. Castiel is a Hebrew name roughly translating into “Shield of God”. Dean removed the suffix -tiel meaning “of god” from Castiel. Even unknowingly in the act of giving a little nickname, Dean literally removed God and heavens possession of him.

i love angel lore

this actually lines up well with what cas's canonical interest in bees represents at that point. bees being another order of angel, cas admiring them for their structure, their hierarchies, their closeness to god, and everyone with a job to do, during a time where cas feels like his every choice and action has led to disaster. he's desperate to be back "in the fold," to have a job and do it well. and bedlund saying here that angels are also the "closest to his missing God" also supports the idea that bees = a longing for heaven and order. honey!cas is cas at his lowest and most "helpless." he feels defeated, he wants things to be simple and easy again. this cas is perhaps looking for the guidance of that "missing God." he's searched desperately for god before, when he believed god had all the answers and would help them. following the bees, admiring them, wishing to be like them, ties into those themes of feeling helpless and looking for structure and purpose again, the kind of structure and purpose he found in heaven for millions of years. but observing the bees also twines with cas's love and admiration of earth and god's creations. it's a very cas way of longing for the familiarity of heaven. instead of just being like, "ah yes i miss heaven and it's structures" he goes and admires bees for those same attributes. (also imagine cas, in this broken defeated state, telling the bees of all his faults and trauma and regrets. the bees as angels being tuned into angel radio, receiving and relaying cas's confessions) anyway, bedlund saying bees are possibly another order of angels just !!! slams home the idea that cas is looking toward heaven at this time. and again that his interest in bees, while seemingly cute and wholesome on the surface, runs much deeper in ways that are often glossed over or not represented in fandom

Dean Winchester went to hell and spent thirty years on the rack before agreeing to torture other souls for his freedom. Dean Winchester spent ten years putting souls on the rack and torturing them, Alistair’s lessons supplementing the skills his father taught him, twisting the lessons that taught him to save people and hunt things. Dean Winchester liked it because, after thirty years, he wasn’t being tortured himself, and because he was good at it. Dean Winchester was raised from Hell and could accept what had been done to him but not what he had done, not able to accept that they were in some ways the same.

Dean Winchester was gripped tight and raised from perdition and of course he didn’t believe he deserved to be saved—how could he be, after all he’d done? And in the end, he was right, in part: heaven only wanted to use him as a weapon, a tool—just like hell had. Except that there was one angel who didn’t, one angel who saw his soul and had questions, had doubts. One angel who chose to fall and embrace humanity and free will, to learn to love. To prove to Dean Winchester that he was worthy of being saved, no matter how low he’d fallen.

cas lobotomy is so insane because he's literally been reprogrammed and brainwashed an infinite amount of times but he's still so kind and caring and he puts everyone before himself and he still stops to heal babies and looks after the people around him. like no matter how much naomi lobotomized him they can't get rid of his true self which is so full of love and gentleness.

Once again thinking about how Castiel's queerness goes beyond his sexuality. How his need to question is the first expression of his queerness - an angel crafted by God himself as his flawless soldier in his army is considering disobedience. He's having doubts. He's having feelings. He's rebelling against God and the system and his place in it. He's doing the queerest thing one can do - he's expressing his free will!

Hah what if Castiel reached out first to stop Dean from confessing because he knew, he knew right then and there that if Dean started his death speech, his last toast, then it would involve addressing the elephant they've been tiptoeing around for a decade (praying and rebelling, finding free will, learning how to care, mourning for losses that distraught them more than any other death.)

What if Castiel knew that if Dean talked first, he wouldn't even be able to survive half of his speech before the Empty deigns him happy enough to take him (if happiness was in just saying it, then what ecstasy would it have given Castiel to hear it.)

What if Castiel knew that he could have had the one thing, but he chose to delay his happiness to save Dean.

What if Castiel's true happiness was being able to save Dean one last time?

Something the fandom likes to joke about is how much Castiel wants to beat up John Winchester, and I get that it’s a joke and a desire to see some justice on Dean’s behalf, but hear me out.

The only kind of love Dean has ever known is violence. Either to him or for him or by him or because of him. And he deserves a gentle, easy, simple love. A love that has never seen hate and anger and vengeance. Only goodness and grace and patience. A love he doesn’t have to fear.

See, I don’t think Dean would see Castiel hurting his father, even if it’s because his father had hurt him, as an act of love. I think he’d see it as more violence he manifested into the world. He’d convince himself he can’t escape it, that he’s poison. That this is what his love does to people.

And Cas would know this. Cas would want to show Dean all the ways the world is good and kind and sweet and all the ways Dean belongs in it.

Besides, if anyone deserves to kick John Winchester’s ass, it’s Mary or one of the kids. My money’s on Mary. She could take him easy. (And she deserved to. But that’s another post.)

how do I communicate that I think defining cas’s rebellion solely as an act of love for dean is reductive love interest schlock but also I DO think cas rebelled for dean it’s just that dean happened to be the guy that made the lightbulb turn on for cas but he’s rebelled a bunch of times before the only difference now is that rebelling during the apocalypse meant heaven couldn’t control him so dean is really only incidental to cas’s final rebellion but he is the necessary catalyst and because this rebellion worked when a thousand previous ones didn’t cas misattributes that success to dean and forms a lot of his worldview around that for years before realising you can’t just rebel against heaven and replace god with a human man so he stops worshipping dean but then by that point he’s in too deep and loves dean too much so nothing really changes except for cas’s internal perception of the whole thing. he rebelled and he did it for dean but it’s not ABOUT dean even though it is. but it’s not

have we talked yet about this mother of a parallel:

Cas (s5) to Dean : I did it, all of it, for you.

