I'm not someone you want to aim to be : Dean in SPN season 6
This was posted in a shorter form elsewhere awhile ago, and I finally got back to it and expanded it a bit. It was written in response to a discussion about why Dean left the “normal life” in season 6. I originally wrote it to address some points I’ve seen made frequently in fandom regarding Dean’s relationship to Lisa and Ben that I’ve never agreed with, and think ignore a huge part of Dean's characterization and why Dean is where he’s at in season 7. Hopefully I will get to writing about season 7 at some point! Because I think it's impossible to understand him in season 7 without all of this as background.
At the opening of season 6 we were shown Dean slowly adjusting to something he’s never had, civilian life, while still clearly mourning Sam. He’s not entirely happy -- his brother’s in hell, after all -- but he does seem to be healing compared to where we’d left him in season 5. A year is not much time to make such a significant adjustment given that the until this point Dean’s life has been chaotic, violent, and secretive. But we see him making the effort to change.
Despite some backsliding into the secretive behavior that was ingrained into him since he was a child, Dean does eventually open up and share his concerns about the potential hunt with Lisa in "Exile on Main Street," showing that he’s making the attempt to go against his training and communicate, be accountable to someone. Again in “Two and a Half Men” (6.02), we see him struggling but ultimately he’s emotionally open and honest with Lisa about his fears, a major step for him. It helps, of course, that Lisa knows about the supernatural and believes him.
Dean hasn't lived a regular civilian life since he was four years old. That's his starting point in season 6. He hasn't lived in the same place more than a few weeks, as far as we've seen from canon, since Mary died. He's very literally never lived a normal life, nor seen one modeled for him since before he was old enough for school. Living on the road, in transient housing (motels and squatting), never as far as we've seen holding down a regular job of any kind.
A year at the same address and holding a job, everything that makes up a "normal" life, is a big change after nearly thirty years living transiently. Add in first long-term relationship, with a kid. It's a huge adjustment to make. It sounds simple, but it's not.
Now factor in that during this thirty years of living on the road, being raised as a child soldier fighting a war you have to keep secret. Having killed your first human-looking being while still in high school. Dean's story in season 6 is about this, about a soldier trying to live a civilian life -- only this soldier has literally never done so, has no idea how to do it. Add in hell, and the shame you feel for having turned torturer there. Add in watching your brother not die, but go there too, for all you know being tortured worse than you were.
Given all of that, Dean still made it mostly work with Lisa, for a year. Given that he was already depressed and horribly grieving Sam, he didn't "turn down" that normal life, though it sounds like he struggled, due to everything I've said above.
Now, what fandom often tries to say is that Dean turned down the normal life because Sam came back in “Exile on Main Street,” for various explanations of what that means. But what's usually left out is that what happened first is that Dean was poisoned by the Djinn, and hallucinated YED coming back, right in the middle of his garage in his new normal life. In the first family home he's lived in since he was four.
Everything starts unravelling when he’s dosed with the djinn poison.
Dean's first trauma was the fire that killed his mother, the fire set by YED. YED killed his whole family: Mary, then John, then finally via YED's actions, Sam. From Dean’s perspective, YED destroyed his first chance at "normal life." Dean later has another hallucination where YED kills Lisa the same way Mary died, and feeds Ben demon blood -- a direct reliving of that first core trauma, not to mention a reminder of the later disaster that led to Sam’s (first) death. And as we learn from 6.02, Dean immediately moves his new family -- to another state.
No matter how many strides people make to change, often they fall back on their previous conditioned behavior when in crisis, especially if their new coping skills haven’t fully taken the place of the old. As a result Dean moves the family, tries to confine them to the house for their protection, and freaks out at the idea of Ben turning into Dean himself. All the while he’s only too aware that he’s echoing his father’s behavior, another of his worst fears. Unlike John, Dean is fully conscious of the cost of his behavior and wants to do it differently. He just doesn’t know how.
