It's Always Frustrating When People Try To Frame Dean As The Most Emotionally Repressed Man On The Planet

It's always frustrating when people try to frame Dean as the most emotionally repressed man on the planet when in reality he's so self-aware it's almost painful.

I’ve written about Sex & Violence a lot because Cathryn “This young male character… is Dean’s perfect mate”* Humphris owns me, but all the discourse on the episode seems to center around either Dean’s sexuality or his relationship with his brother. It’s because these themes are so prominent in the episode that there has been little discussion on how the episode fits in with the broader arc of the season.

The question I feel warrants asking is why Dean was chosen by the Siren. Why Dean, and not Sam. And to answer this, we need to look at the other victims too, to see whether there was a pattern. Because we’ve talked a lot about how the Siren infected its victims, but not the why.

Because the strip club features so prominently in the episode, it is easy to miss that all of the victims were good men. Adam Benson was in love with his wife, and he had been at the club at his friend’s bachelor party. He was the third to fit the pattern of men in love with their wives killing them.

While Lenny Bristol, who took care of his mother, does not fit this pattern, he is also undoubtedly a good man. Each victim had deep regard for someone. So, this tells us something about how the Siren chose its victims.

Then there’s Bobby’s research. We see the following page in close-up, but while Bobby paraphrases the contents of this “dusty Greek poem” as the boys needing “a bronze dagger, covered in the blood of a sailor, under the spell of the song“ to defeat the Siren, we’re not told the contents of the poem. There are, in fact, no bronze daggers in Bobby’s poem.

The page contains the lyrics to a poem by Simonides of Ceos on Virtue.

ΕΣΤΙ ΤΙΣ ΛΟΓΟΣ ΤΑΝ ΑΡΕΤΑΝ ΝΑΙΕΙΝ ΔΥΣΑΜΒΑΤΟΙΣ ΕΠΙ ΠΕΤΡΑΙΣ ΑΓΝΑΝ ΔΕ ΜΙΝ ΘΕΑΝ ΧΩΡΟΝ ΑΓΝΟΝ ΑΜΦΕΠΕΙΝ. ΟΥΔΕ ΠΑΝΤΩΝ ΒΛΕΦΑΡΟΙΣ ΘΝΑΤΩΝ ΕΣΟΠΤΟΣ Ω ΜΗ ΔΑΚΕΘΥΜΟΣ ΙΔΡΩΣ ΕΝΔΟΘΕΝ ΜΟΛΗ ΙΚΗ Τ’ ΕΣ ΑΚΡΟΝ ΑΝΔΡΕΙΑΣ.

There is a saying/word concerning Virtue [= the Siren] She nestles in rough untrodden rocks And reigns a divine sacred land. Not all mortals can see her. Only those Whose burning desire in their heart Leads them to the greatest deeds.

This poem, which is originally about civic virtue and how society disintegrates without stalwart champions to fight injustice, tells us why it is Dean Winchester for whom the Siren manifested, why it’s Dean that can see it (that is, why it took the shape to please Dean and not Sam).

The Siren chose Dean Winchester because he is a good man, and by analogue with the other victims, because he loves deeply. Because he, unlike Sam (at this time, at least) has a burning desire in his heart. Bobby, who read the poem, actually highlights this at the end of the episode, telling him: “You know, those sirens are nasty things. That it got to you, that’s no reason to feel bad.” Bobby seemed to know both the mechanism and the reason for the Siren’s choosing of Dean.

The Siren chose its victims because they were good men because it is the corruption of good men that gave it the most satisfaction, and it chose the men with the burning desire in their hearts because that’s what made it easy for it. The Siren’s MO was to flood the system of the victims with Oxytocin, the love hormone, and choosing victims that were already in love was convenient. In order to get Sam under its thrall, the Siren spat its venom directly into his mouth in much larger quantities than used on its other victims. Because Sam was not in love to begin with.

So if we can agree that our two heroes are of equal moral standing at the end of the day, the difference that manifests between Sam and Dean is that Dean had that burning desire in his heart, and Sam did not. And what was this burning desire in Dean’s heart? We have to look at the shape the Siren took to look for the source of it, its method of seduction.

Of it taking the shape of a champion with blue eyes and straw-colored hair, of using beer and Led Zeppelin and understanding to make Dean fall for it, priming him to find it attractive long before he consumed its venom.

* Supernatural: The Official Companion Season 4 by Nicholas Knight. Titan Books, 2010: 79-80. As an aside, the people who keep throwing the “All the writers think he’s straight!“ line around are hilarious, especially when the only verifiable quote they have is from Ben Edlund via Jensen Ackles.

Does anyone else get irrationally angry whenever the demon blood thing is brought up.

I, of mostly sound body and spirit, request that if I’m ever to die, someone post a new work on my AO3 that says “sorry, she died, ongoing stories postponed forever” because don’t I want my fanfic buddies to think I ghosted them. Amen or whatever you say in a will.

i’ve seen gimleaf fics where they each try to find out how to court by the other’s traditions. and i love those, so i think they ought to be taken a step further. and i think the way to do that would be, naturally, to make bagginshield real. allow me to explain why. ahem. after the ring is destroyed, girlfailure legolas spends two weeks poring over The Ancient Texts and stressing because his one (1) friend who WOULD help him (that’s aragorn) knows jack shit about dwarves beyond the surface (no pun intended) (well gandalf knows things but gandalf is a bitch) (he would just smile at legolas knowingly and wish him good luck instead of giving him answers).

so alas, girlfailure “shit tier ass elf” legolas is left to like, idk, sulk or something in the garden he starts at the Bestie Residence in minas tirith. and after like 2 days sam’s had enough he’s like “dude your vibes are upsetting the plants.” and legolas is like “my bad bro. it just seems i know nothing about dwarves which i probably should’ve thought about before, by elf standards, getting hitched in vegas.” and sam is like “oh dwarves? just ask mister frodo ^_^ he knows tons about dwarves!” and legolas is like “what the shit? him in particular? why does he anything about dwarves?” and sam leans in reaaaalllllll close and whispers behind his hand, “well you see mister elf, mister legolas, sir, there’s always been a very healthy amount of rumors that go around in the shire about mister frodo’s uncle, mister bilbo, and the letters he used to exchange with a certain king under the mountain.” and legolas, who was THERE, is like

The Fellowship gets on the topic of their ages one night and Boromir comes to the dawning realization that he has absolutely no idea how old any of his companions are supposed to be at all