Meta: Dean, Women and the Romantic Story-Arc (spoilers up to and including Heart)
Just some quick Dean meta inspired by Heart. (Funny how we get a Sam episode and it tells me all this stuff about Dean.) Watch out, spoilers galore.
It's that last terrible scene in Heart, with the camera closing in on Dean's face, his shadowed eyes losing focus, the line of his mouth firming... and when the gunshot comes, the blankness of his gaze after he flinches.
It made me think, he knew this would happen. This is why he prefers strip clubs and hook-ups and one-night stands. I don't know exactly how long he's thought of himself as defeated when it comes to women, but that is what it comes down to, over and over again.
I think Dean has three ways of seeing women: Nemesis, Target and Sex Object. This is where I must give a lot of credit to dotfic, whose insightful essay on Dean's relationships with women has stuck in my mind and influenced a lot of what I'm saying here. The three categories I just named are actually a riff on three categories that she identifies: antagonists; sisters, moms and guides; and potential romantic interests. I've created my own categories to support the thesis of this meta, which goes in a different direction than hers, but I want to be clear on how much this owes to the discussion that she started.
The main point I would make, drawing from a number of things that have been written on the subject, is that Dean's experience with women has not prepared him to have a healthy, satisfying, romantic relationship.
When you divide the women he has known into categories based on his relationships with them, as dotfic noted, trends become visible.
The Nemesis
First, there is the Nemesis. She is herself supernatural. Think Molly (Roadkill), Meg, Tessa (IMToD), Kate (DMB), the crossroads demon and Lenore (Bloodlust), and then go read everything dotfic has to say about them in the "Antagonists" section of her essay. Pay close attention to the part where she says, "the show seems to make it a point that Dean keeps having great chemistry with supernatural chicks, despite his resistance towards seeing them as people."
Dean sees the supernatural as his nemesis, something that it is his life's mission to destroy. You could argue that after Bloodlust, he begins to see things in shades of gray. He may be moving toward seeing evil itself as his nemesis, rather than the magical world where evil is usually, but not necessarily always, found. After all, he lets Lenore and her friends escape, is more amused at than threatened by Andy, and he refuses to believe he can't save Sam, who frequently displays supernatural powers. Roadkill is another example of this newfound tolerance, and last night we saw him come around to it again.
All that said, we've never seen a supernatural woman who is not in some way Dean's nemesis. (Okay, maybe Eva, but the jury's still out on that.) I think it's safe to say that a nonantagonistic relationship between Dean and a woman in this category would be incredibly problematic. At least at this point in the canon. As the quote above says, Dean has trouble seeing them as people.
The Target
Next is the Target. It seems to be a given that most of the women Dean meets are in distress, usually from supernatural aggressors, but occasionally from human ones (The Benders) and at times from both (Scarecrow). It is Dean's job to save them. Henry Jenkins, writing about the show, says some revealing things about Sam and Dean's relationship with the women I would add to this category:
"These women sometimes surface as romantic interests for Sam and Dean but more often, they are extensions of their emotional drama: that is to say, each of them is dealing with some aspect of family drama which strongly parallels the issues which Sam and Dean are grappling with in their own lives. The men do not so much desire them as romantic or sex objects as they use them as mirrors to see into their own and each other's souls. Each woman teaches them something they need to learn before they can become emotionally whole again and in the process, each teaches the viewer something about the men that we would not know otherwise. The show never patronizes the women, never denies them their core humanity, and indeed, often, it is clear that the men admire the women's courage, intelligence, integrity, and passion."
The Target, then, is a woman who Dean finds himself relating to, often to his own surprise (quoting dotfic again, "Dean has no trouble flirting with, bedding, or protecting hot chicks, but their thankyous seem to throw him."). The women in this category are the most human to him, as he is able to relate to them on a nonsexual level. (They also tend to mirror him or Sam.) They would make appropriate, if not ideal, life-partners, most of them. The fact that Dean is startled to find a deeper level of intimacy has grown between them--well, that tells me that Dean seldom, if ever, intends for that to happen. It happens despite himself. He's not looking for it.
Why not? These women aren't unattractive. He isn't afraid to hit on the ones who are legal. If Dean were more like Sam, he would try to make an emotional connection to match the physical attraction that's already there. The fact is that Dean avoids intimacy not just with "supernatural chicks" but even with women who could potentially be appropriate partners for him.