So Dean didn't give up the normal life when Sam came back at all. Instead, he chose to stay. He chose to keep trying, even after he started hunting with Sam again in the next episode. He wanted to make Lisa's idea work, because as he said, he can't lose them.
So why does Dean exit the normal life?
It starts a bit in 6.02, and part of it of course has to do with Sam being alive and back, as well as Dean knowing there's something wrong about Sam. The Sam part is a whole other essay. But Dean rejoining hunting is a bit less "normal" than construction work. It's familiar, and it's what he's been trained all his life to do. He's good at it, and I assume it's probably more interesting to him than building houses, and Dean doesn't have a lot of qualifications on paper. But he's still wanting to make it work with Lisa, setting up the potential for a life not too unlike that of a trucker or traveling salesman or anyone with a job that takes them away from home fairly often.
So what changes?
Lisa’s suggested compromise in 6.02 doesn’t get much of a chance. Before they can see if it will work, in "Live Free and Twihard," Dean is betrayed by his brother (at that point he doesn’t know about the missing soul) and turned into a vampire, an actual monster, two more long-running fears. In response Dean regresses further and isn’t honest with Lisa about what’s going on because he can’t admit to her that he’s a monster. It’s one of his deepest fears and shames come to life: that there’s something fundamentally wrong with him, that he’s only good for killing. Daddy’s blunt little instrument.
Since the first season, Dean has questioned himself about being a killer. Then in hell, he feels he broke and became something monstrous, by inflicting on other souls what had been inflicted on him -- torture. It's something he's unable to really face or forgive himself for, and it's a big contributor to his depression since season 4.
Then in 6.05 he's turned into a vampire -- literally into a monster. It just confirms what he already thinks about himself. Thinking he's going to die, that he should die, Dean goes to say goodbye to Lisa and Ben. Stupid, sure, but an understandable impulse given what they've come to mean to him over the year he was there. Whatever fandom thinks, Dean loves them. They're a big key to everything that's happened with Dean since season 6 started, and I think missing that, or denying it for whatever reason, is a big reason why parts of fandom have a hard time understanding Dean's motives during that season, and at the start of this one.
He goes to Lisa's, and realizes once he's in her bedroom what a horrible mistake he's made. Because he's a monster. Not just in his head, but in actuality -- he could kill them. Some part of him now, the vampire part, needs to. Is starving, it's basically animal instinct. So he freaks out. Freaks Lisa out, then freaks Ben out, and shoves him.
I think that if he'd told Lisa, before he freaked out, what had happened, or if he'd told her afterwards on the phone, that maybe things could have been salvaged. But telling her is basically admitting Dean's worst fear about himself -- that he's a monster. And he can't do it. He's too afraid, because he cares about Lisa and cares about what she thinks of him. It's speaking aloud his fears about himself.
Everything comes to a head in “You Can’t Handle the Truth” (6.06). Dean fails to tell Lisa what’s going on when she gets him on the phone and lets her talk to him knowing she’s under the truth spell, a self-sabotaging act that he probably at least unconsciously knew would end things. Lisa gives him an opportunity to explain what happened and he again refuses. By the end of the episode when Veritas forces him to tell the truth, it’s clear why:
DEAN
I thought [Sam] was a monster. But now I think...
VERITAS
Now you think what?
DEAN
He's just acting like me.
VERITAS
What do you mean?
DEAN
It's the gig. You're covered in blood until you're covered in your own blood. Half the time, you're about to die. Like right now. I told myself I wanted out... that I wanted a family.
VERITAS
But you were lying.
DEAN
No. But what I'm good at... is slicing throats. I ain't a father. I'm a killer. And there's no changing that. I know that now.
We find out later that Lisa tried calling several more times after this but Dean failed to return any of her calls. After a year of living together, of working out an emotionally honest relationship for the first time in his life, Lisa was willing to give him another chance. But Dean won’t give himself that chance because he no longer only fears that he’ll eventually become a monster, his fears have manifested: he’s actually been one now. He believes there’s nothing else for him. Which is echoed in what he says to Ben in “Mannequin 3” (6.14):
DEAN
It's like this, then. Just 'cause you love someone doesn't mean you should stick around and screw up their life. So I can't be here.
