Last night on twitter @neven-ebrez said, “I wasn’t in the fandom for Season 6 live watching. I wonder how people interpreted early season Sam there, since he was soulless, but this was unknown to the audience. I remember knowing something was wrong but I was just waiting on the show to explain what.” [Tweet]
This link dump of picspam recaps, reviews, meta, and speculation covers the first seven episodes of season six.
Unfortunately, because of Photobucket ransoming, a lot of old general meta (i.e. cinematography, production design, props) is effectively gone forever.
I keep thinking about all of the journey imagery that was used in the last few seasons and the “River shall end at its source.”
We’ve arrived at the source. Mary’s alive and Sam and Dean are struggling with what that means for them. So here we have Dean fumbling over road blocks and dropping and breaking ships. They’re played lightheartedly, but it seems like it’s a way of reinforcing how much he is struggling along this journey.
you know what’s really interesting about this episode though–bobo gave the dynamic a whole new dimension that I really didn’t expect
i’ve known since i saw the twist at the end of s11 that dean and sam would be disappointed by their real mother and disenchanted when they realized that she wasn’t this monolithic, idyllic, flawless ideal that their father made her out to be–with how much John built her up when they were boys and how little they actually knew about her, there was no way that she could ever be to them what they wanted her to be
what i WASN’T expecting was how disappointed mary would be by her boys
she didn’t want them hunting and that’s a given, she doesn’t like the life john chose for them, of course–but more than that, dean and sam represent the same thing to her that she represented to them all their lives, and i guess i never really thought about that
for dean and sam, mary represents a calm, normal life–the life they would have had were it not touched so early by the supernatural
and for mary, sam and dean are also her escape, her normal life, her soft little baby boys that came well-deserved at the end of a horrible hunting-centric adolescence–a peaceful, perfect twilight that she’s been living out happily for the last thirty-odd years
and now they’ve both discovered that they are all Real People and they’ve lost what might be their last ties to that elusive happy ending
and is it just me or is the fuckin haze of disillusionment in here thick enough to cut with a KNIFE
Since season 1, Mary’s been commonly associated with pink, red, and white colors, but particularly pink and red flowers. Here she is in WIAWSNB and In the Beginning.
Amara, too, was associated with pink and red, and introduced with pink and red flowers. Little did we know at the time, but that was foreshadowing Mary’s return.
Well, then, we have something else to learn about Mary, don’t we. We’ve already learned that she didn’t cook that meatloaf or pie that Dean remembers so fondly. What else is going to be revealed?
I think we’re being given clues in the parallel that is being drawn between Mary and Toni. They’re both mothers, obviously, but there have been other visual motifs that are drawing them into association. I get the feeling that, like Mary and Amara, there’s something more going on here.
Here we have Toni on the phone with her son, re-establishing that, yes, she is a mother. “I know, darling, but mummy will be home soon. I miss you, too. I love you so, so much.” Note the pink flowers on the wallpaper behind her.
Here is Toni surrounded by pink flowers, again.
Now, you could argue that the flowers there hint that this interaction was a manipulation, that things are not quite what they seem, but I think there’s more. Toni and Mary are the only people with whom Sam was physically intimate. We didn’t get that greatly anticipated Dean and Sam reunion embrace this time, like we’ve come to expect.
Toni likes tea and seeks information about hunters from Sam. She finds that the way to get to Sam isn’t through pain, it’s through intimacy and the promise of affection and acceptance that he has longed for. (”Really, you don’t ever want something more? You don’t ever think about something? Not marriage, or whatever, but, something, you know, with a hunter? Someone who understands the life?” Season 11: Baby)
Sam wonders if Mary likes tea.
And he brings her his emotional vulnerability, and, importantly, information.
So here we are. Mary and Toni are being brought into close parallel, all surrounded by themes of death, danger, betrayal, and choices that may lead them down the path of becoming monstrous.
Supernatural has carefully reminded the audience about Mary’s initial deal with the YED and the culpability that she feels. We’ve been reminded that she chose John over the rest of her family. It may have been 30 years for her sons, but for her, she just lost John. And now she’s learning all the ways that her death changed him and her children into something they weren’t before.
Why bring up Ruby, and make sure the audience remembers her? Again, Ruby was someone with whom Sam was intimate, someone who manipulated and betrayed him. But why also bring up Benny? Did Toni, too, make a Sophie’s choice at one point like Mary did? Where is her husband/the father of her child? What happened to him? Is that why she is so adamantly against any association with monsters? Did she make a choice that horrifies her and gives her that fierce belief that anyone who associates themselves with monsters isn’t no better than them? Does she HAVE to believe that, or else she wouldn’t be able to live with herself? What did the British MOL make her do?
