spainkitty-mishassweetestkittles:
Caveat: I’m not into them. I don’t read them. I don’t write them. I’m in this story for THIS story, but I’m in this story in general for reasons that are probably not your reasons or this person or that person’s reasons, and that’s ok, because I’m not you or this person or that person.
THAT SAID…
I think that they’re popular on one level because for all that the fandom likes to grouse that Dean and Cas need to get together already and it would be so easy for TPTB to just do it for fuck’s sake, we also understand somehow that it’s not that easy. Dean and Cas happening as Dean and Cas is going to be long and slow and ugly and hard for reasons that have to do not only with inside themselves things, but all the outside themselves things that have been standing between them since Dean was Cas’ mission objective…like, oh, all the different motherfucking species things from perceptions of reality to duties to an age gap that’s literally wider than the existence of mammals.
Not to mention it’s hard to tell a love story in a world and a storyline that eats love stories and burns them on the ceiling. Hard and ugly and you have to work around a lot of story you may not want to tell to get to the ones that you do, because for a lot of this branch of the audience, the MotW stuff and even the A plot is “just filler.”
But I think they’re more popular on a second level, and that is that when humans
want something really badly, they liefind a story they like, they treat it like ice cream, trying it with every possibile flavor and topping they can think of to make it theirs as individuals and yet keep it a common and bonding thing. This is why we have archetypes, this is why we have common story-shapes, this is, on its most basic level, why storytelling itself exists.Dean and Castiel’s story compels despite itself – and somehow works as a teenaged firefighter and drag queen on Mars in the fifteenth century with wildly different personalities – because it’s the story that the big romance trope has been trying to sell us for the last Very Long Time, but by presenting it by accident and non-heteronormative, most of the really disgusting bullshit that sexist tropes tend to shove in there got stripped away.
Stripped down of all the trappings that I already mentioned above are really, really hard to write and not interesting to a lot of the audience anyway, it becomes this: Person meets person, they were never intended to love each other, they seem wildly unequal and impossibly different, they are damaged, they hurt each other a lot, there are many things that stand in the way from outside forces, but they have to work together, and they come to respect each other, to see that they are equals in ways that no one noticed but matter more, that the differences matter less than they thought, that the damage matters a fuckton and not at all, that damage can be dealt with and sometimes even heal, that hurt can be forgiven but doesn’t have to be forgotten or excused. They come to then care about each other, then love each other, then fall in love with each other, and loving each other is so much the most important thing that people can do that none of the seemingly huge things that try to make them stop mattering to each other can matter against it.
That’s it. That’s the Master Recipe. The Big Love Story. The ice cream base. They did the Thing without even meaning to do the Thing, (maybe better than most storytellers do the Thing because of that), and it makes people scream and jump up and down and yell “the Thing the Thing the Thing they did the Thing!” and then run off with it and make the Thing do their thing and at the same time get very, very invested and very, very scared, because this is THE THING, and if it doesn’t work out in the end, that says dark and frightening and ugly things about whether or not The Thing ever can have a happy ending in a way they can dream of, because this is the least bullshitty version of the Thing they’ve ever seen.
TL:DR – Cas and Dean have accidentally hit upon a story we like at its base. And we want to hear the same story over and over differently, because we are, as humans, the same over and over…but differently.
SO FAR I’M HAVING THE TIME OF MY LIFE. I LOVE MY DASH TODAY. This is beautiful!