BEN
You think something will follow you home?
DEAN
No. No, I don't, but I think my job turns me into somebody that can't sit at your dinner table. And if I stayed, you'd end up just like me.
BEN
Why do you say it like you're so...bad?
DEAN
Well, trust me, I'm not someone you want to aim to be.
It’s no longer about worrying that what he does will endanger them, but that who he is will endanger them. That’s a significant shift.
Dean’s inability to forgive himself for the things that have happened to him that were beyond his control -- his original trauma at the hands of YED, the djinn attack, being turned into a vampire -- is directly tied to his inability to come clean to Lisa, to apologize for the actions he could control, to make the changes that would allow him to make a life with the Braedens. Which brings to mind this exchange between Lisa and Dean:
DEAN
What do you want from me?
LISA
I'm not asking for anything.
DEAN
Well, then ask for something!
Lisa already asked him for something: that he be honest with her and with himself. Later in the exchange she turns the question around onto him:
LISA
No, don't. Don't apologize or anything. It's just... It's just I get to this place where I'm okay, and then you show up at our door. You keep doing that, every time I think I'm never gonna see you again. I'm trying to get over you. What are you trying to do? What do you want from us, Dean?
Dean knows what he wants from them; he said it very plainly in 6.02 -- I can't just lose you and Ben. But now he’s given up hope that he can have it, that he deserves to have it, that he won’t harm them by virtue of who he is.
So his inability to let this view of himself as a monster go, to forgive himself for what he did in hell, for how his childhood as a soldier affected him, for being turned into a vampire against his will, for the mistakes he’s made while traumatized and under pressure, causes him to fall back into old behavior of not communicating with the people he loves, sabotaging a relationship he very much wants and expressed a desire for as far back as season 3 and later summed up as when I do picture myself happy…it’s with you.
So even after he was cured of vampirism, Dean still thinks he's a monster. That as he admits to Veritas, he's just a killer. He wanted the normal life, but down deep he thinks he can never have it, doesn't deserve it, because as he tells Ben in Mannequin, he's not fit for their table.
All of this is confirmed for him in 6.21, "Let It Bleed." First, Lisa and Ben are threatened (and traumatized) because of him. Then, to get them back, he makes himself into the thing he hates himself most for -- he tortures. And it doesn't get him anything -- Balthazar ends up telling them where Lisa and Ben are.
Then during the rescue, he forces Ben into the role Dean himself was forced into, which (as he said in 6.02 when Ben tried to get into Dean's weapons) he never wanted for Ben. He slaps Ben and puts a gun in his hands -- and Ben has to shoot at possessed human beings. Lisa is mortally wounded, Ben is traumatized -- Dean might have stopped thinking he could have it, but they were still family to him. It's another repetition of that first trauma, like in his hallucination in 6.01 -- Lisa dead, Ben corrupted (because Dean sees himself as corrupted by killing, and he feels like he just did that to Ben). So Dean does what he thinks is the kindest thing for them, when Cas appears -- he erases himself from their lives. (note: I'm speaking purely of Dean's POV on this here, and I think it's fucked up, and that's a whole other discussion).
All these lines he feels he's crossed and can't come back from. Is it any wonder he doesn't think he's fit for normal life? While still wanting it, desperately?
So this is my extremely long winded answer to why Dean supposedly "turned down" the normal life. Saying it that way so immensely oversimplifies what happened in season 6 as to make it literally illegible. It erases everything that happened with Dean's story, and ignores the impact season 6 is still having on Dean's story in season 7. And I've left a whole bunch out, because I've already written a ridiculous amount.
