rambling meta-ish thoughts
started this on Friday and it never really found a solid structure, but hey. SPN s8 thoughts.
idly watching "hell house" from spn season one because it's on TNT, I'd forgotten that in late s1 it was Sam who was pressing for working cases in between The Big Search, which was for John rather than Kevin, though it had been Dean in the early part of the season who pressed for hunting when they had no leads on John.
I think s8 is doing some interesting things with its callbacks to season 1 -- it's not a reboot, it's not rehashing season 1 at all, but it is intentionally using season 1 as a touchstone, without forgetting all the later canon. Instead, if you put Season One Sam and Dean next to Season Eight Sam and Dean, the differences those years in between make are, to me, the entire point that the show is asking the viewer to see. These aren't the same guys at all. They're not even close to similar to who they were in season one. They might want similar things at this point (Sam, ultimately, to get out of hunting; Dean, ultimately, to have his family with him) but what they want and how they want it and even the driving forces behind their behavior are pretty different from how it played in season one.
In season one they argued constantly, which is something I think fandom sometimes forgets or glosses over. The tone or flavor of the arguing is different in season eight, feels more awful to watch, because of the weight of everything that's happened, both between them and *to* them both. I think there's more to talk about on this topic but I also think I want to see more of the season before I can articulate it well.
I think the other bit I started to get at in the beginning of this post is that Sam and Dean, starting in season 1, have always traded back and forth who was the one pushing hunting as a lifestyle/who they are/what they do. In season two, Dean wanted to stop and Sam pressed forward. In season three Sam wanted to stop and focus on Dean's deal, and Dean pressed forward with hunting. It goes on like that throughout the seasons, for different reasons. Season 6 Dean more or less wanted to work out something part time, until he got vamped and saw things with Lisa as inevitably fucked up. Season 7 he again basically wanted to stop but didn't seem to know what else to do, and Sam was much more focused on hunting in order to give himself structure and distraction from his wall-breakdown problems, and Dean wasn't willing to leave him. Now this back-and-forth has shifted again, due to the circumstances of the missing year between seasons 7 and 8. I guess I see this push-pull between them and hunting over the years as organic and understandable, given that it's how they grew up, it's what they both know the best, even if they have very different relationships to it even when they're on the same page.
The differences in how they relate to hunting as individuals over the course of the series could probably take up a whole post, but distilled down to the essence, I think that Sam has always looked at hunting as something outside of himself, whether he's chafing against it or pushing for it -- the times he embraces it, it's not because he thinks of it as something he *is* down deep, even when he speaks of it as an inevitability, like in "Frontierland" in season 6, but because he feels external factors will never allow him out. Dean's relationship to hunting on the other hand, is all about what he *is* as a person. Either he embraces it (as in s8) or he sees it as what doesn't allow him to have what he wants, what makes him monstrous (s6) but he always sees it as his essential state. And both of them, in season 7, seemed to stick to it because they thought the other wanted it that way, and they weren't willing to leave the other behind -- but also, I think, because neither of them felt they had an alternative.
So what happened between seasons 7 and 8? Sam lost everyone he still loved, a pretty short list at that point, and suddenly there weren't any external factors forcing him to continue doing something he's never seen as essential to who he is. So he stopped. And the world kept going on without him, which at that point, after everything that's happened since he learned he was some kind of chosen one in season 1, must have been such a relief. Even when he was the one pushing hunting in previous seasons it was never because he felt the weight of (potential) victims on his head if he did nothing -- and this is a good thing. Feeling that weight, that everyone who dies if you're not there to save them is on your head, the way Dean expressed in What Is and What Should Never Be in season 2, is some fucked up shit.
And fucked up shit is probably the easiest summation of Dean's experience of that in-between year.
idly watching "hell house" from spn season one because it's on TNT, I'd forgotten that in late s1 it was Sam who was pressing for working cases in between The Big Search, which was for John rather than Kevin, though it had been Dean in the early part of the season who pressed for hunting when they had no leads on John.
I think s8 is doing some interesting things with its callbacks to season 1 -- it's not a reboot, it's not rehashing season 1 at all, but it is intentionally using season 1 as a touchstone, without forgetting all the later canon. Instead, if you put Season One Sam and Dean next to Season Eight Sam and Dean, the differences those years in between make are, to me, the entire point that the show is asking the viewer to see. These aren't the same guys at all. They're not even close to similar to who they were in season one. They might want similar things at this point (Sam, ultimately, to get out of hunting; Dean, ultimately, to have his family with him) but what they want and how they want it and even the driving forces behind their behavior are pretty different from how it played in season one.
In season one they argued constantly, which is something I think fandom sometimes forgets or glosses over. The tone or flavor of the arguing is different in season eight, feels more awful to watch, because of the weight of everything that's happened, both between them and *to* them both. I think there's more to talk about on this topic but I also think I want to see more of the season before I can articulate it well.
I think the other bit I started to get at in the beginning of this post is that Sam and Dean, starting in season 1, have always traded back and forth who was the one pushing hunting as a lifestyle/who they are/what they do. In season two, Dean wanted to stop and Sam pressed forward. In season three Sam wanted to stop and focus on Dean's deal, and Dean pressed forward with hunting. It goes on like that throughout the seasons, for different reasons. Season 6 Dean more or less wanted to work out something part time, until he got vamped and saw things with Lisa as inevitably fucked up. Season 7 he again basically wanted to stop but didn't seem to know what else to do, and Sam was much more focused on hunting in order to give himself structure and distraction from his wall-breakdown problems, and Dean wasn't willing to leave him. Now this back-and-forth has shifted again, due to the circumstances of the missing year between seasons 7 and 8. I guess I see this push-pull between them and hunting over the years as organic and understandable, given that it's how they grew up, it's what they both know the best, even if they have very different relationships to it even when they're on the same page.
The differences in how they relate to hunting as individuals over the course of the series could probably take up a whole post, but distilled down to the essence, I think that Sam has always looked at hunting as something outside of himself, whether he's chafing against it or pushing for it -- the times he embraces it, it's not because he thinks of it as something he *is* down deep, even when he speaks of it as an inevitability, like in "Frontierland" in season 6, but because he feels external factors will never allow him out. Dean's relationship to hunting on the other hand, is all about what he *is* as a person. Either he embraces it (as in s8) or he sees it as what doesn't allow him to have what he wants, what makes him monstrous (s6) but he always sees it as his essential state. And both of them, in season 7, seemed to stick to it because they thought the other wanted it that way, and they weren't willing to leave the other behind -- but also, I think, because neither of them felt they had an alternative.
So what happened between seasons 7 and 8? Sam lost everyone he still loved, a pretty short list at that point, and suddenly there weren't any external factors forcing him to continue doing something he's never seen as essential to who he is. So he stopped. And the world kept going on without him, which at that point, after everything that's happened since he learned he was some kind of chosen one in season 1, must have been such a relief. Even when he was the one pushing hunting in previous seasons it was never because he felt the weight of (potential) victims on his head if he did nothing -- and this is a good thing. Feeling that weight, that everyone who dies if you're not there to save them is on your head, the way Dean expressed in What Is and What Should Never Be in season 2, is some fucked up shit.
And fucked up shit is probably the easiest summation of Dean's experience of that in-between year.