(no subject)
So, it’s been a while since I babbled about Sam, so I decided to do that on my bus ride back from Toronto. The soiree was actually pretty defining for him, as it led to development in his thing with Jennifer and as he relates himself to the camp plot (mentally, as obviously he’s not a main player; he’s just someone who’s forcibly involved himself through sheer stubbornness and wanting to make himself relevant).
I wanted to discuss a lot of this and his general self on a whole.
Sam’s Mental State and General Way of Being
It goes without saying that Sam has been in camp for two years and it’s starting to take its toll on him. He’s been around long enough that things aren’t surprising him. He’s compiled a lot of information and learned a lot, and he’s settled into the group of people who are important to him. He’s at the point where he feels secure enough on camp, and his biggest issue is that he happened to be “dead” during the stuff that happened in May 2010, so he has to depend upon other people’s information to do anything. As a hunter, this makes him feel unsure; he doesn’t like depending upon other information as much, especially when he realistically could’ve encountered it himself. But he didn’t, so it makes him unsure of a lot of things, of Elizabeth Sayre’s motivations and so forth.
I think all of this makes it clear that a lot that has to do with Sam’s motivation in camp has to do with the “hunt.” He has always had a hard time turning off the mindset that involves the hunt, and that hasn’t changed now that a couple years have passed. As he relates to canon, they just killed Eve, they don’t know the whole big picture, and he’s approaching the moment when he’s meant to be suspicious of Castiel-but he’s not there yet. Coming from the end of 6x19 puts him in the mindset of having a wall in his mind and he has to be careful not to scrape at it. In camp, he’s already had a direct set of memories of him doing terrible things to people, of carelessly tossing someone he loved aside, and generally not giving a fuck or three about others. Jeanne’s returning of his soul gave him a good idea of what he did in the time that he’s missing, and now that more time has passed, he knows it’s best to focus on the hunt.
The biggest thing is: Sam doesn’t know how to turn off the hunt. He cares about people, but he sometimes doesn’t know what to do to deal with situations. He’s obsessed with getting stuff together, and camp is enough of a mystery. In canon, it’s very obvious that Sam just continues forward on his redemption arc, and he is determined and stubborn to never fall off that path. The fact of the matter is that Sam just sees himself as pretty tarnished.
But the biggest thing is: he’s relatively secure in his relationship with Dean for the first time in ages. Sam isn’t really conscious of this, but it’s coming through in their threads in camp and obviously, it shows in canon. They work together-maybe not flawlessly, but they do what needs to get done-and in camp, they haven’t fought. Jennifer has threatened to go to Dean and even did once, and they ended up coming to an easy resolution. At this point, the point of his life that hasn’t been stable since day one of returning to hunting (Dean) has actually become stable. He’s still hiding some things from Dean, but it’s less hiding for the sake of hiding and more that, at this point, it seems and feels like they’ve managed to move past that. Sam started the apocalypse, Sam died, and somehow-somehow-the end result of all this is a healthier form of codependency. Yes, he would die for Dean or do some crazy shit for him still, but it’s a lot steadier and less broken, as if every day seems like there’s a risk of that becoming relevant.
In camp, I should add that Sam has gone through a lot. I played out the just-after-Dean-coming-back stuff when I first apped him and the progression toward his mindset of desperation of needing the blood, post-starting the Apocalypse, post-his death and coming to deal with living again, being Lucifer, not being updated with Dean to soulless him, being soulless, being ensouled again, and the ramifications and potential of what he’s capable of. All this had large splatterings of fighting with Dean, fighting with other people, and everything with Jennifer thrown in. Sam still has issues with being a monster, but it’s less a constant issue and more something that he’s just accepted about himself. In a lot of ways, it’s a non-issue in comparison to getting the job done.
One thing Sam wants is to be of more use to other people around camp, and he’s done his best with that during the carnival plot, but he recognizes that in the big picture, he’s just a human dude with human capabilities. He tries to make up for that a lot, and tries to come up with failsafes. A part of Sam doesn’t know how to think of a normal life or how to sustain many aspects of that; he thinks of life the way he lives it in camp-always researching, occasionally taking a break to enjoy things with people, and he’s probably settled into destroying his liver pretty regularly.
The biggest thing is: Sam as Sam isn’t really a necessary aspect of his experience. He’s so gone past that that most of his personal feelings come into play with Jennifer, and with Dean (Dean needs him, he recognizes this now and that’s okay, though he hasn’t consciously addressed it, it’s obviously a part of his psyche because it’s a part of the way he is in the finale). Sam doesn’t live for himself and he doesn’t really know how to be happy. He can joke, but in a lot of ways, he’s stunted himself with everything that’s happened. He’s okay, though. It’s not something that he angsts about. Whether or not he’s happy is a moot point in his mind, and he just lives life accepting that his self-actualization will be gained through other people; when he did it otherwise, he started the Apocalypse, so he thinks this is a pretty good way to be.
