The Lisa Issue: An Unconventional Take
I've been meaning to write my reflection on Dean, Sam, and Lisa and how I feel about Lisa and why. Not your usual perspective.
Be warned: light spoilers and maybe opinions that could piss some people off.
After viewing the season 5 finale of Supernatural, I had mixed feelings, to say the least. It was a highly emotional episode for me, and when it ended, I felt mostly crushed for Sam and Dean, disappointed. It just didn't seem right for them to be apart and to have parted on such devastating terms. I wanted them to live together or die together, to regain some sense of the deep and powerful love they have for each other, even though they spend a lot of time living out of touch with that love. I think the finale, in some ways (particularly, the montage of memory Sam has), does attempt to reach for that but it was more despair and death and defeat than love.
And then, Dean shows up at Lisa's and the final scene features him sitting down at her table, an implied settling in for him. After the premiere and all through summer and even now, as we've seen the first two episodes of Season 6, I've heard a lot of different opinions on Lisa. The two most common seem to be: "We hate Lisa because she's threatening Sam and Dean's relationship" and "We love Lisa because Dean deserves to have a life and she's a good female character." There is this assumption that the Lisa-haters are slashers, which is perfectly logical to me, and simultaneously, the Lisa-fans often criticize the haters for wanting a limited life for Dean and female characters on the show, etc, etc.
I think I would like to write my meta around a particular comment I remember a fan posting somewhere on LJ regarding Dean, Sam, and Lisa that struck me hard. It went something like,
"Sam is not Dean's lover. Dean has the right to have a girlfriend...."
Why this struck me is because it encapsulates the problems I have with BOTH of these groups of fans, the slashers and the pro-het.
I'm not particularly a fan of Dean getting serious with Lisa either, and I had my qualms about it as soon as the finale ended. To clarify, I suppose I don't have a problem with Lisa as a character at all; she seems like a pretty cool chick. She won points with me at the end of 6x02, when she told Dean to go join Sam.
Let me also make clear that I have never been and never will be a slasher, and for most of my time involved in internet fandom, I've been almost anti-slash but not out of homophobic sentiments. Instead, it's for the same reason why I dislike the concept of Dean living with Lisa AND why I'm annoyed by slashers who hate on Lisa because they're shipping Sam and Dean.
What I love more than anything is the idea of the Primary Nonsexual Relationship. This is something I've supported in my many fandoms since I was a wee kid and furthermore, something I study in academia, something I write about in my original fiction, something I seek in my personal life, something I love to see or hear about in other people's real lives.
I guess I should mention, as a sort of disclaimer, that I may be biased because I'm an asexual. A very romantic one, but an asexual nonetheless. Yet even before my own sexuality crossed my adolescent mind, I was captivated by the image of the Ideal Friendship, and back in the early days, I would typically imagine this kind of friendship between two men. It was a friendship marked by romantic feeling and behavior--very emotional, very deep, very passionate, physically affectionate--but completely nonsexual. No sexual behavior or desire or attraction. Furthermore, it was the social centerpiece of both lives; these characters did not seek marriage or any other committed/cohabiting sexual relationship, even if they had sex with other people, because their emotional needs and desire for companionship were satisfied by this Ideal Friendship
As I've grown, this interest has expanded to include siblings and cousins, either in male-male dyads or male-female dyads. Whether non-related friends, siblings, or cousins, what matters is the profound love, emotional passion and commitment between the two people involved and the fact that it is completely nonsexual in nature.
Needless to say, Sam and Dean have always held my interest so much because in them, I discovered the Primary Sibling Relationship. Their love and emotional investment in one another--always so intense and overt and unapologetic--from the very first episode I ever watched, made me swoon with awe at the previously unrealized scenario of the Ideal Friendship existing between siblings. And ever since, they've remained my model for the Primary Sibling Relationship.
Slash--the homosexualization of a relationship between two characters who do not have a sexual relationship with one another in canon--has always upset me because it is an overt example of the broader cultural attitude that the highest form of love or emotional passion can only logically exist within a sexual relationship. Slash undermines the validity of nonsexual romance, nonsexual love, the emotional experience of friendship or family bonds, etc. (And if we were discussing the sexualization of a male and female pair of friends, siblings, etc--I would have the same problem.) In most cases, when someone slashes two characters, it is because they see the emotional bond between them in canon and find it more exciting or valuable or worthwhile if sex gets thrown into that. This has always felt, to me, like the slasher saying, "The friendship isn't good enough" or "The brother relationship isn't good enough." It's BETTER with sex. There's more LOVE if there's sex. Or otherwise: sex is the only way of explaining the love that already exists in this relationship. Which is all at once: sad, insulting, frustrating, and plainly inaccurate.