I think the worsening depression in season 7, outside of all the other losses (Cas, Bobby) and everything going on with Sam, can be traced to Dean feeling like he fully embraced that line crossing at the end of season 6, and it got him nothing. Worse than nothing. Got the people he was trying to save killed -- Lisa literally, Ben in a different way. He's drifting farther and farther down the road to the Dean of 2014, and he knows it.
And I'm not even sure he's afraid of it any more.
At the opening of season 6 we were shown Dean slowly adjusting to something he’s never had, civilian life, while still clearly mourning Sam. He’s not entirely happy -- his brother’s in hell, after all -- but he does seem to be healing compared to where we’d left him in season 5. A year is not much time to make such a significant adjustment given that the until this point Dean’s life has been chaotic, violent, and secretive. But we see him making the effort to change.
Despite some backsliding into the secretive behavior that was ingrained into him since he was a child, Dean does eventually open up and share his concerns about the potential hunt with Lisa in "Exile on Main Street," showing that he’s making the attempt to go against his training and communicate, be accountable to someone. Again in “Two and a Half Men” (6.02), we see him struggling but ultimately he’s emotionally open and honest with Lisa about his fears, a major step for him. It helps, of course, that Lisa knows about the supernatural and believes him.
Dean hasn't lived a regular civilian life since he was four years old. That's his starting point in season 6. He hasn't lived in the same place more than a few weeks, as far as we've seen from canon, since Mary died. He's very literally never lived a normal life, nor seen one modeled for him since before he was old enough for school. Living on the road, in transient housing (motels and squatting), never as far as we've seen holding down a regular job of any kind.
A year at the same address and holding a job, everything that makes up a "normal" life, is a big change after nearly thirty years living transiently. Add in first long-term relationship, with a kid. It's a huge adjustment to make. It sounds simple, but it's not.
Now factor in that during this thirty years of living on the road, being raised as a child soldier fighting a war you have to keep secret. Having killed your first human-looking being while still in high school. Dean's story in season 6 is about this, about a soldier trying to live a civilian life -- only this soldier has literally never done so, has no idea how to do it. Add in hell, and the shame you feel for having turned torturer there. Add in watching your brother not die, but go there too, for all you know being tortured worse than you were.
Given all of that, Dean still made it mostly work with Lisa, for a year. Given that he was already depressed and horribly grieving Sam, he didn't "turn down" that normal life, though it sounds like he struggled, due to everything I've said above.
Now, what fandom often tries to say is that Dean turned down the normal life because Sam came back in “Exile on Main Street,” for various explanations of what that means. But what's usually left out is that what happened first is that Dean was poisoned by the Djinn, and hallucinated YED coming back, right in the middle of his garage in his new normal life. In the first family home he's lived in since he was four.
Everything starts unravelling when he’s dosed with the djinn poison.
Dean's first trauma was the fire that killed his mother, the fire set by YED. YED killed his whole family: Mary, then John, then finally via YED's actions, Sam. From Dean’s perspective, YED destroyed his first chance at "normal life." Dean later has another hallucination where YED kills Lisa the same way Mary died, and feeds Ben demon blood -- a direct reliving of that first core trauma, not to mention a reminder of the later disaster that led to Sam’s (first) death. And as we learn from 6.02, Dean immediately moves his new family -- to another state.
No matter how many strides people make to change, often they fall back on their previous conditioned behavior when in crisis, especially if their new coping skills haven’t fully taken the place of the old. As a result Dean moves the family, tries to confine them to the house for their protection, and freaks out at the idea of Ben turning into Dean himself. All the while he’s only too aware that he’s echoing his father’s behavior, another of his worst fears. Unlike John, Dean is fully conscious of the cost of his behavior and wants to do it differently. He just doesn’t know how.
So Dean didn't give up the normal life when Sam came back at all. Instead, he chose to stay. He chose to keep trying, even after he started hunting with Sam again in the next episode. He wanted to make Lisa's idea work, because as he said, he can't lose them.
So why does Dean exit the normal life?
