Dean Winchester - hero or loser?

[missyjack]

More commentray on the commentary - Kripke on WIAWSNB
Firstly a self-indulgent squee at having the Blue Velvet ref in the episode confirmed as deliberate. I love the visual referencing of other movies and …oops thats a whole other meta

Comments

[quiet000001]

I think to answer that question "yes" derails a lot of the hero archetype, which kind of demands that the character be relatively ordinary to start out with. (Relatively because within the bounds of normal variation the character does have to be OPEN to the idea of adventure, whereas some others would not be- With Frodo, he'd had the idea of going beyond the Shire planted young, so he was perhaps not as mentally unprepared for the journey and thus not as mentally resistant to the idea as some other random hobbit may have been.)

But basically the entire idea of the hero as an archetype requires that the audience be able to sympathize with the hero to some degree, and feel "yes, I could be that person"- which isn't going to happen if your hero is Distinctly Different from the outset. (Even Harry, whom we are told IS very different from very young, tries his best TO be pretty normal, until the story demands otherwise from him.)

That said, one could probably also argue that the traits necessary for a character to believably take on the hero archetype mantle predispose them to 'heroic' behavior even if it's not on a grand scale. (Simply because we expect our mythic heros to be good people and good people often do things which others may view as heroic just because it's the right thing to do in daily life.)

But I do think it's a requirement of a believable hero character that they not be too extraordinary to start with- in part because if they are already a Hero, where's the character arc in the story?

(Erk. Sorry for rambling on in comments, we're talking about archetypes and mythic structure in one of my cinema classes right now, so I've got it on the brain. :) )

All that said, I also think Kripke is too hard on Dean. Granted, Dean is ostensibly his creation and he can define him to be however he wants, but as established in canon, Dean doesn't seem to really have any significant inherent flaws which can't be explained by his bizarre childhood, so there's no reason to think that if he'd grown up in a more normal setting he would have had the degree of problems that Kripke seems to picture.

Maybe Dean would never be *as* satisfied with his lot in life if he wasn't a hunter, because hunting does seem a very fundamental thing to him and a good fit for his talents, but it's possible to not be perfectly satisfied with your life and still be reasonably happy and functional and not a deadbeat drunk.

(Also, I don't think we can really take the djinn ep as a canon image of Dean as he would have been, because the entire dream world in that ep is generated from the inside of Dean-in-real-life's head, and it is entirely likely that Dean WOULD think he'd be kind of a deadbeat if he didn't have hunting, because Dean is pretty damn down on himself. So it's more of a peek into Dean's psyche than a true "what might have been", to my mind.)

[missyjack]

it's possible to not be perfectly satisfied with your life and still be reasonably happy and functional and not a deadbeat drunk. Oh for sure, but its a lot less interesting dramatically! I think part of Kripke's conception is that the loss of hunting would be devestating to Dean - which is why his offer to give it up run off to Amsterdam for Sam is so significant, as is him saying he is sick of hunting(Croatoan). Kripke obv has Dean feel that without hunting he is nothing, even if that would be the case.

[quiet000001]

Well, that probably is true of THIS Dean. The one who has basically been hunting since age 4. :) And since that's the one the story is about, any other versions of Dean aren't particularly relevant to Kripke, I suppose.

But it's actually kind of unfair to both the character and the writers to make that statement (Kripke's) about all the Deans that could have been, because the writers (and Jensen) have done a fantastic job of developing Dean as a multi-dimensional character with traits and habits and skills and talents, and not ALL of his dimensionality can be attributed directly to hunting related experiences. So even if you stripped those things away, you wouldn't end up with the one-note loser. :)

Just probably not really someone interesting enough to make a tv show about. :) (We've never seen anything in canon about Dean which would indicate that he has any kind of personal innate need to be extraordinary or Special, so it's quite probable that Dean without the whole YED events would've grown up into the nice guy who has a sweet wife and owns the corner garage with his dad and always smiles and is nice and a little flirtatious, and is basically not far off many people we meet every day, living his own everyday life. So he could well be happy, but from our pov, he'd be boring. :) )