Tag: :(

rachelhaimowitz:

devoiddean:

Mamma Mia | 12.02 

Okay I am seeing a lot of hate for this moment on my dash but honestly I adored it.

Because, sure, it’s reasonable to expect that Mary would look back on John’s parenting through rose-colored glasses because he’s dead and she’s freshly in mourning over him and the human mind doesn’t like to think bad thoughts about loved ones we just lost. 

It’s also of course entirely possible that John really was a pretty good father before Mary died. Sure he and Mary used to fight (enough even for him to spend the night elsewhere at least once), but that doesn’t mean he didn’t dote on his boys. We may never know, because nothing Dean or Mary recalls is likely to be reliable.

But what I love the most about this moment is Dean’s reaction. How he shows an instant of surprise that he seems to try to hide (along with what strikes me as either a withheld long-suffering sigh or grimace or both), and that he replaces with a sad little half-grin and dropped eye contact that say “I don’t agree with that at all but I don’t have the heart to tell you because I don’t want to hurt you, and hey, I’ve been where you’ve been, I used to think he was a great father too, and I remember how painful the deconstruction of that particular myth was and I don’t think you’re ready for that yet.”

And that is just … fucking beautiful to me. He’s protecting his mother from too many harsh truths at once (which, okay, she probably does not need), but much more importantly, he’s gotten far enough out from under John’s influence to know, immediately and without trying to rationalize that “he did the best he could” (because lbr, a few seasons ago that would’ve been his instinctive response), that actually, no, John was not even a good father, let alone a great one. And that kind of character growth makes me so happy for and proud of him.