There are countless ways to explain this. Dean's lifestyle doesn't permit permanent relationships outside of family and other hunters. Dean may see it as unprofessional on some level--and at certain times--to connect that way. Dean has been burned bad by Cassie. Etcetera.
Which brings us back to that final scene in Heart. Because I think that is what it always comes down to for Dean. The women he loves are targets. Starting with his mom, whose death traumatized him at a young age, and going on to Jess, who also buys it in the pilot (not that he "loves" Jess, but his brother does, and Dean learns the lesson over again as a witness to that experience). Cassie herself becomes a target of that racist ghost-truck; his mom is forced to sacrifice herself when the poltergeist invades their old house; Layla is the victim of a terminal disease. Jo, whether she's a romantic interest or like a little sister, gets kidnapped by the serial-killer ghost and assaulted by demon!Sam. Every woman he meets is a potential victim, often a literal one. And it doesn't matter that many of the Targets are in the end saved from the MotW. Their vulnerability has already been revealed, and Dean is unable to cope with it.
The Sex Object
Which is why Dean turns to the Sex Object. Anonymous women he picks up in bars (Provenance) or ogles in strip clubs (Heart) provide him with temporary release. It's shallow, and it makes him look a little sleazy, but it's better than getting hurt by the inevitable victimhood of the women who he is required to save, the ones he can relate to. Look at the way he freaks in No Exit, when Jo gets snatched. He allows himself to get close to her (again, unintentionally, almost against his will), even though she's a Target, and then she almost dies. Limiting his sexual relationships to the casual and temporary allows him to escape from responsibility for a few hours.
Dean and the Romantic Story-Arc
Last night, I read an interview with Sera Gamble, the Executive Story Editor of SPN, where she is asked what she would do with the characters if not for the constraints of the show. In other words, hypothetically (so don't freak out, I doubt this is going to happen).
"Well, the fans of this show are probably going to send me death threats for saying this, but I’d like to give Dean a real arc with a love interest. Some interesting, troubled, kick-ass chick who is really messes with him." Gamble thinks the reason the audience gets so up in arms about women coming into Sam and Dean’s lives might be that they’re afraid it will change the show into something less cool. "Maybe they think a romantic relationship would shift the central focus from where it should be-the relationship between Sam and Dean. But it really doesn’t have to. In fact it shouldn’t. In fact, if I may be so bold, we’re just not that dumb. Sam and Dean ain’t broke, as it were, so it’s not our intention to fix them."
What has worked since the beginning is how the writers throw very difficult stuff at each brother, stuff that tests them and pushes them to the breaking point. "We give them people to love and then those people get taken away or betray them. Why would a love interest be any different?"
As people said in the comments of this interview, the woman Gamble describes sounds an awful lot like a Mary-Sue. They also pointed out that Sam kind of fills that role for Dean already. Hear-hear. I would add that Gamble is imagining the wrong approach for giving Dean a romantic story-arc.
It shouldn't be about the woman. It should be about Dean learning how to accept the woman. Because in the matter of women, Dean is, in fact, broken. A romantic story-arc would have to deal with that, no matter what. It might even have to make that the primary focus.
Dean's problem is not that the women he meets are wrong for him. His problem is that he is wrong for those women. He is afraid of committing to a woman whose life is in peril. He's afraid of feeling for someone else the terror that he already feels for Sam, who he's obligated to protect 24/7. I don't think he has the personal resources to protect another person the way he does Sam. In fact, the idea of protecting another person besides Sam might be a serious turn-off for Dean. (Which might be another reason he doesn't hook up with any of those Target women except for Cassie--and it might even be a way of explaining their lack of chemistry, Dean being turned off unconsciously by her new Target status in that ep).
So a romantic story-arc would not be so much about the great love affair between Dean and Mary-Sue. It would be about Dean making a fundamental change in how he sees the world.
"Dad wants us to pick up where he left off, saving people, hunting things. The family business."
Dean sees others as people, things and family. People are for saving. Things are for hunting. Family is for him, for intimacy and togetherness and loyalty. Maybe occasionally he dreams otherwise, as with Cassie before she kicked him out, but Dean just isn't ready for the women he meets to become family. (ETA: The last woman in his family burned up on the ceiling.)
When Sam does what he has to do at the end of Heart, it's just another instance where Dean learns that lesson all over again. I wonder if Sam is learning it too.
