denugis:

So, I’ve seen a bunch of posts/comments suggesting that if Sam had taken the MoC he would have handled it fairly well. Said posts ranged from the amiably cracky “he would just pet ALL THE DOGS” to more moderate and serious suggestions that Sam has his shit together enough that he could probably at least do Cain-in-his-beekeeping-phase.

I don’t believe it, not just the cracky form I’m not supposed to really believe, but the more serious meta. Part of that is a matter of personal literary taste – I don’t care for overly cinnamon roll characters – but most of it is a real inability to suspend disbelief. However you read Sam’s non-reactions on the Watson level, “he really is just that forgiving and zen” does not work for me as a plausible account. 

So at first I was thinking that MoC!Sam might in fact be instantly, shockingly violent, that the Mark would tap into the magma layer of anger of someone whose torturer and rapist has just been living in his bedroom. (While I grant some bad writing there, it’s an extreme example of a very longstanding pattern of Sam underreacting to dealing with beings who have inflicted particular and intimate damage on him, so I’m not prepared to write it off as simply OOC or out-of-’verse.) Part of me does think that the anger HAS to be there.

But … what if it isn’t? What if coping by underreacting really has got so deep into Sam that the reactions are gone, inaccessible even to the hypothetical Mark? That’s actually a more frightening horror possibility to me than psycho!Sam. An inability to register physical pain is a dangerous medical vulnerability; it’s also a horror trope in fictional monsters, the zombie who just keeps on and on no matter how you wound and damage it unless you can get the one killing blow. Losing the ability to experience damage is one route to both living in and becoming a nightmare.

Maybe MoC Sam would be more like soulless!Sam in some ways, just as Sam without his soul was atypical of a condition most of whose victims seem to experience violent, emotional lashing out. Maybe he’d be some kind of zen forgiveness monster, and maybe that would be really fucking terrifying. Maybe I just read too many Victorian novels, but the extremes of awesome!Sam make me afraid not only for but of Sam. So perhaps I actually could buy into the “Mark!Sam would just become the ultimate cinnamon roll” meme after all, just in a “this could be the concept for my horrorbang fic” variant.

Hmm.  Second cup of coffee. Let me see if I can herd my thoughts into some coherent shape. 

The source of the Mark is the betrayal of family, yes?  The source of the betrayal is the conflict between who the two beings are and what they bring to the relationship.  And so the Mark accentuates the character of the person wearing it in relation to who they are to the people they are close with.  

For example, first there was Lucifer, God’s golden child.  When he was asked to sacrifice that spot to humans, to be humbled and put aside his role as favorite and all the goodies that entails, the Mark accentuated that sense of entitlement that characterized his relationship with God.  So he set about destroying and twisting the very things that God loved about humanity into something that reflected back to God the very things he hated and rejected about himself… his darkness.  

Then we have Cain, oldest son of a family that had gotten kicked out of the Garden of Eden for listening to the whisperings of The Serpent. His family’s biggest fear and shame was their fall to temptation. I don’t doubt the eldest sibling would have been coopted to enforce the parents’ values among his younger siblings.  And so Cain was the original Righteous Man, tasked with enforcing the family values.  He enforced them on Abel, and then went about enforcing them on the rest of his bloodline, too.  

Dean came to the Mark with a long history of functioning as the family homeostatic mechanism, there to keep everyone together, be the one to fix things, and keep things The Way Things Should Be – “Hunting things. Saving People.  Keep Sammy safe.”  And so with the Mark he sacrifices all in order to hunt Abbadon, or, wait, was it Metatron… oh, doesn’t matter, “Hunting things,” right?  Keep Sammy safe.  Be the one to take on all burdens and be the fixer and cleaner of messes.   “Keep Sammy safe” doesn’t necessarily mean respect his autonomy or choices, or, ultimately, keeping Sam alive, either.  Dean is “responsible for all things,” and all things (including Sam) can be sacrificed in order for him to do what needs to be done to Fix Things and make them the way they should be.  

So what does that mean for Sam and the Mark, then?  

Hmm.  These days, Sam is the one who has faith.  He “believes” in the sense of consciously choosing to suspend his past experiences and current signs to the contrary.  He is willing to sacrifice many things he probably shouldn’t on the altar of the big picture.  He uses his intellectual skills to rationally corral his experiences and feelings into boxes and puts lids on them.  He is an ends justify the means kind of thinker, and so it is okay to sacrifice large parts of yourself in their service.  His role in his relationships these days is largely defined by just keeping taking the bad and giving back faith.  Everything else is up for sacrifice to this.  

To be honest, there is little scarier than people who Believe with a capital “B.”  He has the ability to intellectualize away the impact of sacrifice in the service of his Beliefs.  Where he might not be indiscriminately violent, he would be ruthless if he could rationalize the cost.  He would still have his charm, that earnestness, that ability to reach out and emotionally connect with others when attempting to elicit their cooperation.  But where Dean lashes out with brute force either verbally or physically, Sam might be the one to gaze into your eyes earnestly, present his rationalization for what he is asking you to sacrifice, all the while figuratively, or literally as the case may be, cutting your heart out.