“Unmanly” vs. “too gay”
That’s not what Jensen said. He said the scene, as originally written, was “unmanly”. As for where “too gay” came from, in the video you can see that Jensen is clearly only repeating words a fan told him Misha’d used (which isn’t what he’d said either).
The thing is, Jensen has a point. And it’s not about intent, but about tone.
The original lines in question:
Dumb to keep. I know. I saw you dissolve or whatever. But, just in case. ‘Cause I never stopped wanting to fix it either. So we got something in common. Just— take it. Please.
…as brilliant as these lines are, they doesn’t sound like two men talking to each other; and they especially don’t sound like Dean talking to Cas. Season 7 Dean does not beg (“take it, please”), and he doesn’t apologize easily (“just in case”), especially now, and especially for doing something he does not feel is wrong. I’ll get into this more when we get there, but by this point, I think he’s too broken and torn down, too disconnected from his own wants, to be self-aware enough to apologize for keeping the coat.
And yet, this dialogue was carefully written to be the culmination of everything Dean had experienced and overcome up to this point. Like I said, I’ll dig more into this when I get to “The Born Again Identity”, but the entire episode, the entire season really, hinges on that one line of “cause I never stopped wanting to fix it” (because as I mentioned in the analysis of “Death’s Door”, that’s part of why Dean’s grief is so persistent and self-destructive). After he admits it, nothing is the same.
The stopgap — “part of me always believed you’d come back” — was good, but it wasn’t exactly true; because a) that’s not how grief works; and b) Dean wasn’t tormented because he always thought Cas might return; he was tormented because he never got a chance to repair their relationship before Cas died. So yeah, I never liked it, I never thought it fit, and I thought the editors were right to cut that line.
I think maybe what they should’ve done instead was just keep “Because I never stopped wanting to fix it either” and cut away everything else. Of course, it’s easy for me to say that now, with the benefit of hindsight and not being in the Writer’s Pit. But I wish Sera had fought harder for her script, or that Bob/Misha/Jensen hadn’t changed it on the fly to what they did. Ah well. Mistakes happen. Coulda woulda shoulda.
As for whether Jensen sees Dean and Cas in love — isn’t it obvious that both he and Misha think Dean is? I mean, notice how easily he and Misha joke about Dean keeping the trench, for example; and in the quote I link to above, Misha outright says “we’ve talked about this, and we think Dean is attracted to Cas”. He even goes so far as to say Dean’s “a little gay” for Cas. It’s clear that they’re both Team Profound Bond. And, okay, so maybe Jensen isn’t as loquacious about it as Misha, maybe he doesn’t use the same words, but when someone asks “what did Dean do with the trenchcoat” and he jokes about “using it as a pillow” or mimes rubbing his face all over said coat, I think that’s a pretty clear indication of what he thinks his character feels.
So can we please put these misconceptions about the “unmanly” quote to bed already? This isn’t on you, nonny, but that they’ve survived as long as they have, I think, reflects poorly on the fandom, and even implies a level of homophobia on our parts that just isn’t there.