Tell me what you think? I'm open to discussion on this stuff, and probably veered off track at some points. Would love to know where.
It's that last terrible scene in Heart, with the camera closing in on Dean's face, his shadowed eyes losing focus, the line of his mouth firming... and when the gunshot comes, the blankness of his gaze after he flinches.
It made me think, he knew this would happen. This is why he prefers strip clubs and hook-ups and one-night stands. I don't know exactly how long he's thought of himself as defeated when it comes to women, but that is what it comes down to, over and over again.
I think Dean has three ways of seeing women: Nemesis, Target and Sex Object. This is where I must give a lot of credit to dotfic, whose insightful essay on Dean's relationships with women has stuck in my mind and influenced a lot of what I'm saying here. The three categories I just named are actually a riff on three categories that she identifies: antagonists; sisters, moms and guides; and potential romantic interests. I've created my own categories to support the thesis of this meta, which goes in a different direction than hers, but I want to be clear on how much this owes to the discussion that she started.
The main point I would make, drawing from a number of things that have been written on the subject, is that Dean's experience with women has not prepared him to have a healthy, satisfying, romantic relationship.
When you divide the women he has known into categories based on his relationships with them, as dotfic noted, trends become visible.
The Nemesis
First, there is the Nemesis. She is herself supernatural. Think Molly (Roadkill), Meg, Tessa (IMToD), Kate (DMB), the crossroads demon and Lenore (Bloodlust), and then go read everything dotfic has to say about them in the "Antagonists" section of her essay. Pay close attention to the part where she says, "the show seems to make it a point that Dean keeps having great chemistry with supernatural chicks, despite his resistance towards seeing them as people."
Dean sees the supernatural as his nemesis, something that it is his life's mission to destroy. You could argue that after Bloodlust, he begins to see things in shades of gray. He may be moving toward seeing evil itself as his nemesis, rather than the magical world where evil is usually, but not necessarily always, found. After all, he lets Lenore and her friends escape, is more amused at than threatened by Andy, and he refuses to believe he can't save Sam, who frequently displays supernatural powers. Roadkill is another example of this newfound tolerance, and last night we saw him come around to it again.
All that said, we've never seen a supernatural woman who is not in some way Dean's nemesis. (Okay, maybe Eva, but the jury's still out on that.) I think it's safe to say that a nonantagonistic relationship between Dean and a woman in this category would be incredibly problematic. At least at this point in the canon. As the quote above says, Dean has trouble seeing them as people.
The Target
Next is the Target. It seems to be a given that most of the women Dean meets are in distress, usually from supernatural aggressors, but occasionally from human ones (The Benders) and at times from both (Scarecrow). It is Dean's job to save them. Henry Jenkins, writing about the show, says some revealing things about Sam and Dean's relationship with the women I would add to this category:
"These women sometimes surface as romantic interests for Sam and Dean but more often, they are extensions of their emotional drama: that is to say, each of them is dealing with some aspect of family drama which strongly parallels the issues which Sam and Dean are grappling with in their own lives. The men do not so much desire them as romantic or sex objects as they use them as mirrors to see into their own and each other's souls. Each woman teaches them something they need to learn before they can become emotionally whole again and in the process, each teaches the viewer something about the men that we would not know otherwise. The show never patronizes the women, never denies them their core humanity, and indeed, often, it is clear that the men admire the women's courage, intelligence, integrity, and passion."
The Target, then, is a woman who Dean finds himself relating to, often to his own surprise (quoting dotfic again, "Dean has no trouble flirting with, bedding, or protecting hot chicks, but their thankyous seem to throw him."). The women in this category are the most human to him, as he is able to relate to them on a nonsexual level. (They also tend to mirror him or Sam.) They would make appropriate, if not ideal, life-partners, most of them. The fact that Dean is startled to find a deeper level of intimacy has grown between them--well, that tells me that Dean seldom, if ever, intends for that to happen. It happens despite himself. He's not looking for it.
Why not? These women aren't unattractive. He isn't afraid to hit on the ones who are legal. If Dean were more like Sam, he would try to make an emotional connection to match the physical attraction that's already there. The fact is that Dean avoids intimacy not just with "supernatural chicks" but even with women who could potentially be appropriate partners for him.
