#we're not supposed to find him interesting or funny or lovable | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

darkshrimpemotions · 3 years

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I think I'm just fully realizing, as I’m half-rewatching the show via YouTube reaction videos...we really weren't supposed to love Dean. And we really were not the target audience, and by we I mean a much larger segment of folks than you may think. Eric Kripke (and also Robert Singer) didn't want a bunch of queer OR mentally ill folks OR women OR people of color OR abuse survivors. Hell, he didn't even really want an audience of macho manly men!

Eric Kripke was aiming for an audience of Eric Kripkes--the kind of whiny pseudo-intellectual nerdbro who finds men like s1 Dean threatening in real life, thinks being rejected romantically by a woman is comparable to real hardship, views any unfamiliar form of intimacy with some base level of suspicion, and expresses disgust at other men’s promiscuity not because he has more “respect” for women (and don’t get me started on the puritanism of equating sex with disrespect automatically), but because he resents that he can't do the same.

Eric Kripkes hate men like Dean and envy them in equal measure. Dean is aspirational, a power fantasy, but he’s not the character Kripke actually identifies with. That's s1 Sam: the soft-spoken, smart, nerdy, sensitive guy who is special and whose niceness is rewarded by women improbably throwing themselves at him.

Dean’s hook-ups in the early seasons are almost all girls he blatantly, openly hits on or pursues in a way that, according to Nice Guy(TM) logic, would be creepy if he didn’t look the way he does (it’s still creepy, to be clear, only Nice Guys(TM) ever think it’s not). Whereas Sam’s hook-ups during these seasons almost always initiate things first, despite being in situations where hooking up with the 7-foot rando who just rolled into town would realistically be the furthest thing from their minds.

Dean is the Nice Guy(TM)’s power fantasy of being able to “get away with” whatever he wants by virtue of being hot (and assuming all women are just completely shallow), whereas Sam is the Nice Guy(TM) self-insert that, in fiction, actually “wins” girls by being comparatively respectful.

That’s why Dean is written the way he is in the early seasons, where he rides this weird line between being downright irredeemably sleazy and accidentally actually deconstructing toxic masculinity in his characterization. Kripke wants to be Dean but also resents the very existence of Deans (that is, the surface-level Dean, the Masculine Performance) in the world, and resents his own inability to inhabit that role.

They confuse him, and they make him feel insecure, but instead of bucking that whole worldview he fully buys into it via the way he makes fun of it. So Dean becomes this weird hodgepodge of highly performative toxic masculine traits interspersed with moments of genuine emotion that were probably intended to read as weakness. And it’s supposed to be over-the-top and vaguely ridiculous and ultimately, kind of pathetic.

But then he made the inspired mistake of casting Jensen fucking Ackles, the man who’s forgotten more about gender performativity than most of us will ever fucking know, in this highly gendered, highly contradictory role.

When you hand Jackles contradictions he just turns them into character complexity, so suddenly instead of watching a show about Regular Guy being sucked into his toxic family’s heinous world of monsters, you’re watching a show about Manly Guy desperately trying to hold his family together against impossible odds through increasingly self-destructive means while his facade of masculinity systematically crumbles around him.

And it’s fucking fascinating, so fascinating that every subsequent writer leans further into that, until that’s almost the entirety of the show. Hell, even Kripke leans into it somewhat, maybe subconsciously, fairly early on. Watch the back half of season 1: it’s extremely Dean-perspective heavy where the first half of the season was more evenly split. Still, the perspective remains more or less balanced in seasons 2 and 3, only to slant extremely far towards Dean in season 4 and never really course-correct after that.

In retrospect it should’ve been obvious that Ruby was playing Sam from the get-go, because the show simply does not invest much time or effort into getting you invested in her relationship with Sam. Certainly not as much time and effort as it expends on making you feel Dean’s worry and distrust, or in building up his parallel relationship with Castiel. And boy, once that relationship takes off, there’s really no more hope of this ever being the Sam show again.

The most it can hope for is to evenly split focus between the two brothers, although most of the time it doesn’t even manage that. By the time we get halfway through the show, it’s pretty solidly the story of Manly Guy having a constant gender and sexuality crisis trying to keep his increasingly queer found family together from within the confines of his glass closet, while the angel who pulled him out of Hell chips steadily away at the closet’s walls.

