What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

trainedunprofessional:

Clearly…clearly Dean gets so mad at Garth using Bobby’s terms & trying to “take his place” because that wound is still too raw. Dean never got a chance to properly grieve for Bobby, what with first trying to stop Leviathan & Co then running for his life the entire time in Purgatory….
No wonder he gets snippy with poor Garth. I can’t blame him though, I’d probably be the same way in that situation.
And true, its Dean’s normal m.o. to stuff things down & keep them inside…but as close as he was to Bobby, the way Bobby died, AND then the way Dean was running for his life for over a year almost immediately afterwards….yeah.

As much as I love Garth, I have a serious problem with how he acts in this episode - and worse, with how the narrative arc ultimately endorses his behaviour. I mean, I get that Bobby was important to a lot of people, and that Garth genuinely cared for him. But Bobby was a father to Sam and Dean, which is a whole different class of relationship, and when someone’s dad dies, you don’t get to fucking show up acting like him around his kids as though it’s no big deal, and especially not when it’s clearly triggering one of them. By any reasonable standard of behaviour, Garth’s desire to emulate Bobby’s mannerisms - and notjust his role as a hunter - is not more important than Dean’s obvious need to grieve; but when Dean finally snaps and calls him on it, Garth’s response is to devalue the relationship between Bobby and the Winchesters by arguing it was the same as everyone else’s, when this is 100% untrue. 

Because yeah, Garth, Bobby meant a lot of things to a lot of people, including you - but he wasn’t your dad, he wasn’t the guy who played ball with you as a kid and intervened with your obsessive, abusive father on your behalf, he didn’t see you grow up, he didn’t raise you, he didn’t give up on Heaven to stay behind as a fucking ghost to help you out, he didn’t think of you as a son, he didn’t bury you when you died or weep when you came back again, he didn’t promise he’d live for you when he wanted to kill himself because he knew you needed him, he mattered to you but Bobby Singer was Sam and Dean’s dad, and you don’t get tell them their grief is the same as yours, or act as though Dean is being selfish and unreasonable for finding your behaviour upsetting.

I just. AUGH. This episode gives me feelings.

(via trainedunprofessional-deactivat)

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