Likewise, that comment the SPN fan made about Dean and Lisa presents the same problem. To suggest that Dean cannot possibly stay with Sam in a primary relationship because they aren't having sex is the exact same undermining of nonsexual love that slash commits--only, in favor of heterosexuality. Sure, for most people, the only way to "true happiness" is to have a life partner that you're sexually involved with. But that is not an obligation, and artistically speaking, it is far more groundbreaking to create characters who DON'T play by real-life rules (as long as they're written in a believable way). So what if most people don't love their sibling this way? So what if Dean and Sam like to screw women? So what if, in some part of Dean's mind, there was a fantasy of an average life? None of that must force either Dean or Sam to become one more domesticated, average, married-with-kids man. And resisting that average life is also not synonymous with loneliness or lovelessness or lack of companionship, etc, unless the boys put themselves in that position.
Instead of taking the easy way out by keeping the brother relationship dysfunctional (or by sexualizing it as a way of "fixing" it, though that would never happen in canon), why not actually do the work of having Sam and Dean recognize their love for one another, recognize all their issues, and proactively move toward forgiveness, harmony, understanding, trust, loyalty, etc as brothers? If nothing else, it would make for a richer and unique narrative.
I want Dean to stay with Sam not because I think the brothers have an incestuous relationship or SHOULD have an incestuous relationship, but because I see them as soul mates. I don't have a problem with Dean or Sam having heterosexual relations with women at all, as long as those relations do not undermine the emotional primacy of the brothers' relationship.
Sam and Dean are characters who present an exhilarating opportunity for viewers to witness a very rare but still possible social phenomenon: a sexless primary relationship between two sexual people.
Having this relationship with each other does not prohibit either brother from having sex with others or from caring about or loving other people. It just means that on their personal relationship hierarchy, their relationship ranks as number one.
So if Lisa can remain in Dean's life to some degree, without suddenly usurping the relationship he has with his brother, I won't have a problem with her.
What I'm more interested in--what I want from the writers--is to finally have Dean and Sam do that emotional work with one another to close the gap between the love they feel and the way they express (or don't express) it. I want them to openly be the soul mates I know they've always been.
Be warned: light spoilers and maybe opinions that could piss some people off.
After viewing the season 5 finale of Supernatural, I had mixed feelings, to say the least. It was a highly emotional episode for me, and when it ended, I felt mostly crushed for Sam and Dean, disappointed. It just didn't seem right for them to be apart and to have parted on such devastating terms. I wanted them to live together or die together, to regain some sense of the deep and powerful love they have for each other, even though they spend a lot of time living out of touch with that love. I think the finale, in some ways (particularly, the montage of memory Sam has), does attempt to reach for that but it was more despair and death and defeat than love.
And then, Dean shows up at Lisa's and the final scene features him sitting down at her table, an implied settling in for him. After the premiere and all through summer and even now, as we've seen the first two episodes of Season 6, I've heard a lot of different opinions on Lisa. The two most common seem to be: "We hate Lisa because she's threatening Sam and Dean's relationship" and "We love Lisa because Dean deserves to have a life and she's a good female character." There is this assumption that the Lisa-haters are slashers, which is perfectly logical to me, and simultaneously, the Lisa-fans often criticize the haters for wanting a limited life for Dean and female characters on the show, etc, etc.
I think I would like to write my meta around a particular comment I remember a fan posting somewhere on LJ regarding Dean, Sam, and Lisa that struck me hard. It went something like,
"Sam is not Dean's lover. Dean has the right to have a girlfriend...."
Why this struck me is because it encapsulates the problems I have with BOTH of these groups of fans, the slashers and the pro-het.
I'm not particularly a fan of Dean getting serious with Lisa either, and I had my qualms about it as soon as the finale ended. To clarify, I suppose I don't have a problem with Lisa as a character at all; she seems like a pretty cool chick. She won points with me at the end of 6x02, when she told Dean to go join Sam.
Let me also make clear that I have never been and never will be a slasher, and for most of my time involved in internet fandom, I've been almost anti-slash but not out of homophobic sentiments. Instead, it's for the same reason why I dislike the concept of Dean living with Lisa AND why I'm annoyed by slashers who hate on Lisa because they're shipping Sam and Dean.