And so, what does this mean for Mary? Mary, like Ruby, betrayed Sam once. What will learning about hunters do for her? What choice is going to be presented to her? What is Mary going to do?
One of the original founders of Hogwarts “over a thousand years ago.” Salazar Slytherin believed that only pure-blood witches and wizards should be allowed to attend Hogwarts. He got into an argument with Godric Gryffindor about this and eventually left the school. There was a legend that Slytherin built a secret chamber somewhere in Hogwarts that only his true heir would be able to open. This chamber, called the Chamber of Secrets, contained a monster that would finish his “noble purpose” of killing all the Muggle-born students at Hogwarts (Pm). According to legend, Slytherin reconciled with the other Founders later in life and came back to Hogwarts castle to die (JKR-W3). (The Harry Potter Lexicon)
Here’s the thing: Sam was going to feel like a monster (a freak, an outsider) even if he’d never met Ruby.
Sam and Dean fit perfectly into sibling birth order roles people talk about when they talk about dysfunctional/alcoholic family dynamics. Dean is the Hero: his role, from the moment their mother died and John started taking them hunting, was to be the model child, to do things right and follow in his father’s footsteps. He downloaded John’s values system and priorities pretty much word-for-word and took it as his own. He acted as John’s proxy when John was away, he was expectedrequired to be competent and responsible at an incredibly (inappropriately) young age. As long as he was there being successful (according to John’s values system: defending his family, saving people, hunting things, etc.), John could pretend the family was fine. And Dean would have done his part to avoid more conflict. That role isn’t easy, and I have heard some pretty convincing arguments that Dean’s designation as the Righteous Man was no less upsetting for him than it was for Sam to learn that he was Lucifer’s vessel. Children (humans) aren’t all good any more than they’re all bad, and an expectation of perfection is just as damaging as an expectation that you’re a fuckup.
But I’m not talking about Dean right now.
Sam was cast as the family fuckup. In the dysfunctional family systems model, Sam is the Scapegoat. John cast him as angry, incompetent, and unreliable—an outsider in the family, a black sheep, a person whose job it was to take the blame for the dysfunction so the real source of the problem (John) didn’t have to seriously address his issues, and it has everything to do with Sam’s inability to value his own life and recognize the good in himself as an adult. In “Bugs,” Sam says that nothing he ever did was good enough for John, and that John has always been disappointed in him: “I didn’t wanna bowhunt or hustle pool – because I wanted to go to school and live my life, which, to our whacked-out family, made me the freak.” John cast him as the outsider in his own family. Which may have been true, in a way—it’s completely plausible to me that for whatever reason, Sam was just not wired to be a hunter. (To be clear, in most contexts I wouldn’t be on board with saying someone was or was not “wired” a certain way, but in the Supernatural universe things like bloodlines and destiny seem to matter. Which is why I think it’s worth mentioning that Sam, like John, unlike Dean, was probably meant to be a Man of Letters.) He’s a skilled hunter, but he’s never seemed tied to it in the way Dean is. Which, for John, would have been a problem: anything Sam did or said to question how they were being raised and why they weren’t being allowed to go to school would have been a threat to the precarious lie that John was a Good Parent doing the Right Thing. Or at least doing the Best He Could. By casting Sam as the “freak,” as the Problem Child with an axe to grind, he could distance himself from Sam’s completely legitimate problems with the way they were treated and brought up.
And it’s pretty clear they were, in fact, legitimate problems. In the few scenes where they appear together, John and Sam are fighting more often than they’re not, but they’re fighting in a way where Sam is fighting to get his father to see him, to recognize him and respect him as an adult and as a hunter. Look at this scene in “Dead Man’s Blood"—for context, this is when John had recently reappeared and is demanding their help but refusing to give them information about what’s going on. Sam stops both their cars in the middle of the road and demands an explanation, and this happens:
SAM: Last time we saw you, you said it was too dangerous for us to be together. Now out of the blue you need our help. Now obviously something big is going down, and we wanna know what! JOHN: Get back in the car. SAM: No. JOHN: I said get back in the damn car. SAM: Yeah. And I said no. DEAN: Okay, you made your point, tough guy. Look, we’re all tired, we can talk about this later. Sammy, I mean it, come on. SAM: This is why I left in the first place. JOHN: What’d you say? SAM: You heard me. JOHN: Yeah. You left. Your brother and me, we needed you. You walked away, Sam. DEAN: Sam… JOHN: You walked away! DEAN: Stop it, both of you. SAM: You’re the one who said don’t come back, Dad. You closed that door, not me. You were just pissed off that you couldn’t control me anymore!