There are hardly any women in the story at that point that aren’t written as sisters or mothers to the main characters. There are precious few hook-ups for either brother anymore, either, pursuing and pursued alike. There’s no power fantasy to speak of, and no low-key competition between the brothers related to any of these things.

Instead you have Manly Guy embracing his homemaking skills while forming affectionate homosocial bonds with men who are more secure in their masculinity than he is, which he finds both freeing and comforting. And you have Regular Guy setting boundaries, going vegan, and bonding with the women in his life over surviving similar kinds of trauma.

They co-parent a child with their gay angel best friend who likes pop music and is Manly Guy’s most profound significant homosocial bond. Oh yeah, and they also hunt monsters and save the world sometimes, but mostly those plots exist as allegories for the things they’re working through, or catalysts for their continued character development.

Like no fucking wonder Kripke (and later, Singer) didn’t get the audience he was after. And also thank fucking god he didn’t.

#supernatural #dean winchester #dean studies #spn meta #spn gender studies #eric kripke #lizawords #this is the least coherent meta i have ever written #i was just watching sesskasays' reaction videos of season 1 of spn #and at some point toward the middle of the season it hit me that OH #we're not actually supposed to like dean that much #we're not supposed to find him interesting or funny or lovable #that's all coming from jackles it's really not in the writing at all #and the more i looked at it the more i could see it #and now i can't UNsee it #anyway this is VERY kripke-critical if you can't tell from the first two paragraphs #but let me be clear this absolutely also applies to robert singer and to a lesser extent andrew dabb as well

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quillsandtypos · 3 years

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Smiling in the Background

Summary: Reggie discusses his parents divorce with sunset curve for the first time. The reader opens up to Reggie about their own experience.

Warnings: comfort angst and talk about divorce

Words: 2.4k

Pairings: none but could be interpreted as reggie x reader

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Reggie knew his place in the group. He was the funny but lovable dumbass. If you needed a laugh you came to him. He was used to being overlooked and underappreciated. But he knew that his friends didn’t feel that way about him, they were always there for him when he needed it, not that he did; but it was still nice to know that they had his back.

But as the boys, and Reggie, grew older things shifted out of place. At their core they still had similar morals and principles to their personalities, but the trauma that they had developed would become a part of them as well.

Alex was first to endure that kind of trauma; when his parents didn’t react well to him coming out, he was devastated. The guys of course had already known about him being gay for years. They comforted him when he came to band practice the next day crying because of his parents' words. The boys promised him that he always had a family with them, a family that accepted him.

Luke was the second. At first the band didn’t know exactly what happened. Luke wasn’t very good at hiding his emotions, and they knew his relationship with his parents wasn’t the greatest at the time, but they didn’t know exactly what happened until they accidentally walked in on him playing one day, completely in tears. Luke told them what had happened and the song that he was writing to cope. By the next week the three had gotten together to write the instrumental to the song. They surprised Luke with it, and it was enough to make him smile, even if it was only for a second.

It took Reggie a long while to even admit to himself what was happening in his world. Something like this couldn’t be happening to him. He was supposed to be the funny guy of the group. How could he be the safe and comforting grounds for everyone else to walk upon when he couldn’t walk upon the grounds himself? He didn’t tell the group for quite awhile, he didn’t want to bother them with his own problems; he knew Luke and Alex were dealing with their own shit.

But he didn’t need to tell him, they knew something was up, long before he did. Words were only spoken about it once. It was a beautiful summer day and they were practicing in the studio. The group was cracking jokes and smiling. Reggie was smiling too, but it was obvious to those that knew him well that it was fake.

“Reg?” spoke Alex.

He forced a smile, “Yeah?”

Alex looked worried, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, totally!” Reggie lied.

Alex gave him a knowing look and Reggie knew he couldn’t lie to one of his best friends.

He glanced down to avoid eye contact. “It’s kinda a long story,” he murmured.

Alex took a spot next to him on the couch. “I’ve got time, if you want to tell it,” he assured him.

By that point the other two had caught on to the more serious atmosphere, and had turned around to watch.

“Reg you know we’re here for you man, right?” Luke asked, as he gripped Reggie’s shoulder rather tightly.