It starts a bit in 6.02, and part of it of course has to do with Sam being alive and back, as well as Dean knowing there's something wrong about Sam. The Sam part is a whole other essay. But Dean rejoining hunting is a bit less "normal" than construction work. It's familiar, and it's what he's been trained all his life to do. He's good at it, and I assume it's probably more interesting to him than building houses, and Dean doesn't have a lot of qualifications on paper. But he's still wanting to make it work with Lisa, setting up the potential for a life not too unlike that of a trucker or traveling salesman or anyone with a job that takes them away from home fairly often.
So what changes?
Lisa’s suggested compromise in 6.02 doesn’t get much of a chance. Before they can see if it will work, in "Live Free and Twihard," Dean is betrayed by his brother (at that point he doesn’t know about the missing soul) and turned into a vampire, an actual monster, two more long-running fears. In response Dean regresses further and isn’t honest with Lisa about what’s going on because he can’t admit to her that he’s a monster. It’s one of his deepest fears and shames come to life: that there’s something fundamentally wrong with him, that he’s only good for killing. Daddy’s blunt little instrument.
Since the first season, Dean has questioned himself about being a killer. Then in hell, he feels he broke and became something monstrous, by inflicting on other souls what had been inflicted on him -- torture. It's something he's unable to really face or forgive himself for, and it's a big contributor to his depression since season 4.
Then in 6.05 he's turned into a vampire -- literally into a monster. It just confirms what he already thinks about himself. Thinking he's going to die, that he should die, Dean goes to say goodbye to Lisa and Ben. Stupid, sure, but an understandable impulse given what they've come to mean to him over the year he was there. Whatever fandom thinks, Dean loves them. They're a big key to everything that's happened with Dean since season 6 started, and I think missing that, or denying it for whatever reason, is a big reason why parts of fandom have a hard time understanding Dean's motives during that season, and at the start of this one.
He goes to Lisa's, and realizes once he's in her bedroom what a horrible mistake he's made. Because he's a monster. Not just in his head, but in actuality -- he could kill them. Some part of him now, the vampire part, needs to. Is starving, it's basically animal instinct. So he freaks out. Freaks Lisa out, then freaks Ben out, and shoves him.
I think that if he'd told Lisa, before he freaked out, what had happened, or if he'd told her afterwards on the phone, that maybe things could have been salvaged. But telling her is basically admitting Dean's worst fear about himself -- that he's a monster. And he can't do it. He's too afraid, because he cares about Lisa and cares about what she thinks of him. It's speaking aloud his fears about himself.
Everything comes to a head in “You Can’t Handle the Truth” (6.06). Dean fails to tell Lisa what’s going on when she gets him on the phone and lets her talk to him knowing she’s under the truth spell, a self-sabotaging act that he probably at least unconsciously knew would end things. Lisa gives him an opportunity to explain what happened and he again refuses. By the end of the episode when Veritas forces him to tell the truth, it’s clear why:
DEAN
I thought [Sam] was a monster. But now I think...
VERITAS
Now you think what?
DEAN
He's just acting like me.
VERITAS
What do you mean?
DEAN
It's the gig. You're covered in blood until you're covered in your own blood. Half the time, you're about to die. Like right now. I told myself I wanted out... that I wanted a family.
VERITAS
But you were lying.
DEAN
No. But what I'm good at... is slicing throats. I ain't a father. I'm a killer. And there's no changing that. I know that now.
We find out later that Lisa tried calling several more times after this but Dean failed to return any of her calls. After a year of living together, of working out an emotionally honest relationship for the first time in his life, Lisa was willing to give him another chance. But Dean won’t give himself that chance because he no longer only fears that he’ll eventually become a monster, his fears have manifested: he’s actually been one now. He believes there’s nothing else for him. Which is echoed in what he says to Ben in “Mannequin 3” (6.14):
DEAN
It's like this, then. Just 'cause you love someone doesn't mean you should stick around and screw up their life. So I can't be here.
BEN
You think something will follow you home?