Cas (s15) to Dean : Everything you have ever done, the good and the bad, you have done for love.

Have we talked yet about the beauty of how these quotes are actually a thesis statement for both of their characters bc literally ever since rescuing Dean from hell, everything cas did was in one way or another, for Dean.

Meanwhile, Dean mother hen Winchester, as we know, is a living breathing embodiment of Love.

Something about Dean doing everything out of love, and Cas doing everything out of love for Dean, specifically. Something about this makes me insanely feral

when cas rolls his eyes it's like when cats stretch their arms

Sometimes i think of how terrifying it must’ve been for Cas to fall in love with Dean. Like. Imagine you’re this huge, otherworldly, immortal being who’s been around for eons, observing and watching over earth from afar. Your only purpose in existence is to worship a creator you’ve never seen and be obedient to those higher—holier—than you.

You’ve dedicated yourself to Him, promised to be dutiful, have succeeded in being a foot soldier, have won wars, built stars, silently watched mankind ruin and replenish itself. It feels like you’ve been around forever though you know that’s not true (you have older brothers and sisters, after all), and then one day, one day, your superiors tell you that you have an important part to play in the End of Times.

They task you with saving the righteous man from the depths of hell. And you think thats all it is, a visit to hell and back—a task fit for a footsoldier. That’s all it was supposed to be. Save this man and then return to heaven for further instructions.

But then you touch this man, you save him, he saves you, and somehow, you find yourself playing a bigger role in the apocalypse than you thought.

You don’t feel emotions, you’ve been built as a war machine, of course you don’t feel emotions. But you look at this man’s eyes and he is so different from you. You’ve never felt emotions, but this man feels all of them strongly, deeply, and furiously. He looks at everything like it carries a history bigger than yours and you see it. All that sentiment, all that love, you see it in his eyes.

He hates the staring—tells you its weird and creepy, but you just can’t stop. You look into his eyes and you see that the color of love is green.

And you don’t understand at first, but he makes you understand. Teaches you savage empathy and a wild sort of care and somehow, somehow, this-this man, a single man with a broken, beating heart teaches you how to feel your own.

He grabs you by the shoulders, much like how you grabbed him that first time in hell, and, impossibly, he makes you feel.

It doesn’t make sense.

You don’t need oxygen, but your heart beats faster in your chest, your lungs expand quicker, and you can’t stop staring. It’s confusing. It’s worrying, inconvenient, troublesome, sinful.

It’s terrifying.

You’re afraid and you’ve never really been afraid so it’s even more terrifying. You’re scared of heaven, of hell, of disobeying…of loosing him.

In the end, these new emotions define you somehow. Wrap around you like a noose and you don’t know how to not suffocate from them so you do what you do best. You take the source of all this new intensity inside you, and you shape your decisions around it.

The source tells you theres a right and wrong, and for the first time in your memory since God created the heavens and earth, you make a decision.

oh, cursed thought a lot of ppl don't want to examine.....the parallels between john ghosting dean to go off and do his own thing and neglecting to inform him where he is / if he's alive and cas ghosting dean for weeks / months to go off and do his own thing and neglecting to inform him where he is / if he's alive. something that's a basic common courtesy esp when you're living the lives they live and doing the things they do, which could get them killed at any moment. oh dean :( he's been WORRIED and SCARED for the people he loves his whole life. he's been sitting and waiting for someone he cares abt to come home his whole life, and scared he may never see them return again. he's always looking back. always looking at the door. always looking at the phone that won't ring. 😭😭😭

season 4 dean and cas are so 🤌 🤌

just… cas saw dean stripped bare of his defenses and at his lowest and touched his soul to raise him, his voice ringing out that dean winchester had been saved, and at the same moment, cas was lost to the angels because his path had changed course.

and as a result, cas knows more ABOUT dean than almost anyone at this point, he has seen past all the lies and masks dean uses to the truth of him, BUT he doesn’t KNOW him, really, because he lacks a fundamental understanding of how people work and what drives them. and it just becomes the two of them tearing down each others’ perceptions of the world, dean showing cas what it really means to have humanity and how significant emotions are while cas teaches dean that he’s worth the effort that went into saving him

castiel, the one and only.

our old heroes, adelaclancy (ao3 link) // isaiah 40:25, NIV // 4.22 lucifer rising // 15.17 unity // tmwwbk tvline preview, ben edlund // isaiah 48:12, NIV

the way after having thrown dean to the ground, cas takes one last deep breath and exhales bracing himself for the empty is making me insane. a creature who doesn't need to breathe! takes one last breath before his inevitable death!!!!!!!! we keep arguing if cas should be an angel or a human in the end but he can never be either, not fully! because he is both. he is Cas.

☆ the semi-sunken dog of thursday

☆ nasa's photo of the day on september 18th, 2008 - astro-cooperation/stefan heutz/wolfgang ries | this night has opened my eyes - the smiths | supernatural 15x18 - despair | "perro semihundido" - francisco de goya | monday's child poem | the plague dogs (1982) | coping with losing a pet - helpguide.org