(no subject)
A quote from Tumblr:
So in The Man Who Would Be King, Castiel says that he’s been around for a while. In his opening monologue, the oldest memory he presents is the origins of terrestrial life from the oceans. Let’s start with that.
Paleontologists believe that prehistoric fish first evolved into tetrapods around 390 million years ago, so Castiel is at least that old. Now, when he rebelled at the end of Season 4, he’d known Dean for about a year:
1/390,000,000 = 0.00000000256% of Cas’s life
If you condensed all of Castiel’s known existence into a 2 hour movie, Dean wouldn’t show up until the last fraction of a second of the ending credits. But Cas still rebelled for Dean.
That’s some powerful shit, and it’s canon.
It really is. And it certainly explains why the angels underestimated Cas’s attachment to the Winchesters, and why so many of them seemed genuinely angry and baffled by Cas’s actions: When you look at the numbers, it seems obvious that Cas’s Fall is the very definition of impulsive.
And yet, in the first real conversation we see Dean and Cas have on the park benches, Cas stresses that he already has doubts, he already has questions. And who knows how long he’s had them? (Maybe since Lucifer’s Fall? Maybe before? Personal headcanon is that he’s had them ever since Gabriel left, for reasons I’ll get into below.) It’s not made clear how long he’s doubted, but obviously he’s lived with these feelings long enough to not only understand what they are but also be able to admit to himself that he has them. That takes time, especially for someone immersed in such a hive-mind situation as he is.
So while Dean is the catalyst for Cas’s fall, I don’t think he’s the sole reason why Cas rebelled, or even the one to put the idea in Cas’s head. (Actually, I’m not even sure you can really call what happens in Season 4 rebellion as much as Cas trying to trade one cause for another: “I did all of it for you, and you failed”, etc.) As backwards as it sounds, I honestly think Cas, by helping Dean, was trying to make things better for the other angels.
In “Lucifer Rising”, if you watch the body language between Dean and Cas, I think it’s when Dean brings up family that kicks Cas over the edge:
Dean: You know what’s real? People, families - that’s real. And you’re gonna watch them all burn?
Castiel: What is so worth saving? I see nothing but pain here. I see inside you. I see your guilt, your anger, confusion. In paradise, all is forgiven. You’ll be at peace. Even with Sam.
Dean: You can take your peace… and shove it up your lily-white ass. ‘Cause I’ll take the pain and the guilt. I’ll even take Sam as is. It’s a lot better than being some Stepford bitch in paradise. This is simple, Cas! No more crap about being a good soldier. There is a right and there is a wrong here, and you know it.
(emphasis mine)
The parts I’ve bolded I think really hit close to home for Cas, because he has a family too: the angels. And he sees their rage and confusion and pain over God’s departure: he’s watched it drive Uriel and others to kill each other; it even drove Gabriel to go into hiding, because he couldn’t stand to watch his family fight with itself. And the Apocalypse was supposed to make things all better for Cas’s family; it was supposed to take away all the pain and unpleasantness.
But along comes the Righteous Man, the man foretold in the divine plan, who tells him, I will take my family as is, because that’s much, much better than any paradise.
And if this creature - one of God’s favorite creations, mind you, the ones God put him on Earth to watch over - says he will take his family as they are, no matter how broken and demonic and hurt they are, over the best thing possibly imaginable, then maybe, Cas realizes, that’s what God meant for the angels to do all along too.
That’s why Cas gives up his place among his brothers. That’s why he goes after God. And that’s why, when he can’t find God, he becomes one himself. He’s always trying to do right by his family. Like Dean, he’s always got his family in mind.
That’s not to say he doesn’t love Dean, or consider him family too, but I think there’s a lot more to Cas’s rebellion than just “I’m in love with this guy and I want to save him”. Not that he isn’t in love with Dean. Because, well, he is. I think it’s so obvious the two are stupid for each other I don’t know why it’s even a debated point anymore. But I love how richly layered Cas’s motivations are, and that even though he canonically considers himself Dean’s ‘guardian angel’, he doesn’t do what he does just out of love for Dean alone.
(And one last thing: When you crunch the numbers, it’s obvious why has Cas made such terrible decisions since his rebellion - because by the very nature of his lifespan, his choices are horribly thought out. At this point, he’s acting on the angelic equivalent of brain farts.)
[x]
Now I get that these people are Destiel shippers and I'm not one. Of course I think it's hot but I don't think it's canon, although I do think that the writers do tease that portion of the fandom regularly. Some people call it 'queer-baiting', I call it 'At least people are getting more used to seeing homosexuality in such context that it's regularly done and not causing some huge backlash'. Really people, look at the big picture and stop squabbling over the small problems when there are still big ones.
I digress.
My point here is that I just love it so much when people think and write things like this. Because whether they're really far off with their theories and ideas or they're spot on, writers want exactly this. They want their characters, and more importantly, their characters' actions, to be discussed. You have to care about characters to think this deeply. You have to love a story to sit and pick it apart.
Because writers develop their characters so much more thoroughly than you'll ever see on a screen or in print. We spend days, months, years developing their pasts, their flaws, the reasons behind their actions... down to what they like to eat for breakfast. Most of this you'll never see or read, but it makes them more solid in our mind, and therefore we can write them more convincingly.
It would be the most touching thing someday to have someone talk this way about my characters. As a writer your story is so inside your own head, you're so in the middle of it and consumed by it that you can't always see things that are obvious to others. They can discover things about your characters that even you don't.
So to anyone who sees things like this and rolls their eyes and thinks these people are wasting their time and that if the writers ever saw this they'd hate it - you're so completely wrong.