What I love more than anything is the idea of the Primary Nonsexual Relationship. This is something I've supported in my many fandoms since I was a wee kid and furthermore, something I study in academia, something I write about in my original fiction, something I seek in my personal life, something I love to see or hear about in other people's real lives.
I guess I should mention, as a sort of disclaimer, that I may be biased because I'm an asexual. A very romantic one, but an asexual nonetheless. Yet even before my own sexuality crossed my adolescent mind, I was captivated by the image of the Ideal Friendship, and back in the early days, I would typically imagine this kind of friendship between two men. It was a friendship marked by romantic feeling and behavior--very emotional, very deep, very passionate, physically affectionate--but completely nonsexual. No sexual behavior or desire or attraction. Furthermore, it was the social centerpiece of both lives; these characters did not seek marriage or any other committed/cohabiting sexual relationship, even if they had sex with other people, because their emotional needs and desire for companionship were satisfied by this Ideal Friendship
As I've grown, this interest has expanded to include siblings and cousins, either in male-male dyads or male-female dyads. Whether non-related friends, siblings, or cousins, what matters is the profound love, emotional passion and commitment between the two people involved and the fact that it is completely nonsexual in nature.
Needless to say, Sam and Dean have always held my interest so much because in them, I discovered the Primary Sibling Relationship. Their love and emotional investment in one another--always so intense and overt and unapologetic--from the very first episode I ever watched, made me swoon with awe at the previously unrealized scenario of the Ideal Friendship existing between siblings. And ever since, they've remained my model for the Primary Sibling Relationship.
Slash--the homosexualization of a relationship between two characters who do not have a sexual relationship with one another in canon--has always upset me because it is an overt example of the broader cultural attitude that the highest form of love or emotional passion can only logically exist within a sexual relationship. Slash undermines the validity of nonsexual romance, nonsexual love, the emotional experience of friendship or family bonds, etc. (And if we were discussing the sexualization of a male and female pair of friends, siblings, etc--I would have the same problem.) In most cases, when someone slashes two characters, it is because they see the emotional bond between them in canon and find it more exciting or valuable or worthwhile if sex gets thrown into that. This has always felt, to me, like the slasher saying, "The friendship isn't good enough" or "The brother relationship isn't good enough." It's BETTER with sex. There's more LOVE if there's sex. Or otherwise: sex is the only way of explaining the love that already exists in this relationship. Which is all at once: sad, insulting, frustrating, and plainly inaccurate.
Likewise, that comment the SPN fan made about Dean and Lisa presents the same problem. To suggest that Dean cannot possibly stay with Sam in a primary relationship because they aren't having sex is the exact same undermining of nonsexual love that slash commits--only, in favor of heterosexuality. Sure, for most people, the only way to "true happiness" is to have a life partner that you're sexually involved with. But that is not an obligation, and artistically speaking, it is far more groundbreaking to create characters who DON'T play by real-life rules (as long as they're written in a believable way). So what if most people don't love their sibling this way? So what if Dean and Sam like to screw women? So what if, in some part of Dean's mind, there was a fantasy of an average life? None of that must force either Dean or Sam to become one more domesticated, average, married-with-kids man. And resisting that average life is also not synonymous with loneliness or lovelessness or lack of companionship, etc, unless the boys put themselves in that position.
Instead of taking the easy way out by keeping the brother relationship dysfunctional (or by sexualizing it as a way of "fixing" it, though that would never happen in canon), why not actually do the work of having Sam and Dean recognize their love for one another, recognize all their issues, and proactively move toward forgiveness, harmony, understanding, trust, loyalty, etc as brothers? If nothing else, it would make for a richer and unique narrative.
I want Dean to stay with Sam not because I think the brothers have an incestuous relationship or SHOULD have an incestuous relationship, but because I see them as soul mates. I don't have a problem with Dean or Sam having heterosexual relations with women at all, as long as those relations do not undermine the emotional primacy of the brothers' relationship.
Sam and Dean are characters who present an exhilarating opportunity for viewers to witness a very rare but still possible social phenomenon: a sexless primary relationship between two sexual people.
Having this relationship with each other does not prohibit either brother from having sex with others or from caring about or loving other people. It just means that on their personal relationship hierarchy, their relationship ranks as number one.
So if Lisa can remain in Dean's life to some degree, without suddenly usurping the relationship he has with his brother, I won't have a problem with her.
What I'm more interested in--what I want from the writers--is to finally have Dean and Sam do that emotional work with one another to close the gap between the love they feel and the way they express (or don't express) it. I want them to openly be the soul mates I know they've always been.