There’s a lot going on here. Dean sort of sides with John, even though he’s just as curious about what they’re up to as Sam is, but his main goal is to try to get them to shut up and stop fighting. He also joins in the Winchester family bullshit chorus by belittling Sam (“tough guy”) while Sam is trying to stand up to John and demand respect if John won’t give it freely. John does not give him respect. First he tries to intimidate Sam, and then when that doesn’t work he resorts to emotional manipulation: “We needed you,” “you walked away.” He’s trying to make Sam feel shitty about what was a very healthychoice to walk away from a family that was constantly rejecting him and constantly demanding that he stay. What he tells Sam about himself is that he’s no good at hunting, he’s no good at being a member of the Winchester family, he’s no good, period. If John values Sam as a person, or even if he values his skills as a hunter, he doesn’t show it here. As far as we know, he never shows it. (His parting words to Sam basically amount to “Why do we fight so much? I did my best. Can we stop fighting now? Go get me some coffee.” Dean, by contrast, gets an “I’m proud of you” before he’s instructed to murder his brother. No apology for either one of them. Terrible parenting all around, but really different terrible parenting, which is what I think is interesting.)
Sam’s choice to leave the family and go to Stanford makes sense through this lens, and so does his guilt and ambivalence about it later: he leaves at least partly because the message he’s getting from John is that he’s not any good – or not good enough, not as good as Dean – as a hunter, so he takes John at his word and bows out of the whole deal. Only being told you’re not good at something (or that you’re wrong about something all the time, or whatever) isn’t the same as not valuing that thing. So he’s kind of nominally opted out of the hunting-and-family set of values and priorities, but actually doesn’t view his own choices as valid and feels all kinds of guilt about making them. Guilt that John and Dean are in no way shy about exploiting once he’s come back to the fold, as it happens. This is what I hear every time Sam says something like “you’ll never punish me as much as I’m punishing myself” or “I feel like maybe I’m never gonna actually be all right:” he’s internalized John’s and Dean’s idea of him as broken, monstrous, never good enough.
I guess you could, if you wanted to, read this whole thing straight: Sam sensed, even as a little boy, that Azazel had bled in his mouth and he was destined for demonic trouble later in life. But it makes more sense to me that, if the demon blood does have anything to do with Sam’s feeling of being “unclean,” it’s because of the way it informed John’s treatment of him. Because layered on top of all the more conventional family dysfunction, John actually saw his son as a monster. He told Dean he was probably going to have to kill Sam. Given how much John hated monsters in general and demons in particular, especially after Mary’s death, I have a hard time imagining that wouldn’t lead him to treat Sam with a certain level of revulsion. Kids are perceptive. Sam is perceptive. Even if John had been trying to hide it (which it doesn’t actually sound like he was, much, but who knows), there’s only so much you can hide in a closed society of three. John set Sam up to feel like a freak, a monster, an outsider, long before he made any choices as an adult to align himself with demonic forces or blur the lines between monster and human.
Yes, this. And further to that last point, John seeing Sam as a monster? When Mary died, John didn’t know wtf had happened. He didn’t know what she knew, neither about the supernatural nor about how to competently parent small children. John’s information about the devilish plot that killed his wife improved as the boys got older. His increasing knowledge, and his consequent increasing conviction of Sam’s monstrousness, would have coincided neatly with Sam’s increasing maturity, independence, and capacity for resistance to the family ethos.
The more Sam became his own person, the surer John was that Sam was a monster.
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.
Jowett, Lorna. “Purgatory with Color TV: Motel Rooms as Liminal Zones in Supernatural.” TV Goes to Hell: The Unofficial Road Map of Supernatural. Eds. Stacey Abbott and David Lavery. ECW Press, 2011.
