Deancas - Blog Posts

samediankh

4 years ago

Oh, look, what's that?

That is #quality stuff

one of many reasons castiel spent the first year of knowing dean trying not to strangle him: dean’s weird little winchester-only dialect

i’m fucking obsessed with this right now, so buckle in for a meta. a cool fun (horrible) thing about dean’s dialogue is that a good 90% of what comes out of his mouth is:

a pop culture reference (“you’re just gonna take some divine bong hit, and shazam, you’re roma downey?”)

references to real life phenomenon (“i don’t wanna wake up missing a kidney in a bathtub full of ice” “try new mexico, i hear he’s on a tortilla”)

these also often take the form of nicknames, and dean has a tendency to give people nicknames in general or call them something besides their given name, whether it’s affectionate or rude (“easy there, van damme” “so i’m girl interrupted” furthermore castiel = cas, ezekiel = zeke, etc, see also frequent use of “chucklehead” “asshat” and on the nicer/endearments end “buddy” “pal” “sunshine” etc)

an idiom (“a snowball’s chance” “if it smells like a duck…”)

slang (“drinking the koolaid” “jonesing for some hooch” not to mention the literal endless amount of words dean uses to refer to killing - gank, waste, juice, ice, etc)

a metaphor (“power up your batteries” “fly me back to my page on the calendar”)

a euphemism (“cloud seeding” “i’d have given you an hour alone with her first”)

sarcasm (his habit of replying “peachy” or “super” when asked how he is)

wordplay (see: the entire “vampirate” and “werepire” debacles)

completely nonsensical (guessing what happened to a magical artifact: “it was dug up by tomb raiders? it was seized by the king of the dead by warlords?”)

said at lightning speed - if you pay attention, dean actually talks a LOT, usually a mile a minute (this makes me feel a way when you recall his year of mutism at age 4 but that’s another post)

slang IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE (casual usage of “guano,” etc)

a lie, a deflection, a joke, etc

or worse, something dean’s NOT saying, deliberately, because he’s one of the most repressed people on earth

the end result of all this being:

dean winchester is utterly infuckingcomprehensible.

think about this. there’s an ENTIRE SECTION on EVERY SINGLE EPISODE PAGE of the spn wiki devoted to JUST explaining dean’s pop culture references, because the average viewer won’t have seen everything he’s talking about either. they have a whole page for this called “hunter’s lingo,” but honestly, it’s not all hunters, just sam and dean’s fucking batshit communication style. even i don’t understand dean half the time. SAM gets it, sam speaks it back to dean a lot in the early seasons, but that’s because sam and dean are 1. practically two halves of the same person 2. FREAKS. every time we get an episode that involves outsider POV is devoted to them going “what the fuck is WRONG with them?”

enter castiel. technically speaking, the show implies that angels are omnilingual. castiel should understand every language known to man, but knowing the meaning of words doesn’t help him understand the following:

pop culture references

references to real life phenomenon

nicknames

idioms

slang

metaphors

euphemisms

sarcasm

wordplay

you get the idea.

listen to me. look me in the eyes. castiel cannot understand a single fucking word that comes out of dean’s mouth. my guy laid a hand on dean winchester in hell and immediately fell in love with him and has no fucking idea what he’s talking about ever. because not only is dean winchester’s way of speaking CLINICALLY insane, and sometimes incomprehensible even to other human beings who are not sam, castiel is an angel, and someone prone to taking things even more literally than other angels do

go back and watch and watch seasons 4-5 especially. the reason cas does so much squinting and head tilting is because every time dean opens his mouth castiel has to open up his mental “dean winchester dictionary” and translate entire paragraphs on the fly, because again, dean never shuts up!

what makes this extra hilarious to me is this gem:

this line is from 5.13. at this point cas has known dean for AN ENTIRE YEAR AND A HALF. what you see here is my guy SNAPPING. cas made an EFFORT in this scene. he asked who glenn close was. he’s telling dean that he can’t understand him. he is doing his level best to have a normal conversation with this guy he has a crush on and for the life of him he cannot do it (equal but opposite energy to cas blowing up the gas station and motel room in 4.01, tbh)

yes, cas can understand dean’s tone. he can use context clues, and he usually gets the general idea. and when cas DOES understand dean’s jokes, he laughs at them. the first time we ever see him smile is during their 4.07 heart-to-heart when dean says “it was a witch, not the tet offensive.” since cas has knowledge of human history, he knows what the tet offensive is; he got the joke, and he laughed.