So in The Man Who Would Be King, Castiel says that he’s been around for a while. In his opening monologue, the oldest memory he presents is the origins of terrestrial life from the oceans. Let’s start with that.
Paleontologists believe that prehistoric fish first evolved into tetrapods around 390 million years ago, so Castiel is at least that old. Now, when he rebelled at the end of Season 4, he’d known Dean for about a year:
1/390,000,000 = 0.00000000256% of Cas’s life
If you condensed all of Castiel’s known existence into a 2 hour movie, Dean wouldn’t show up until the last fraction of a second of the ending credits. But Cas still rebelled for Dean.
That’s some powerful shit, and it’s canon.
It really is. And it certainly explains why the angels underestimated Cas’s attachment to the Winchesters, and why so many of them seemed genuinely angry and baffled by Cas’s actions: When you look at the numbers, it seems obvious that Cas’s Fall is the very definition of impulsive.
And yet, in the first real conversation we see Dean and Cas have on the park benches, Cas stresses that he already has doubts, he already has questions. And who knows how long he’s had them? (Maybe since Lucifer’s Fall? Maybe before? Personal headcanon is that he’s had them ever since Gabriel left, for reasons I’ll get into below.) It’s not made clear how long he’s doubted, but obviously he’s lived with these feelings long enough to not only understand what they are but also be able to admit to himself that he has them. That takes time, especially for someone immersed in such a hive-mind situation as he is.
So while Dean is the catalyst for Cas’s fall, I don’t think he’s the sole reason why Cas rebelled, or even the one to put the idea in Cas’s head. (Actually, I’m not even sure you can really call what happens in Season 4 rebellion as much as Cas trying to trade one cause for another: “I did all of it for you, and you failed”, etc.) As backwards as it sounds, I honestly think Cas, by helping Dean, was trying to make things better for the other angels.
In “Lucifer Rising”, if you watch the body language between Dean and Cas, I think it’s when Dean brings up family that kicks Cas over the edge:
Dean: You know what’s real? People, families - that’s real. And you’re gonna watch them all burn?
Castiel: What is so worth saving? I see nothing but pain here. I see inside you. I see your guilt, your anger, confusion. In paradise, all is forgiven. You’ll be at peace. Even with Sam.
Dean: You can take your peace… and shove it up your lily-white ass. ‘Cause I’ll take the pain and the guilt. I’ll even take Sam as is. It’s a lot better than being some Stepford bitch in paradise. This is simple, Cas! No more crap about being a good soldier. There is a right and there is a wrong here, and you know it.
(emphasis mine)
The parts I’ve bolded I think really hit close to home for Cas, because he has a family too: the angels. And he sees their rage and confusion and pain over God’s departure: he’s watched it drive Uriel and others to kill each other; it even drove Gabriel to go into hiding, because he couldn’t stand to watch his family fight with itself. And the Apocalypse was supposed to make things all better for Cas’s family; it was supposed to take away all the pain and unpleasantness.
But along comes the Righteous Man, the man foretold in the divine plan, who tells him, I will take my family as is, because that’s much, much better than any paradise.
And if this creature - one of God’s favorite creations, mind you, the ones God put him on Earth to watch over - says he will take his family as they are, no matter how broken and demonic and hurt they are, over the best thing possibly imaginable, then maybe, Cas realizes, that’s what God meant for the angels to do all along too.
That’s why Cas gives up his place among his brothers. That’s why he goes after God. And that’s why, when he can’t find God, he becomes one himself. He’s always trying to do right by his family. Like Dean, he’s always got his family in mind.
That’s not to say he doesn’t love Dean, or consider him family too, but I think there’s a lot more to Cas’s rebellion than just “I’m in love with this guy and I want to save him”. Not that he isn’t in love with Dean. Because, well, he is. I think it’s so obvious the two are stupid for each other I don’t know why it’s even a debated point anymore. But I love how richly layered Cas’s motivations are, and that even though he canonically considers himself Dean’s ‘guardian angel’, he doesn’t do what he does just out of love for Dean alone.
(And one last thing: When you crunch the numbers, it’s obvious why has Cas made such terrible decisions since his rebellion - because by the very nature of his lifespan, his choices are horribly thought out. At this point, he’s acting on the angelic equivalent of brain farts.)
[x]
Now I get that these people are Destiel shippers and I'm not one. Of course I think it's hot but I don't think it's canon, although I do think that the writers do tease that portion of the fandom regularly. Some people call it 'queer-baiting', I call it 'At least people are getting more used to seeing homosexuality in such context that it's regularly done and not causing some huge backlash'. Really people, look at the big picture and stop squabbling over the small problems when there are still big ones.
I digress.
My point here is that I just love it so much when people think and write things like this. Because whether they're really far off with their theories and ideas or they're spot on, writers want exactly this. They want their characters, and more importantly, their characters' actions, to be discussed. You have to care about characters to think this deeply. You have to love a story to sit and pick it apart.
Because writers develop their characters so much more thoroughly than you'll ever see on a screen or in print. We spend days, months, years developing their pasts, their flaws, the reasons behind their actions... down to what they like to eat for breakfast. Most of this you'll never see or read, but it makes them more solid in our mind, and therefore we can write them more convincingly.
It would be the most touching thing someday to have someone talk this way about my characters. As a writer your story is so inside your own head, you're so in the middle of it and consumed by it that you can't always see things that are obvious to others. They can discover things about your characters that even you don't.
So to anyone who sees things like this and rolls their eyes and thinks these people are wasting their time and that if the writers ever saw this they'd hate it - you're so completely wrong.