lizbobjones

A hopefully one day conclusive study of these assholes, hopefully told as briefly as I can.

Written for the people in the fandom who care but sometimes need a pick me up on this, and not written to prove a point to anyone who doesn’t already care. <3

This scene is technically covered in pt.1 because I listed the argument Dean has emphatically trying to deny what Cas was. But his reaction to seeing official fanart of himself in one of Bobby’s books always warms my heart.



It’s his first gesture of acceptance of what Cas may be, and what he has done for him, and in this context Bobby and Sam are still assuming the angels are good, and this divine intervention is a positive thing. Dean needs some persuading, but I adore this moment he takes to touch the handprint Cas left on him with reverence and maybe a little wonderment. And a lot of fear.

Through this episode he grapples with the philosophical question that Cas's very existence has caused in him, but a lot of it is directed straight past Cas in a "I want to speak to the manager" way, per the episode's title. Cas is an embodiment of the shaking of his faith but of course this is a moment in the story for Dean that is about challenging his personal beliefs and foundations and revving him up to handle the wider mytharc of the season. Cas very early on in the first episodes of season 4 is still more of a narrative tool than a fully realised character and he comes with both the burdens of expectation of Christianity and explaining how the angel mythos will happen in the show, and Dean's own personal arc that as we've seen up to this point has left him struggling to have personal faith or wider belief in Heaven or God or angels.

Amongst all that, this moment of his shoulder touch means a lot to me in that it's a small, personal, physical gesture, prompted by this image which resembles Dean and Cas so strongly that it's obvious the art department was practically having a joke when designing the 'medieval' document. As the story continues, through to present day, Dean and Cas frequently physically communicate in shoulder touches, pushing and pulling each other around or patting each other on the shoulders in comfort or warning. It's something that I think remembering this moment helps never to really forget that it all came from Cas pulling him from Hell and the personal significance of their very unique bond later on. At the moment, Dean might be spooked, and touching his shoulder in "that's what he did to me" with all his uncertainty and distaste for the powers above. But it's the beginning of a very different personal connection arc too, and this gives us the emotional profundity rather than from 4x01 the teasing of "well it didn't touch me there" etc from the innuendo and banter laid on the handprint when they still didn't even know what Cas was.

I don’t think their actual interactions in this episode are particularly romantic - very charged and with a strong sexual subtext in the sense that they have an immediate chemistry and follow many of the basic known Destiel tropes such as the staring, the getting into each others' spaces, the fiery back and forth... I think it is a baseline establishing conversation, of Cas showing up relaying orders or Heaven’s thoughts on things, and Dean reacting prickly and not wanting to be bossed around; their back and forth is electric, but wild sexual tension does not a romance make, and I want to focus less on “here’s every reason you should ship them” and more on the sense of love between them. In that sense, I don't think the final conversation actually has any narrative or emotional beats which are suggestive of their love story, and especially for the opening stretch of this series of posts, there's a lot of instances which I may skip over which are still favourites but don't really seem to build up very much in their personal story.