DEAN
No. No, I don't, but I think my job turns me into somebody that can't sit at your dinner table. And if I stayed, you'd end up just like me.
BEN
Why do you say it like you're so...bad?
DEAN
Well, trust me, I'm not someone you want to aim to be.
It’s no longer about worrying that what he does will endanger them, but that who he is will endanger them. That’s a significant shift.
Dean’s inability to forgive himself for the things that have happened to him that were beyond his control -- his original trauma at the hands of YED, the djinn attack, being turned into a vampire -- is directly tied to his inability to come clean to Lisa, to apologize for the actions he could control, to make the changes that would allow him to make a life with the Braedens. Which brings to mind this exchange between Lisa and Dean:
DEAN
What do you want from me?
LISA
I'm not asking for anything.
DEAN
Well, then ask for something!
Lisa already asked him for something: that he be honest with her and with himself. Later in the exchange she turns the question around onto him:
LISA
No, don't. Don't apologize or anything. It's just... It's just I get to this place where I'm okay, and then you show up at our door. You keep doing that, every time I think I'm never gonna see you again. I'm trying to get over you. What are you trying to do? What do you want from us, Dean?
Dean knows what he wants from them; he said it very plainly in 6.02 -- I can't just lose you and Ben. But now he’s given up hope that he can have it, that he deserves to have it, that he won’t harm them by virtue of who he is.
So his inability to let this view of himself as a monster go, to forgive himself for what he did in hell, for how his childhood as a soldier affected him, for being turned into a vampire against his will, for the mistakes he’s made while traumatized and under pressure, causes him to fall back into old behavior of not communicating with the people he loves, sabotaging a relationship he very much wants and expressed a desire for as far back as season 3 and later summed up as when I do picture myself happy…it’s with you.
So even after he was cured of vampirism, Dean still thinks he's a monster. That as he admits to Veritas, he's just a killer. He wanted the normal life, but down deep he thinks he can never have it, doesn't deserve it, because as he tells Ben in Mannequin, he's not fit for their table.
All of this is confirmed for him in 6.21, "Let It Bleed." First, Lisa and Ben are threatened (and traumatized) because of him. Then, to get them back, he makes himself into the thing he hates himself most for -- he tortures. And it doesn't get him anything -- Balthazar ends up telling them where Lisa and Ben are.
Then during the rescue, he forces Ben into the role Dean himself was forced into, which (as he said in 6.02 when Ben tried to get into Dean's weapons) he never wanted for Ben. He slaps Ben and puts a gun in his hands -- and Ben has to shoot at possessed human beings. Lisa is mortally wounded, Ben is traumatized -- Dean might have stopped thinking he could have it, but they were still family to him. It's another repetition of that first trauma, like in his hallucination in 6.01 -- Lisa dead, Ben corrupted (because Dean sees himself as corrupted by killing, and he feels like he just did that to Ben). So Dean does what he thinks is the kindest thing for them, when Cas appears -- he erases himself from their lives. (note: I'm speaking purely of Dean's POV on this here, and I think it's fucked up, and that's a whole other discussion).
All these lines he feels he's crossed and can't come back from. Is it any wonder he doesn't think he's fit for normal life? While still wanting it, desperately?
So this is my extremely long winded answer to why Dean supposedly "turned down" the normal life. Saying it that way so immensely oversimplifies what happened in season 6 as to make it literally illegible. It erases everything that happened with Dean's story, and ignores the impact season 6 is still having on Dean's story in season 7. And I've left a whole bunch out, because I've already written a ridiculous amount.
I think the worsening depression in season 7, outside of all the other losses (Cas, Bobby) and everything going on with Sam, can be traced to Dean feeling like he fully embraced that line crossing at the end of season 6, and it got him nothing. Worse than nothing. Got the people he was trying to save killed -- Lisa literally, Ben in a different way. He's drifting farther and farther down the road to the Dean of 2014, and he knows it.
And I'm not even sure he's afraid of it any more.