Protecting your whole self

flyingfish1:

Charlie—“balanced” Charlie, the one we know and love—already had those dark impulses within her before she split into two. 

And that’s the case with Dean, too. Mark or no Mark, Dean has violent tendencies. He likes killing monsters. He’s tortured others. The Mark isn’t giving him new “symptoms” so much as it’s amping up some of the things he already does and feels. Just like demon!Dean was, MOC!Dean is a version of him, not some completely new and separate creature.

Dean hasn’t been looking at it like that, though, and he never has. Not with dark!Charlie, and not with himself. He’s always been something of an idealist and a black-and-white thinker, and it never shows more than when he’s trying to deal with his own darker impulses. He adamantly separates the two Charlies and he and he tries over and over to utterly squash his own darker impulses. He fiercely orders dark!Charlie to stay away from her good double, claiming that he doesn’t want her to “corrupt” good!Charlie, not recognizing that Charlie needs both sides of herself to be whole and that it wouldn’t be corruption at all, but integration. And as for himself… he wants to destroy that part of himself.

I’m reminded of that gifset which I can’t find right now of Dean killing his own dark doubles and enjoying it—the shapeshifter in “Skin,” the Leviathan double in “Slash Fiction,” (which was also, for the record, a Robbie Thompson episode like this one). “Well, that felt good,” he says after chopping off his monster self’s head.

He feels compelled to wipe the dark, monstrous versions of himself out of existence. And so, whenever he becomes convinced that he himself is monstrous (“I’m poison,” etc), he feels that the only thing he can possibly do is wipe himself out of existence, too. That’s why he didn’t care about the consequences of taking on the MOC. He was poison, so if it hurt him, so be it. It’s why he accepted death when Metatron stabbed him and it’s why he asked Cas to kill him two episodes ago. “I can’t be that thing again,” he says, but that “thing” isn’t a “thing” at all: it’s part of himself. If he could separate out all the dark aspects of himself into a literal “thing” and kill it, I’m sure he’d do it gladly, but he can’t.

He can’t destroy his dark side without destroying all the good parts of himself, and 10x11 makes that literal by showing good!Charlie being hurt whenever bad!Charlie was. Dean can’t wipe his dark side out of existence without also wiping out the guy who’s a caring friend and brother, who prides himself on saving people from monsters, and who daydreams about having a jacuzzi and likes LARPING and slinkys and singing along to the radio. I think that in the past he hasn’t let himself care about that, because he just hasn’t been able to see any other options.

That’s why the ending of this episode was so hopeful, because for once in his life Dean’s being presented with another path to take. Instead of destroying his whole self in an effort to neutralize his dark side, he can try to accept all of himself. He can try to let himself heal. He can try to find balance. Charlie’s always been something of a trailblazer for Dean, and I think seeing her do this—and knowing that she’s on his side—has given him hope that he will finally find a way to do it himself.

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