“Yeah, yeah I know. I just don’t wanna bother you guys, you’re dealing with your own stuff anyways, you probably don’t need my stuff anyways right?” Reggie joked. He forced himself to laugh and smile but no one in the room bought it for a second. They all had somber faces and looked at him through worried eyes.

“Reggie, you are never a bother to us,” Alex reassured him.

Luke nodded.

“Yeah what he said,” Bobby agreed.

Reggie took a look at all of his friends' faces and decided that he would tell them. He told them about how it started off with arguing at night, but it was quiet enough that he could ignore it. Then it turned to comments during the day that they thought he wouldn’t notice, which he did. Then it was screaming so loud in the middle of the night that he could hear it upstairs even with a pillow over his head. He told them everything, and they listened to all of it. Occasionally nodding to let him know that they were still listening. When he was done talking his breath was shaky and there were still tears rolling down his cheeks.

Bobby offered him a tissue box that he gladly took.

After a few moments of silence and them watching him, he felt the need to break it.

“I’m still the funny guy though, so don’t any of you think you can take my place,” he playfully threatened. The group broke into small grins but they quickly faded.

“The funny guy can still be sad. Being funny doesn’t mean the absence of being human,” Alex consoled him.

“Besides, you’re so much more than the funny guy. You’re an amazing friend, a great bassist, and you’re one of the nicest people I know,” Luke continued. Other than when he was talking about his parents, Reggie didn’t think he had ever seen Luke look so serious.

“And you make a mean sandwich,” Bobby added. Alex lightly smacked his leg.

“Ow! I was just trying to make him smile,” Bobby defended himself.

Reggie genuinely laughed at that.

“Thanks guys,” Reggie said, as he looked at all of them.

From that point on it was a said but unsaid thing. Reggie never really talked about it, but the guys knew when the fighting had gotten especially bad that night. They always offered a listening ear but never pushed him. But when Reggie died, he didn’t know what would happen to his parents. He never brought it up, with Caleb and everything it seemed like an unimportant matter.

But when Julie introduced you to the band, that seemed like an important matter to him. Another alive human being could see them, even if they weren’t playing. You came to know all of them fairly well, but you clicked the most with Reggie. He’d sometimes come visit you at school, just to say hello only to poof back out a couple moments later. He’d just sit in your room as you did homework, occasionally interrupting your homework to ask you a question or two about the world nowadays; not that you minded, you enjoyed talking to him.

Today was one of those days, it had been a week or so since Caleb’s stamps had been removed, and you were grateful to even be having a conversation with him.

Reggie already knew you had divorced parents, you had mentioned it off handedly the second week he knew you. Everyone else seemed to brush passed it, but he continued to watch you for a moment, noticing the way you couldn’t make eye contact with him; the same thing he had done, all those years ago.

But it wasn’t until this moment that it was brought up again. You had said something about needing to pack to go to your mom’s house when he remembered.

“Oh right, you have divorced parents too,” he reminded himself.

You realized what he just said. “Wait, you’re parents are divorced?”

Then you realized what you had just said. “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have asked that,” you apologized.

“No it’s okay, truthfully I don’t really know,” he admitted.

You had a curious look on your face, but you said nothing, since it wasn’t any of your business.

He paused for a minute before continuing. “My parents always fought and they seemed to be having a lot of issues right before I died, but when we went to where my house used to be, my house wasn’t there anymore. I don’t know if they ever ended up getting a divorce or not, I just kinda assumed they had,” he explained.

You thought of something but hesitated slightly.

“What?” he asked.

You bit your lip. “Well do you want to know?”

You definitely had peaked his interest. “How could we know?”

“Well I mean it’s 2021, I’m sure we could find them on the internet or in a phone book somehow,” you nervously suggested.

“Sure, but can you do me a favor?” he asked.

“Yeah, of course,” you responded softly.

“Can you find it and just tell me? I don’t think I can take the searching around,” he admitted. He looked so fragile in that moment, like at any second he could break. You immediately agreed. You looked through google using his last name, sifting through anything you could find.

After about ten minutes of searching you managed to find some court proceedings with his last name on it.

“Was this their names?” you questioned as you showed him the names on the paper.

“Yeah,” Reggie responded.