but as far as actual dialogue goes, he consistently struggles to keep up. even after metatron gives castiel the pop culture knowledge in season 9, cas struggles to put it to put it to proper use (dean: “you wanna just walk right into the death star?” cas: “what does a fictional battle station have to do with this?”). whenever he asks dean to clarify it’s always when he’s most annoyed, like most of the time he knows it would be futile but he’s too annoyed to care. (dean: “i don’t know who’s on first, what’s on second!” cas: “what IS second???”) i’m pretty sure he spends seasons 4-6 wanting to shake dean by the shoulders and ask him why he is LIKE THIS.

it takes cas - who, again, is omnilingual - YEARS to begin to acclimate to dean’s speech and start speaking that language back to him. it’s season 8 before we start really hearing him use slang, season 9 before he begins to understand wordplay, season 10 before he starts using pop culture references (to other angels, who immediately fail to understand him, which disappoints him immensely), and season 11 before he really gets into metaphors. i don’t remember what season he started using “yeah” instead of “yes” but i do know it took a really damn long time.

and honestly, i don’t think cas truly got the hang of it until at least season 11-12. that’s something like 7 or 8 YEARS. it’s more than half the time they’ve known each other at the point of the series finale.

so what’s true romance, fellas? it’s falling completely and totally in love with the most inexplicable person you will ever meet in your whole 4.5 billion year life, even though you have yet to understand a single thing he’s ever said to you. thank you for coming to my ted talk

Destielgate

I think the weirdest thing about this Destielgate is that some people act as if this is drama exclusively for hardcore Destiel shippers. It certainly is not. I’m not apart of the supernatural fandom, but how supernatural handled Destiel seriously affects me as someone of the LGBTQ+ community. In fact, it affects literally anyone who understands the significance of Destiel. None of my friends watch supernatural, and yet everyday we talk about the newest Destielgate updates and every single day we talk about how ridiculous it is that they are trying to cover up the Spanish dub and how hurt we are that queer characters are being treated like this.

I get updates about Destielgate from my queer discord book club where only like, 2 people have watched supernatural and none are actually dedicated fans of Supernatural. Despite all this we have in depth conversations about what is going on and trade the information we have discovered and we all are basically waiting in suspense to see what is going to happen to Destiel. Because how this ends, affects all of us. I feel like the episode writers, or CW, or whoever was in charge of this did not fully understand the impact of having lead characters of an extremely popular tv show come out as queer. I feel like they truly had no idea what they were getting into and no idea how important it was to the LGBTQ+ community that it is handled well. Because when I say queer representation saves lives? It LITERALLY saves lives but depending on how you handle it, it could have the opposite affect.

What truly baffles me is that Destiel did not need to become canon. Destiel shippers would have ben relatively fine with the ship not sailing because that is the nature of ships; they are almost never canonized. But they decided to make it canon in the most homophobic way possible. Yes, any representation is good, but what some do not understand is that a character declaring his love, not having his love reciprocated, immediately getting sent to Mega Turbo Super Hell (the empty) and then never being mentioned again except in a throw away line? Never being grieved over? Never having any resolution? these things that happened after the confession was a rapid devaluing of a character that was apparently very important before that episode. As soon as he declared his love for Dean, he was stripped of the value that the show had been putting on him. Castiel, a character who was well loved and an integral part of the storyline suddenly does not matter to people who previously would have died and/or killed for him right after he declared his love for Dean? That is where the problem lies. That rapid devaluing of Castiel as a character sends a clear message to any queer person watching the show: they do not matter. They are not valued or wanted and its better to stay silent than to speak your truth. It is better to be a closeted gay than openly queer because when you come out you could lose everything.

Yet another Bury Your Gays ™ trope (with the huge chance of there being queer censorship) is the business of literally all of us in the LGBTQ+ community. This is not about a Supernatural ship anymore, it is about whether or not blatant homophobia and queer censorship will continue to go unchecked. It is about whether big companies will decide that queer lives are more important than money. It is about the LGBTQ+ community no longer being something inconveniencing, but rather something precious.