Sam and the Camp Plot
In a lot of ways, the camp plot has helped Sam move forward and focus on something specific rather than the general nature of camp and its creatures. Having a database and an idea of what’s in camp is good, but he’s also done so much research that in a lot of ways, it’s almost irrelevant until October rolls around or until shit shows up and he realizes that the people causing that are campers themselves. Or if in game CFUW games happen. Things like that are good to know for daily life, but they don’t reveal the bigger picture or what’s necessary.
When Sam latched on to the plot, he wasn’t sure he’d get much, and then Erin showed up and he learned some things, and he’s been obsessed with it-and interested in her-ever since. Part of this interest is genuine; Sam genuinely is attracted to Erin and finds aspects of her personality and the way she carries herself intriguing. A lot of it is because he understands, which she made even clearer during the soiree, the need to do anything possible. But Sam knows he’s missing the bigger philosophical picture and while he’s trying to keep an open-mind, he thinks it might be a contradiction of values between him and some people on Erin’s staff (mainly Noir, though he’s not sure about the others, too).
The plot itself confuses him, but the biggest issue for Sam is the potential that everything that is camp, everything that people have come to define as a home, might be threatened. There are some people who can’t just leave camp because they don’t necessarily have a place to go home to, and as far as he can see, he’s still piecing together information on what it all means. But it does mean something.
A large portion of it frustrates him because he wonders if he was given information just to have it, or maybe it was something else. He knows some people have information that he doesn’t have (people who, for example, might get along better with Noir or Charlotte), and he knows that Erin does what she can. But that’s where he’s recently run into some problems.
The limit of information that he’s been given and that he has to work with really bothers him. He’s hit a wall, and what happened at the soiree only served to upset him. People getting hurt is never an acceptable loss, and the fact of the matter is, Erin has made it clear time and time again that Noir is a member of her staff, that Noir is someone that she trusts, and that they just work differently. Regardless of any conflict of interests, Erin is just as responsible for the choices that Noir makes as Noir is, because she’s her captain. Sam doesn’t alleviate Erin from that.
The virus itself may be minor in the big picture, as it could be something contained within time, but it’s led to him wondering if there’s something else that Erin would be willing and capable of doing to get something done. Or something that Noir might be willing to do. Sam has seen and done the means to an end game; he ended up nearly ending his own world to do it, and it was only through sheer stubbornness that things ended up differently. But he doesn’t trust Erin to not know the limits, and not understand that; to put it simply, he’s a little pissed off at her, and he’s considering different tactics in his approach to her.
For as much interest as he’s expressed in Erin, his courting and interest in her has always been seen as part of the job. He assumes she does things the same way. Sam isn’t stupid, and while he’s let his own desire for her to be good cloud his judgment, he shut off an aspect of that when he ended up speaking to Jalen after Erin took off. Sam knows he needs to go back over the information without a clouded judgment, all to see if he missed a facet of information. She might be hiding something if it’s a failsafe, if it’s a way, and it might also hit a point where their free will might come into question. He isn’t sure, because he’s trying to approach things without the biases of his experiences, and that’s damn near impossible.
The biggest thing is that he doesn’t trust Erin anymore. This isn’t about Noir or her tactics, it’s that Erin employs someone who’s willing to go ahead to do those things. Dean has put it into Sam’s head over and over that there’s always another way. And Sam is at the point in his life where he recognizes those harsher choices exist, and he used them a lot while he was without a soul, but he knows there’s a reason why he doesn’t do them.
If anything, he’s going to do what he can to try and keep those choices from being on the table as it comes to camp, but he doesn’t know how likely that is.
Sam and Jennifer
A lot of Sam’s most conflicting feelings aren’t to do with the plot-because he’s able to hold his head together, and even if he’s disappointed in Erin, it’s not something that is going to hurt him personally-but with Jennifer. A couple months ago, he hit a point to where his frustration with a lot of her way of carrying herself got to be too much, and he cut things off. In his mind, he wants her to be something that she’s not, and she’s even admitted that she can’t be anything but that (under the guise of truth, but still).
Sam feels guilty, and he feels like he owes her, and more than anything-he’s unstable to stabilize what emotions and feelings he does have for her because they’re always evolving. The biggest thing is that he’s come to accept that she’s a permanent fixture in his life now. It’s the same way he’s come to understand that Ganymede, Apollo, and Robin are always going to be around from now on. Jennifer is family. Maybe she’s the kind of family that Dean doesn’t want over for dinner at any point, but she’s a permanent fixture in his life. He can’t cut the ties there, because he feels responsible for her. He knows she doesn’t have anyone and feels that way, and he couldn’t deal with leaving her alone. It’s partly guilt and partly just the way things have gone.
