Does Dean Know Cas Loves Him?

Does Dean know Cas loves him?

Oww, that question's hard on the feels! Okay... okay. Yeah, I think so. Dean's not unobservant and he doesn't lack empathy, so he must be aware on some level. I think he's hung up on not knowing what it could possibly mean for either of them - what the devotion of a creature like Cas could even mean in human terms.

It seemed like Dean stuck and held on the whole "angels don't have the equipment to care, and when they try, it breaks them apart" bit. When was that - season 7, while Cas was off in mental honeybee land? Dean couldn't possibly have held onto that once he saw Cas parenting Jack with such unconditional love, years later, but by then there was so much water under the bridge... too much they both should've done, and shouldn't have done, and did do but then never talked about...? I dunno. I think it just became too big to tackle by then. They never had the luxury of enough time without a crisis to even start.

I think Dean believes that Cas shouldn't or mustn't love him, for various reasons, so he avoids consciously dealing with it as far as possible, and mentally frames it as doing them both a huge favour. Dean's aware, but can't bear it and feels completely unworthy of it, is my take. He wants to protect the people he cares about, including - especially - from himself. The more losses they suffer, the more he doubles down on the self-blame.

In reality, even when he's in absolute torment, as he was while fully human, Cas actually does just fine with his developing emotions - he accepts them, for starters - but from where Dean's standing, from the fragmented parts of the story Dean witnesses, it looks like a long-running disaster movie in which Cas gets repeatedly broken down and diminished and punished for choosing the Winchesters.

Even for a man who started out faithless, having an angel willingly fall from grace and choose him over heaven, brethren, and actual god must be... so overwhelming. It must feel wrong to be the focus of something so big and incomprehensible, even if it wasn't his choice or his fault. Dean's not even close to deciding what to do with that big picture by the time Cas flat-out says, "I love you," and makes it so very, very simple and human.

there must be something 😳 I can do for you 😳 in return?

What if The Doctor was asked to pose for some photoshoot? Nine opens a series of "The Doctor × Posing" arts

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the fanfiction in my head is soooo good wish you guys could see this

5:20 The Devil You Know

I'm in awe how you remember great huge chunks of new canon for these meta, Nym. How do you get all that from a single viewing of a show like SPN?

Heh, it never occurred to me that it was noteworthy! You've really got me thinking, now!

I guess... I approach any TV show I like enough to bother watching with a fanwriter's mindset? I actively character-study the main figures in a show as I go? I definitely don't recall all the monsters-of-the-week and fights and cases of the Supernatural storyline. I was focused on the main and recurring characters and their character arcs, on keeping up with the unfolding story, so I remember the main beats and their significance?

I feel like I missed great, relevant swathes of Dean's and Sam's character arcs, though. Because they were the show's constant, and because the whack-a-mole plot never stopped hammering them in 15 years, I'm sure there's plenty I won't pick up until I rewatch. I still find new things in shows I've seen so often that I could - in the event of a technological apocalypse - recreate the scripts from memory. *cough*Stargate*cough*

I took to using Tumblr's episode- and scene gifsets to help me contextualise and remember the events of specific episodes while I was following Once Upon a Time. I was struggling badly by then with cognitive dysfunction and recall, so I was actively looking for anything that helped me keep my fandom activities going. Writing fanfic most of all. That's why I tag the Supernatural gifsets I reblog or create with the season and episode number - little nudges for my brain to file that canon moment in the right spot in the overall storyline. When I can't figure out what ep I'm looking at/remembering from a glance at Amazon Prime's episode list with its tiny summaries plus my hunch, I google it. Once I've done that, the knowledge tends to stick.

I had an amazing art teacher in my second year of senior school - one of the few positives of my tween and teen years! He told the class about the technique used by Roman rhetoricians to remember their speeches - mentally dividing up the physical space where they were going to speak into 'pigeon holes' and 'storing' pieces of their material in them. Visual cues to recall. I've never stopped using that tip in some way. I guess I sort of use a TV show's episode numbers/titles and even main characterisation beats as my pigeon holes, once I get invested in a show!