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Early SPN
You know? I miss Dean's leather jacket.
Not because I miss it per se, but because it is gone not by choice of the actor/production staff, but as a result of someone's thievery.
Truth be told, there are a lot of eps wherein Dean wears a canvas jacket. And much of the time, it doesn't even register which he's wearing--leather or canvas. They are both equally functional for the character in a given situation. (Though as the guys joked about at a con, Dean could hide a lot of stuff in that leather coat.)
But watching the early eps of the season--before it was established to have been "John's" jacket in any real sense, it was Dean's. And it was a part of Dean's character.
Given the growth and changes the character has gone through in S6, I'm not sure how I'd feel about it showing back up again. But you know? I'd really like that to be the choice of the production team, rather than someone somewhere with sticky fingers who figured they'd take for themselves not only something of the character, but something that Jensen probably would have liked to have taken with him when the series wraps.
Not because I miss it per se, but because it is gone not by choice of the actor/production staff, but as a result of someone's thievery.
Truth be told, there are a lot of eps wherein Dean wears a canvas jacket. And much of the time, it doesn't even register which he's wearing--leather or canvas. They are both equally functional for the character in a given situation. (Though as the guys joked about at a con, Dean could hide a lot of stuff in that leather coat.)
But watching the early eps of the season--before it was established to have been "John's" jacket in any real sense, it was Dean's. And it was a part of Dean's character.
Given the growth and changes the character has gone through in S6, I'm not sure how I'd feel about it showing back up again. But you know? I'd really like that to be the choice of the production team, rather than someone somewhere with sticky fingers who figured they'd take for themselves not only something of the character, but something that Jensen probably would have liked to have taken with him when the series wraps.
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I would love to see a scene where Dean sets it aside as a sign of his moving on from the attachment to everything that was Dad - the cassette tapes, the jacket, the RULES, all of that. Becoming his own man. But since Show isn't likely to do that (particularly since the coat is gone), I guess it calls for fic?
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I wrote a little more in depth about it here (http://feliciakw.livejournal.com/370005.html).
Some things, I think, cannot be separated John from Dean. His taste in music, for example. His dad had an influence on his tastes, but at some point, that became a part of Dean. You know?
I mean, we certainly wouldn't want Dean to get rid of the Impala because it was John's car, right?
I guess that the gist of what I'm trying to say: This past season, Dean was able to recognize and separate John's flaws from his strengths, and reconcile and balance his early hero worship with his later resentment to an acceptance of John as the man he was, in all regards.
Ooh. Gotta get to a meeting. I hope that all made sense.
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I think for me it's a situation of, I need to wait a while after a particular season is over, then look back on it and see what it shows overall. If you're seeing Dean onscreen coming to terms with his relationship with his father and deliberately setting aside some of the items that connected them, that gives me hope that that stuff is actually there to be found, and that I'll be pleased when I come across it myself. What I haven't seen so far (and it could well be that I've ignored a lot of things) is Dean consciously stepping away from being John 2.0 (Created In My Father's Image) and embracing the parts of himself that have truly become his own because he *does* embrace them, and not because he hero-worshipped his father.
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Re: The Jacket . . . the last time we see it is in the season opener, when he thinks he's hunting something, and he starts going through the things he's stashed away, looking for his father's journal (he moves the jacket aside to find the journal), going through the trunk for weaponry (he kept the knife, which I thought a bit odd, as I think Bobby would have had more use for it. Though it was "Sam's," so maybe that's why he kept it), etc. The last time we saw the jacket, it was folded away in a box in the garage. We haven't seen it since.
I think it was "Two and a Half Men," at the end, where he told Lisa, with no small amount of distress, that he saw what he was doing, "with the yelling and acting like a prison guard. My dad was like this all the time." He didn't want to become that.
But then in "Family Matters" (I think), Dean scolds Sam for trusting Samuel just because Samuel is family. "Family doesn't mean the same thing to him that it does to us. He's not Dad." Or something like that.
Then again in "Caged Heat," when Dean has his confrontation with Samuel, he says something about Samuel talking about "putting blood first. Which is funny, because you sound just like my dad. The difference is, he actually did."
So even though Dean saw himself becoming the paranoid hunter that John was (after Sam pointed it out to him), he also cherished and held tight to what John taught him about family.
Then in "Unforgiven," when Sam and Dean were arguing about whether or not to stick around and solve the case, they were quoting John to each other. Dean: You never use the same crapper twice. Sam: You finish what you start.
John is still very much a presence in the guys' lives and in Dean's thought processes, but I think he has reconciled (or is well on the way to reconciling) his conflicting emotions.
Overall, I think a lot of these seemingly minor, throw-away things are very significant in the shift and balance and reconciliation of Dean's memories of his father.
It's not something that Show has said specifically or explored in depth. And Dean definitely has a long way to go in accepting himself as a good person, but otoh, in some regards, that knowledge is there, too. In "The French Mistake," his speech about where they come from, they're not famous, but they matter to the people of that world. That's a pretty significant thing for Dean to say.
There's been a lot of good Dean character stuff this season, which might be one of the reasons I've liked this season better than a lot of people have. I hope you can see it, too, if you decide to revisit the season.
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