Damien/Joan is such a difficult dynamic to do when you're trying to go for "unhealthy but darkly romantic" vs. "explicitly abusive" because I feel like by the nature of the ship, if you're not going to go full OOC it's gonna be dark and manipulative and if you go straight through to the heart you get this explosion of awful and control, so like, to make him into a half of a semifunctional unit you have to like, eat around the edges and chip away at the sheer awfulness and find a hole that Joan can very uncomfortably settle in, where they're both more whole but the whole thing is prickly, thorns digging into each other, but familiar.
(It's also why the arc of Mark and Damien on the run is kind of partially in my head fundamental to making Joan and Dean work for me, like I'd shipped since s1, but that arc assured me of the insecurity of Damien, the unsureness of whether anyone has ever really liked him or found him charming vs. whether literally everything is because of the power, which makes him feel more lonely while making him think the power is more essential, and it's this awful feedback loop and it's so fucked up AHHHH I love it)
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