There are countless ways to explain this. Dean's lifestyle doesn't permit permanent relationships outside of family and other hunters. Dean may see it as unprofessional on some level--and at certain times--to connect that way. Dean has been burned bad by Cassie. Etcetera.
Which brings us back to that final scene in Heart. Because I think that is what it always comes down to for Dean. The women he loves are targets. Starting with his mom, whose death traumatized him at a young age, and going on to Jess, who also buys it in the pilot (not that he "loves" Jess, but his brother does, and Dean learns the lesson over again as a witness to that experience). Cassie herself becomes a target of that racist ghost-truck; his mom is forced to sacrifice herself when the poltergeist invades their old house; Layla is the victim of a terminal disease. Jo, whether she's a romantic interest or like a little sister, gets kidnapped by the serial-killer ghost and assaulted by demon!Sam. Every woman he meets is a potential victim, often a literal one. And it doesn't matter that many of the Targets are in the end saved from the MotW. Their vulnerability has already been revealed, and Dean is unable to cope with it.
The Sex Object
Which is why Dean turns to the Sex Object. Anonymous women he picks up in bars (Provenance) or ogles in strip clubs (Heart) provide him with temporary release. It's shallow, and it makes him look a little sleazy, but it's better than getting hurt by the inevitable victimhood of the women who he is required to save, the ones he can relate to. Look at the way he freaks in No Exit, when Jo gets snatched. He allows himself to get close to her (again, unintentionally, almost against his will), even though she's a Target, and then she almost dies. Limiting his sexual relationships to the casual and temporary allows him to escape from responsibility for a few hours.
Dean and the Romantic Story-Arc
Last night, I read an interview with Sera Gamble, the Executive Story Editor of SPN, where she is asked what she would do with the characters if not for the constraints of the show. In other words, hypothetically (so don't freak out, I doubt this is going to happen).
"Well, the fans of this show are probably going to send me death threats for saying this, but I’d like to give Dean a real arc with a love interest. Some interesting, troubled, kick-ass chick who is really messes with him." Gamble thinks the reason the audience gets so up in arms about women coming into Sam and Dean’s lives might be that they’re afraid it will change the show into something less cool. "Maybe they think a romantic relationship would shift the central focus from where it should be-the relationship between Sam and Dean. But it really doesn’t have to. In fact it shouldn’t. In fact, if I may be so bold, we’re just not that dumb. Sam and Dean ain’t broke, as it were, so it’s not our intention to fix them."
What has worked since the beginning is how the writers throw very difficult stuff at each brother, stuff that tests them and pushes them to the breaking point. "We give them people to love and then those people get taken away or betray them. Why would a love interest be any different?"
As people said in the comments of this interview, the woman Gamble describes sounds an awful lot like a Mary-Sue. They also pointed out that Sam kind of fills that role for Dean already. Hear-hear. I would add that Gamble is imagining the wrong approach for giving Dean a romantic story-arc.
It shouldn't be about the woman. It should be about Dean learning how to accept the woman. Because in the matter of women, Dean is, in fact, broken. A romantic story-arc would have to deal with that, no matter what. It might even have to make that the primary focus.
Dean's problem is not that the women he meets are wrong for him. His problem is that he is wrong for those women. He is afraid of committing to a woman whose life is in peril. He's afraid of feeling for someone else the terror that he already feels for Sam, who he's obligated to protect 24/7. I don't think he has the personal resources to protect another person the way he does Sam. In fact, the idea of protecting another person besides Sam might be a serious turn-off for Dean. (Which might be another reason he doesn't hook up with any of those Target women except for Cassie--and it might even be a way of explaining their lack of chemistry, Dean being turned off unconsciously by her new Target status in that ep).
So a romantic story-arc would not be so much about the great love affair between Dean and Mary-Sue. It would be about Dean making a fundamental change in how he sees the world.
"Dad wants us to pick up where he left off, saving people, hunting things. The family business."
Dean sees others as people, things and family. People are for saving. Things are for hunting. Family is for him, for intimacy and togetherness and loyalty. Maybe occasionally he dreams otherwise, as with Cassie before she kicked him out, but Dean just isn't ready for the women he meets to become family. (ETA: The last woman in his family burned up on the ceiling.)
When Sam does what he has to do at the end of Heart, it's just another instance where Dean learns that lesson all over again. I wonder if Sam is learning it too.
Tell me what you think? I'm open to discussion on this stuff, and probably veered off track at some points. Would love to know where.