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A while ago, I read one of Flutiebear’s great metas that aligns Daphne with Nausicaa. A quick recap if you aren’t familiar with The Odyssey: Nausicaa is a young, beautiful, virginal princess that Odysseus meets on the shore when he wakes up after being shipwrecked. She takes him to her father who offers him food and shelter and then outfits him for the rest of his journey home to Ithaca. She has a crush on him, and her father offers her to Odysseus to be married. He refuses because he is battling hell and high water to get home to his faithful wife Penelope and his son Telemachus waiting back in Ithaca. As Flutie points out, this is pretty much what Daphne’s role is (and it is for this reason that I believe that Cas as Emmanuel and Daphne never consummated their marriage, but that’s another story). Daphne literally finds Castiel naked on the shore, takes him home, cares for him, and then when Dean appears to whisk him off, he leaves her. Now the association of Daphne with Nausicaa has become completely, irrevocably headcanon for me.
And so this backdrop of the Odyssey (which I totally love, by the way) has been in the back of my mind for a while now. And after 8x17 I’ve been thinking about Cas a lot. And then one morning I woke up, and this was in my brain, and I sent a ridiculously long text to Kenzie who encouraged me to elaborate and write this, and then beta’d for me (you’re awesome kaithx).
As I’ve established, Daphne is my Nausicaa, and in that situation, it places Castiel as Odysseus. And for a long time, I really only thought of it that way within the context of that particular thread of the story, and then I dismissed the thought and never considered Castiel as Odysseus throughout his stint in the mental institute or purgatory. But now as I’m reconsidering everything within the context of the Odyssey it seems to fit.
So if we take Daphne as Nausicaa, then we place Castiel as Odysseus. Odysseus is the battle-worn, weary hero trying to find his way home after a bloody war. He is a powerful warrior, instrumental in winning the war. Because of his own hubris, he has a string of incidents of terrible luck wherein all of his men, his friends, his brothers in arms, die and he loses everything. And yet he is kind-hearted, and truly loves his family and homeland and is fiercely determined to return to them. He ends up wandering, lonely and aimless, for a long time before he finally finds his way home. Fitting, yes?
Home
In this scenario, I would argue that Cas’s home is not a place, in the same way that Ithaca was a place for Odysseus, but is instead wherever the Winchesters are, and not in heaven, even though that is where his brothers and sisters are. Heaven is the site of the war that he is trying to escape. In 8x08, in the ‘Talk to me’ scene, Cas talks about the devastation that he caused in Heaven and says that, if he goes back, he’s afraid he might kill himself. Now that doesn’t sound like ‘home’ to me. And, if Naomi’s office is in Heaven (and I personally don’t think it is), Cas only returned because Naomi was controlling him. It wasn’t of his own volition. And we have seen Cas prove his love for the Winchesters time and again and in 8x08 he talks of wanting to become a hunter and stay with the Brochesters. So no. Cas’s home is not in heaven. His home is with Sam and Dean.
If we accept, then, that Cas’s Ithaca is with the Winchesters, then he’s already been home, right? Yes, he has physically been chilling with the bros. But no, he hasn’t fully been home. The obvious reason is that any time he has been with the Winchesters since he got out of purgatory, he has been under Naomi’s control, he hasn’t been himself. Certainly, he can’t truly be home if he isn’t truly himself. Breaking free from Naomi’s control in 8x17 was a great step in his odyssey home, but it certainly isn’t all. In the Odyssey, Odysseus gets very close to being home before being snatched away again. And when he does finally get home, it is not like he just walks into his house like “yo.” No. He gets to Ithaca, and then Athena disguises him as an old beggar so that the suitors who have taken over his home don’t kill him immediately. He reveals himself to his son, and a maid figures out who he is. But other than that, no one knows his true identity. So yes, he is physically in Ithaca. But he is not home. In order for him to fully regain his home, he has to kill the suitors who have overrun his home. He does this in a spectacular scene wherein the suitors are having a contest to take Penelope’s hand in marriage, because after twenty long years of waiting, she has finally relented and decided to marry the suitor who can do this. They are all trying to string a bow that only Odysseus can string, and then they are to try to shoot an arrow through the heads of a dozen axes. Basically, it is this impossible task that only Odysseus can do. And a bunch of suitors try, and fail. And then Odysseus, still disguised as the old man, completes the task. And when he stands up, he is no longer disguised. And then he kills all the suitors, and reveals himself to Penelope. And that is when he is truly home. He has to complete a nearly impossible task and shake of the suitors (read: oppressors, read: the people trying to control Cas) in order to go home.
So yes, Cas has been with the Winchesters, but no, he hasn’t been home. He hasn’t completed a glorious task that allows him to gain his position with the Winchesters. And in my opinion, that task is falling, throwing off his chains, and falling. He hasn’t fallen yet, and until he falls, he can’t truly be home. I think that Cas’s final, glorious act, his shooting an arrow through the axeheads, will be falling.
Penelope and Telemachus
In this scenario that I am creating, Penelope is Dean. Penelope is the epitome of the faithful spouse waiting at home, fending off suitors, and praying that the hero will return to her. This season we have seen Dean as the homemaker (“I’m nesting”) and we have seen Dean turn down suitors (Ellie and Aaron) and we have seen Dean pray that Cas will return.
