Deeply Enjoy The Boys/Gen V Taking Supernatural Actors Who Played Very Likeable Characters And Getting

I made it to fan fiction!

goodnight to the autistic-coded character that gets mischaracterized and treated like a kid

I would use it every single time

i’m not ever going to get over the fact that sam didn’t know dean was the one who carried him out of the fire until he was 22 years old

tbh a lot of the ways jack’s infantilization pops up is in discourse around him and dean and their relationship , especially after Mary’s death in game night. because everyone’s relentlessly clinging to the idea of jack as a pwecious widdle baby who can do no wrong, there’s this unanimous refusal to give him any accountability whatsoever for anything he does, particularly with killing mary and hurting dean so severely in the process. instead, everyone decides that dean is the bad guy for reacting to his childhood trauma unfolding again after he’d finally healed from it and got her back.

I mean spn fans fundamentally do not see jack as an autonomous person so it only makes sense that nobody can put him on equal footing in any of his relationship dynamics, but to vilify dean for having a very justified reaction to his fucking mother dying again is just an insane thing to do in the name of woobifying jack. yes, it was entirely accidental and yes, Jack is equally as traumatized by it, but that does not take away from the fact that what he did directly emotionally damaged sam and dean.

not only would a lot of fandom discourse benefit from realizing these are literally not normal functional healthy people dealing with normal situations that give them the liberty to approach said situations in normal functional healthy ways (dean promising to kill jack if he needed to in 13x02, & shooting jack in 13x23), but it would also benefit from realizing that jack is a grown ass invulnerable demigod with the capacity to cause a lot of major damage if he spins out of control, and he bears full responsibility for that damage (which is why it is actually so fucking stupid whej I see ppl say that jack becoming a baby would magically fix their conflict. no it fucking wouldn’t, you just don’t see jack as a full person with direct responsibility in said conflict and you don’t care about their relationship actually being healed mutually).

on the other hand, dean was reacting to a presumed threat almost immediately after losing two of his loved ones in a situation directly related to jack. he has every right to be wary and cautious, and given that he is actively traumatized and already an emotionally dysfunctional person from being abused by John, he isn’t exactly going to outlet his trauma healthily or behave in a way that miraculously breaks the cycle John created. I’m getting tired but lastly, ppl should also realize that jack is a grown ass adult with the emotional maturity to understand and forgive dean for the way he acted before—even while Dean actively struggles to forgive himself and tries to be as good a father as possible to make up for it.

Because again, their situation is not normal and they have no way of treating it or reacting to it normally. as far as jack knows and has seen of his powers, he is dangerous and is able to reach a point where he’s too much of a threat to keep alive. the tragedy of it is that he doesn’t want to be a threat, he doesn’t want people to fear or hate him and he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. that’s why he says “you were right all along” in moriah. between dean and jack, a huge facet in their relationship is the question of whether or not dean is right, and by the time they’ve reached a point of mutually seeing each other as father and son that question is up in the air as something neither of them want. jack never wanted dean to be right, and now that dean knows jack as a person and as his own kid he especially doesn’t want to be right anymore.

just. Please start thinking of Jack as an actual autonomous person. That is literally all it comes down to. It will open up your world

I don't know if this is an unpopular or rare perspective on Jack, and I'm a huge over-analyzer, but I think that he purposefully makes himself more naive as a way of making himself likeable/less intimidating.

Like at first he's genuinely new to everything and doesn't understand what's going on, but I think he starts "masking" fairly early as he notices people react well to certain things and react poorly to others.

An example that stands out to me is his expression and the way he holds himself.

At the start, he has a "scary" expression reminiscent of the Kubrick stare. His head is tilted down, chin in, and eyes furrowed. It seems to be his default state, as he reverts to it when he's overwhelmed or just focused strongly on something else, like when he uses his powers.

However, at the police station he ends up getting his first positive feedback (lack of fear/nervous response) from his body language

Being down on the ground, he looks up at the officer and ends up with his head tilted up and his eyes unfurrowed. With his mouth full his expression also changes compared to how slack his face was before.

Then when he wakes up in the cell with Sam, he's back to his normal expression and angry about Sam tazing him, and Sam apologizes and explains why.

What's interesting to me is what Jack does next -

He sits crosslegged like he did earlier, despite being on a bench, and apologizes back. Because he just learned from Sam that if you hurt someone and regret it and want them to forgive you, you apologize and explain why it happened.

And he gets into the last pose that worked for him - legs crossed and tilting his head up, because it makes him look less threatening. And it works, it relieves some of Sam's obvious fear.

(part 1)

(trying to explain babyjack in the destiel language so they can understand what I’m saying)

so you see it’s like if dean’s one-off improvised “baby in a trench coat” comment to cas in 6x19 got taken far too literally and everyone decided that either Cas or the show would be better off as an actual baby in a trench coat being babysat by Sam and Dean instead of being a former angel of the lord and later member of team free will. so they completely ignore his actual character and relationship dynamics to keep the baby thing going, make it almost entirely impossible to enjoy or engage with any content about him because it’s all nothing but the same baby-Cas being babysat drivel and there’s no sign of nuanced discussion to be seen.

maybe it gets switched up with Bobby as the babysitting uncle instead of Sam and Dean but that’s as different as it’ll ever get. eventually trench baby Cas gets so over-saturated within the fandom that it becomes regarded and touted as the show’s own gospel truth instead of the silly fandom joke it started as. destiel is of course completely nonexistent, because Cas is a baby and dean is his babysitter-dad and that’s weird, right?

but if you try to say “hey no, that’s actually a grown ass gay man who loves dean romantically and he’s an equal part of the family, this baby stuff was never real and the canon textual evidence actually shows he’s a grown ass gay man who loves dean,” you’ll get thrown in the corner with a shame collar because everyone is still so insistent that their baby-being-babysat dynamic is the real textual deal. mmkay?

"because the ai generated gay sex cats killed my grandma, okay?"

i think a reason why people find sam boring is because he’s not written with a lot of traits that make him seem more ‘quirky’ or personable, unlike dean. for example, dean likes cowboys and westerns, he’s into outdated pop culture, dean likes to play dress up, dean loves scooby-doo, dean likes to cook, deans really protective of his car, dean likes wearing women’s underwear. dean is given a lot more personal details and information that doesn’t contribute to the show or narrative, where as sam’s unrelated traits are reading, exercising, decently healthy, and researching.