You scrolled through the rest of the papers. You anxiously looked up at his depressed face. “Your parents got the divorce finalized five months after your death,” you concluded.

Reggie sighed, “I guess I was the thing keeping together.” He emphasized the was in his sentence.

You looked him in the eye with a sort of passion that could only be recreated by someone who had gone through similar pain. “Reggie, you can’t blame yourself like that. Divorces are between the parents, it has nothing to do with you.”

“And yet somehow it feels like we're the ones who get hurt the most doesn’t it?” he asked, as he turned to you.

You felt your eyes start to water, “Yeah, something like that,” you agreed.

“Why is it that way?” you wondered aloud.

He turned his body to face you.

“I just mean, why do parents act like we’re unaffected by it and that we don’t get any decisions on what happens to us in the matter, but we’re the ones who have to deal with choices they made,” you ranted.

“You wanna talk about what happened to you?” Reggie offered.

You took one look into his eyes, and you knew you couldn’t stop the flood gates from opening.

A few tears leaked out of your eyes. “It was several years ago, I should just be used to it,” you complained.

“Just because it happened in the past doesn’t mean the pain is in the past.” He looked a little impressed with himself with what he just said.

You smiled slightly at his face. “Yeah, I suppose your right.” You wiped off the tear running down your cheek.

He looked at you to continue.

“But there isn’t much to explain, I have one parent who is a bitch and the other isn’t bad,” you explained. You shakily laughed.

“You don’t have to tell me anything, but I doubt that’s all of it,” Reggie spoke softly. You were vulnerable, and you hated vulnerability. But you knew that Reggie would keep this side of you a secret for as long as you needed him to, that’s what friends are for. And you also knew that he understood your situation better than anyone, he was in the same boat himself.

So you decided to tell him the whole story.

“When I was around thirteen I started noticing things were off, I wasn’t sure of what yet, but there were these little moments where I knew that the fight was getting worse,” you started.

“There were some moments where the events didn’t make sense. I wasn’t entirely sure what was happening. There was a barrier coming into play and I didn’t know where it was, but I knew it was there,” you explained.

“I was young, but I knew that my childhood was coming to an end. As a kid you put your parents up on these pedestals, and then divorce hits, and things get uncovered and you realize no one is as high up as you believe them to be. Not that their marriage was ever completely stable anyways, but somethings become natural, no matter how bad they are for you.” Reggie looked at you with watery eyes, he really did get exactly what you went through.

“But as I got older they got worse, but when they told me they were getting a divorce it didn’t really surprise me. I knew they had been fighting for years, and it didn’t come as a shock to most people in my family, so I guess I wasn’t the only one who noticed.”

Reggie held a sad smile on his face for an instant, “They usually tend to know before the parents do.”

“Well they definitely did in my case, and to make matters worse they battled it out in court. Which meant that I had to battle it out in court,” you paused to collect your thoughts and wipe your nose.

“Well I didn’t actually go to the court but I had to fight my own parents to get equal time with the both of them,” you admitted.

“Y/n I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” Reggie consoled you.

You squeezed your eyes shut to get the final tears to come out.

“It’s okay, it was a long time ago, and I probably didn’t have it as bad as some people,” you reasoned.

He placed his hand on your knee. “A wise person once told me that even though someone’s suffering is worse, it doesn’t erase your own,” Reggie offered.

“That’s really smart, who said that?” you asked.

Reggie thought for a moment before breaking into a large grin. “No idea, but I think they had the right idea though.”

You laughed at that, though he wasn’t wrong, it was a good idea.

You placed your hand on his knee. “Thank you Reggie.”

He patted your leg, “Anytime y/n, anytime.”

“And you know I’m always here for you right?” you promised.

He looked like you had said the most obvious thing of all time. “Yeah, I can poof to you at any time.”

You rolled your eyes. “I’m serious, Reg.”

His face grew serious again in acknowledgement. “Yes, I know.”

“So if you ever wanna go find your parents house, you know where to find me,” you offered.

“I will make sure to remember that.”

“Good, then I will see you tomorrow,” you told him, as you got up.

“Not if I see you first!” he yelled out at you.

“You’re a dork!” you yelled back, though you couldn’t deny the smile on your face that replaced the sad one from earlier.

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