In the movies, the motel is usually a temporary stop en route to somewhere else. The motel (or hotel) offers a transitional space where the protagonist experiences a crisis of identity – when the crisis is resolved, the protagonist moves on. A television show, though, might be predicated on an endless journey, following protagonists who travel across the country, rarely stopping for long, never establishing a home. In such shows, life on the road defines characters as well as structuring narrative. Route 66 (1960–1964), an early example, is cited by Supernatural creator Eric Kripke as an influence (“Pilot” commentary). The Incredible Hulk (1978–1982) combined the road format with a superhero story and The X-Files (1993–2002) featured FBI agents based in Washington who traveled across the U.S. to investigate paranormal events. Supernatural draws on these earlier shows, combining horror, the fantastic, and the road genre to present ever-moving protagonists in the Winchester brothers, Dean and Sam, and their mission of “saving people, hunting things.”
Dean and Sam not only cross physical space to investigate the supernatural, they also pass between different dimensions (literally when Dean goes to Hell and then returns), and (via hauntings from the past) between times, so liminal zones feature frequently. Motels are non-places, between places, “purgatory with color TV,” as Katherine Lawrie Van de Ven suggests (235) and the motel rooms the Winchesters stay in replicate other sites where borders between the supernatural and the mundane blur. Motel rooms in Supernatural have an aesthetic function: signifying Anytown, USA, they are generic but distinctively American, providing visual flourishes in the generally dark, washed-out landscape of the show. When the Trickster traps Dean and Sam in a TV land fantasy (“Changing Channels,” 5.8), this grittiness is exaggerated by the brightness of the “sitcom” motel room compared with the “real” motel room – it is the same room with the same décor but one pops with color, the other is dull and slightly worn. Furthermore, as spaces for both exposition and emotion, motel rooms also serve a plot function, enhancing their thematic significance: the Impala may be the Winchesters’ “home,” as the season 5 finale suggests, but life in motel rooms has shaped who they are. Van de Ven notes, “trading in the purgatorial gray areas of identity, hotel/motel films provocatively employ marginal, transitory spaces to speak to experiences ofcomplexity or uncertainty” (236–237). Supernatural’s motel rooms are key sites of uncertainty, even contradiction, that relate as much to the brothers’ identity as to supernatural phenomena.
Liminal spaces in myth are places of power. Saints and heroes are born in doorways. Evil creatures fear to cross riverbanks. They are places of thresholds, the transition from one state to another. When you cross the threshold, you are neither in the state you were before nor in the state that is yet to come. In that very moment you are free to be whatever you choose.
Supernatural, particularly in the early seasons, is full of images of motel rooms that are temporary stopping places along an asphalt river. Gas stations and convenience stores that are places of refueling but not really habit and routine. Their “home” is a vessel along the journey. They are neither in one state or the other. On the road and at home. They stand in the doorway between human and monster, at times with one foot more firmly on one side of the frame than the other.
These past several seasons have been filled with images of boats, the road, rivers, stars, and maps. And now, in this current season, we’re seeing stop signs, road blockages, and “end of the road” signs. At the same time, we’re seeing the Winchesters’ enjoyment of the pleasures of homemade meals, stopping at nursing homes, and getting constant reminders that the Winchesters are getting older. They’ve been traveling through liminal spaces for a long time. Makes me wonder what it’ll take for them to commit to one side of that doorway or the other.
I’m seeing conversation about lying and the Gadreel situation going around my dash again. I’m not up to date on s10, like, at all, but it seems like an opportune moment to repost something I posted on LJ at the mid-point of s9, because it’s still the fundamental thing that needs to be resolved for me.
Here beginning the c&ped LJ post: I’ve seen a lot of people describe the storyline of s9 as being about keeping secrets, or lying. I’ve seen people suggest that Dean wasn’t wrong to do what he did, only to lie about it.
That’s technically true, in a way. If Dean hadn’t lied, and if he hadn’t lied at one remove by approving Gadreel’s trick, Dean wouldn’t have done anything wrong. But that isn’t because Dean’s moral misstep was dishonesty. It’s because lying was the means of what he did wrong, and he wouldn’t have been able to accomplish that wrong without the lies. Dean didn’t do something and then lie about it, he did something (continuously and repeatedly) for which lying was the necessary instrument. It’s like the concept of the speech act: certain kinds of speech aren’t speech about something, they are speech as action: taking an oath, for instance. Dean’s lies in s9 weren’t lies about what he did, they were lie acts that accomplished what he did.
What Dean’s lies accomplish is the taking away of Sam’s consent. When Uther appears to Ygraine in the form of her husband because Ygraine would not have had sex with him or conceived Arthur if she had known he was Uther and not Gorlois, Uther’s crime wasn’t dishonesty, it was rape. When Gadreel – with Dean’s knowing authorization and collaboration – appeared to Sam as Dean to get Sam’s consent to something Sam didn’t know he was consenting to, what he accomplished, and what Dean knew he would accomplish, was access to Sam’s body and mind without Sam’s consent. The lie was only an instrument to a multilevel, controlling invasion of a person’s selfhood.
