Ive Been Thinking Recently About The Way Your Plot Should Ideally Be Driven By Your Characters, Rather

I’ve been thinking recently about the way your plot should ideally be driven by your characters, rather than making your characters fit into the plot you have planned for them. The best characters are the ones who jump into the story and fuck it up in ways you were not expecting

which just makes me realise all over again that Cas is the character of all time.

In Supernatural, Sam is a great example of a character who can pretty much run with whatever plot you want him to. At a meta level he’s fairly obedient. You want him soulless? he’s soulless. he will drink the drug blood he will hit the dog he will do whatever the story needs. his plots tend to shape him, and it’s easy to make an equal case for why he would or wouldn’t do any particular thing. Fanon Sam is so different to canon Sam, and I think that’s partly because of how textually malleable he is.

Then there’s Dean. Dean is a character who both is and isn’t the person he’s supposed to be at a meta level. He was always supposed to be a main hero character, but somewhere along the way all his surface attributes turned out to just be careful camouflage for the real Dean underneath. the mean homophobic jokes became true, in this weird way that felt initially like a mistake but by the season 10 episodes I’m watching right now feels like the most intentional, fascinating revelations about his true self. I really do get the sense that in early seasons the writers thought they were using his queerness as a fakeout butt of the joke (ha ha! the he-man’s overcompensating!), but then Dean’s character turned around and was just like … and so what? i am a little fruit. i love rainbows and ballet and the asses of soldiers i see on the street. i will fight god about it. I’m Dean Winchester, bitch. I lied to you before. That’s what I do. The things I want are exactly the things I said I didn’t want.

And then there’s Cas. Cas was supposed to be in the show for FOUR EPISODES, until his character turned around, said fuck you to the writers and walked backwards into hell while kissing Dean on the mouth. I am completely besotted by the story of how Cas happened. Like, he was not supposed to do this! He was not supposed to do any of this! he is teflon! he is unstoppable! he is stronger than god! You kill that man and the space he leaves is so narratively powerful that it drowns out whatever else is supposed to happen. You kill him and Dean kicks a hole in the story, sticks his head out the side of it and screams unceasingly until he gets his boyfriend back. You make up any reason why Cas and Dean can’t share the same space and he just looks at you flatly and then keeps punching through doors until he finds Dean again.

Cas is both a writer’s nightmare and a writer’s greatest gift. You always know how he’s going to behave in any given situation, even if it’s not how you need him to behave for the plot. And I think it’s so cool to see the writers finally giving in to his gravitational pull from season 9 onwards and making that a feature, not a bug. The whole Metatron plotline is just the writers projecting themselves into the story, being like “hey Cas how about you do this?” and Cas turning to them and going “hey how about you go FUCK yourselves. respectfully.”

I just adore him. I adore him and Dean, and the way they’re making their own stories! Cas sat down on Dean’s bed one day back in 2008 and blew up the whole carefully constructed Brotherhood of Salmondean Show in one scene! He’s alive in this undefinable, chaotic, brilliant way, and he brings the other characters and the story they exist in to life too. I honestly don’t think that there would be 15 seasons of Supernatural without Cas specifically. I don’t know if we’d have the fully fleshed-out, queer as hell version of Dean we have without him. Cas’s existence is the thing that turns all of Dean’s fascinating negative space into something positive and interesting. When Cas is in the picture we finally know what Dean wants, and it’s not just Cas. It’s connection and love and life, and Cas is the conduit to all that. Dean made Cas care about the world, sure, but Cas made Dean real enough to be able to do that.

Prisoner | ref

I made you a sandwich Dean, why don´t you love me?

you know that old adage about a human soul and an angel floating above a lake dock at the end of time

(prints!)

Michael