In this scenario, then, Sam takes on the role of Telemachus, which fits in given his oftentimes parent/child relationship with Dean. Dean has always been Sam’s caretaker, I would argue his mother. Sam has always been the child that Dean cares for, so it isn’t a stretch for me to see Sam take on the role of ‘son’ to Dean’s ‘mother’ in this scenario. In the Odyssey, Telemachus is only a newborn when his father goes off to the Trojan War. When he leaves, Odysseus tells Penelope to remarry if he hasn’t returned by the time Telemachus grows a beard, which was a sign of reaching manhood. And as we have seen in the first half of this season, Sam’s development has related to growing up, in that he discovered and made the life that he wants for himself. After his time with Amelia, Sam knows that he wants a ‘normal life’ and he knows that it’s something that he can achieve. That is his goal, his path is that he intends to reach manhood, as it were. The second half of the season so far is focusing on the trials, and closing the gates of hell. This, to me, seems like Sam’s through path to achieving his ‘normal life,’ so his route to ‘manhood.’ The manhood that Telemachus reaches in the poem is physical, but Sam’s is metaphorical.
Now that I’ve talked about Cas’s home and his (canonical!) family, I will talk about the episodes in the Odyssey.
Episodes
I didn’t realize it immediately, but I think that Cas has been on this odyssey a lot longer than I initially thought. His journey home seems to have started right after the Godstiel debacle, so it’s been going on for almost two seasons, and I don’t see an end in the immediate future.
In the Odyssey, there are several big episodes: Nausicaa and the Phaeacians, Circe, Calypso, and the suitors. I’m primarily going to focus on Calypso for the purposes of this essay.
On his ten-year journey, Odysseus has many offers of places where he can stay and live out the rest of his life. Nausicaa, Circe, and Calypso all offer him this, and he stays with each for a stint before he keeps moving forward because of his love for Penelope, Telemachus, and Ithaca. He stays with Nausicaa for only a few days, with Circe for a year, and with Calypso for seven years. He could have stayed with any of these people for the rest of his life, in fact, if he had stayed with Calypso, he would have been made immortal. And yet he keeps moving forward, toward his home and family. If he had chosen to remain with any of these women, he would not have been the Odysseus that we know and love (read: eh, he’s okay, I guess).
We have seen Cas do this same thing. He could have stayed with Daphne in his perfectly comfortable white picket fence life. He could have stayed with Meg in the mental institute when Dean and Sam went off to kill Dick Roman, but he chose to go with them instead. He could have stayed with Naomi, and done as she said and killed Dean. But he didn’t. He keeps moving forward, toward his home. If he had chosen to remain, he just wouldn’t be the Cas that we know and love (read: really actually literally love).
The Calypso episode is interesting because he stays with her for seven years, by far the longest of any of the episodes. She keeps him on her island by enchanting him with her song and dance. Odysseus doesn’t choose to stay there, he is just compelled to stay there, and he cannot leave, though he wants desperately to return to Penelope. She is a goddess and she makes him her lover, and he can do nothing about it, until Athena intervenes and has Zeus compel Calypso to set him free. It is not that Odysseus escapes Calypso on his own; it is that someone intervenes to set him free.
In this scenario, I am placing Naomi as Calypso. Naomi (whatever she is, and I highly doubt she is an angel) has Cas under her control and is compelling him to do things that he doesn’t want to. He is snatched from his family and brought to her office without his consent, he is forced to do things that he doesn’t want, like killing Samandriel and thousands of fake Deans. And he, though reluctantly, follows these orders for quite a long time. Until he is given an order that he cannot go through with, and he is set free. But it is not that Cas alone sets himself free, in the same way that it is not Odysseus alone that frees himself. In the Odyssey, Athena intervenes because she loves Odysseus. In 8x17, Cas does not free himself alone, but the intervention of a larger entity. It is pretty clearly, though not canonically, his love for Dean, and Dean’s love for him that “broke the connection.”
Thus our heroes are released from their prisons. But again, being released from Calypso is not enough to get Odysseus home. And being released from Naomi is not enough to get Cas home. There is more to their respective stories yet. Odysseus sets off on his journey home on a raft, but meets further obstacles before he can make it home, such as the Nausicaa episode and the suitor episode. Cas sets off with the tablet on a bus, and though we don’t know where he is going, I have faith that he is on a path that will lead him home eventually.
Structure
Now let’s talk about narrative structure! The Odyssey is not your standard novel. As was normal for epics, it starts in medias res, which means literally into the middle of things, as in, the reader is thrown into the middle of the story. Though the Phaeacians with their princess Nausicaa are the last place where Odysseus lands before he gets back to Ithaca, this is where the poem begins. The rest of Odysseus’s adventures are told through flashbacks. He sits at dinner with the Phaeacians and tells these tales. Continuing along this association with the Odyssey, this could account for why this season’s colors are wonky (as someone pointed out, but I can’t find a link. If anyone knows, I’d be happy to add it) and why there are so many recasts (as several people have pointed out, but I also can’t find a link). Maybe this entire season will be revealed as one giant flashback.