Dean went into the plan intending to tell Sam right away. Gadreel persuaded him otherwise. Gadreel persuaded him not by holding his control of Sam’s body over Dean’s head in a hostage situation (that was a card Gadreel played only once before the reveal, over the question of kicking Cas out of the bunker), but by threatening Dean with what SAM would do if the possibility of consent were returned to him: Sam would choose to throw Gadreel out and would then die. Gadreel’s argument didn’t change, from 9.1 to 9.8. I’ve seen several discussions of 9.8 that claimed that Dean tried to tell Sam but Gadreel prevented it, but that isn’t really true: Gadreel persuaded Dean not to tell Sam, again, and he used the exact same argument as ever: giving Sam awareness would return power over his body and his choices to Sam. Dean chose again not to allow that.
It has been argued that Sam was in a coma, and Dean was authorized to make decisions regarding his body, as a loved one is in a real world medical circumstance. That analogy doesn’t hold. Sam was aware, and was capable of making an informed decision whether or not to move on. Dean knew that; he eavesdropped on part of Sam’s conversation with Death. Nor was Dean making a decision in ignorance of what Sam’s wishes would be. He explicitly believed, not that Sam wanted to die and would refuse all measures, but that possession by an angel was a specific measure Sam would specifically refuse. And Dean had a means of communicating with Sam. The same access he had to Sam’s mind through Gadreel could have been used as effectively to tell Sam the truth and let Sam choose whether to let Gadreel in as to trick him. Finally, since the ruse of Gadreel impersonating Dean depended for its success on Sam being willing in general terms to choose to live, Dean’s decision can’t be seen as the prevention of suicide.
So, no, it’s not enough for Dean to regret dishonesty and agree to be honest in the future. Dean doesn’t have a right to exercise control over Sam’s choices, Sam’s consent, Sam’s mind, Sam’s body, or Sam’s memory. He doesn’t have a right to do it by means of lying, but nor would he have the right to do it by means of more honest force. Sam belongs to Sam. And no one, ever, should have a person in their life who doesn’t accept their most basic autonomy, their control over the most fundamental boundaries of the self and the most basic decisions regarding what happens to the self. The earning back of trust, if it’s going to happen, can’t just be a matter of Sam being able to believe that things Dean says to him are true, it has to be a matter of Sam being able to believe that to Dean he is his own subject, not an object Dean can’t bring himself to let go of and therefore usurps power over. There’s nothing beautiful about a love that erases the subjecthood of its object, and the sentimentalization of roofies and noncon as “Dean just loves Sam too much” frankly makes my blood run cold.
This isn’t to say that Dean is irredeemable, that the evil thing he did was done out of malice or was incomprehensible given Dean’s damage and issues, or that his relationship with Sam can never be repaired. But the attitude that “Dean will always save Sam – never change!” well, I can see it in a way, but it would be a dark future for Spn, a future in which Dean’s love would be the monster, the Big Bad. It would be a damn effective horror story. In the end, though, I’d prefer the more optimistic version in which Dean can change, must change, and does change.
Yep, these are exactly my issues with the dynamic between Dean and Sam, particularly in the last few seasons.
Sam was initially defined as the object of "Watch out for Sammy,” a thing – a valued thing, but a thing nonetheless – with no regard for his autonomy. Dean’s actions are an outgrowth of the family values that John put into place in order to cope with the situation they were in. And perhaps they were key to surviving the angelic and demonic plans for them, but holding on to these values and ways of seeing each other have very significant costs.
We’re talking a lot about Dean, but I also have to wonder about the cost to Sam that we’re continuing to see played out here. I have to wonder how much of “I don’t want to do this without my brother” is informed by Sam buying into the old family view of himself.
If Dean has subsumed responsibility for Sam’s bodily autonomy, the converse would be that Sam doesn’t exist outside of his relationship with Dean. And so, when I see Sam forgiving his brother time and time again, being emotionally supportive regardless of the path Dean is taking, and being so hyper vigilant to the times he has let Dean down, I always have a bit of a twinge. While on the surface, Sam’s behavior is laudable, I just keep wondering about how easily he sells off these bits and pieces of himself in order to maintain his relationship with Dean, simply because he wouldn’t exist as a person if he didn’t.
Hearseeno 