Is he good for her? Probably not, and Sam recognizes that. Even as he tells her good-bye every other dramatic conversation they have about their lives never intersecting, he knows he’s continually trying to find and secure a way for her to be in a good place. He knows he’s keeping an eye on her from a distance because he’s afraid she’s going to slip up and do something reckless. Because Jennifer is Jennifer. She’s a perpetual teenager at this point, and though she’s changing and claiming she doesn’t care, Sam, even more, wants to be someone who’s good for her.
In a lot of ways, it’s something that runs deeper than romantic feelings. It’s pretty much codependency-Sam doesn’t see it as much, but she’s a part of his identity at this point. She’s the first person that he came to truly love in a long time, and she’s someone who’s been there through it all. Sam can’t really say why; she’s nothing like Jessica or Sarah or Madison. She’s a lot more like Ruby, in that way, but someone who isn’t out to use him or make him do anything. There’s obviously a part of self-gratification in there, too, in being there for her that he wouldn’t get from someone else (and in a way, Sam needs to be needed, and if anything, it can be continuously argued that Jennifer needs Sam because what else would she have?).
More than anything, she’s the one person in camp aside from Dean who can inspire impulsive feelings in him. Even when it comes to Robin, he wouldn’t do that, but he can’t always control things. Putting words to it is difficult for him and therefore difficult for me, because Sam has shared a lot with Jennifer, but more than that, he’s hurt her so much that it’s almost like returning from that point is an impossibility. It’s not something he fully realizes or wants to recognize, but it is definitely a factor in a lot of his behavior.
Other Stuff
The only other thing I can think to mention is that I’ve been having a harder time playing with Robin, and have therefore been dropping threads, because Sam feels helpless there. He doesn’t know what to do, and he doesn’t know how to help without seeming … judgmental or as if he’s refusing acknowledgement of choices of what she wants or how she can handle things. It’s a big point of conflict for him.
And if anything in this didn’t make sense, it’s because I admittedly do a lot with Sam on instinct, because I’ve been playing him for so long. Also, I wrote it on a bus after falling asleep outlining it in my head.
I wanted to discuss a lot of this and his general self on a whole.
Sam’s Mental State and General Way of Being
It goes without saying that Sam has been in camp for two years and it’s starting to take its toll on him. He’s been around long enough that things aren’t surprising him. He’s compiled a lot of information and learned a lot, and he’s settled into the group of people who are important to him. He’s at the point where he feels secure enough on camp, and his biggest issue is that he happened to be “dead” during the stuff that happened in May 2010, so he has to depend upon other people’s information to do anything. As a hunter, this makes him feel unsure; he doesn’t like depending upon other information as much, especially when he realistically could’ve encountered it himself. But he didn’t, so it makes him unsure of a lot of things, of Elizabeth Sayre’s motivations and so forth.
I think all of this makes it clear that a lot that has to do with Sam’s motivation in camp has to do with the “hunt.” He has always had a hard time turning off the mindset that involves the hunt, and that hasn’t changed now that a couple years have passed. As he relates to canon, they just killed Eve, they don’t know the whole big picture, and he’s approaching the moment when he’s meant to be suspicious of Castiel-but he’s not there yet. Coming from the end of 6x19 puts him in the mindset of having a wall in his mind and he has to be careful not to scrape at it. In camp, he’s already had a direct set of memories of him doing terrible things to people, of carelessly tossing someone he loved aside, and generally not giving a fuck or three about others. Jeanne’s returning of his soul gave him a good idea of what he did in the time that he’s missing, and now that more time has passed, he knows it’s best to focus on the hunt.
The biggest thing is: Sam doesn’t know how to turn off the hunt. He cares about people, but he sometimes doesn’t know what to do to deal with situations. He’s obsessed with getting stuff together, and camp is enough of a mystery. In canon, it’s very obvious that Sam just continues forward on his redemption arc, and he is determined and stubborn to never fall off that path. The fact of the matter is that Sam just sees himself as pretty tarnished.
But the biggest thing is: he’s relatively secure in his relationship with Dean for the first time in ages. Sam isn’t really conscious of this, but it’s coming through in their threads in camp and obviously, it shows in canon. They work together-maybe not flawlessly, but they do what needs to get done-and in camp, they haven’t fought. Jennifer has threatened to go to Dean and even did once, and they ended up coming to an easy resolution. At this point, the point of his life that hasn’t been stable since day one of returning to hunting (Dean) has actually become stable. He’s still hiding some things from Dean, but it’s less hiding for the sake of hiding and more that, at this point, it seems and feels like they’ve managed to move past that. Sam started the apocalypse, Sam died, and somehow-somehow-the end result of all this is a healthier form of codependency. Yes, he would die for Dean or do some crazy shit for him still, but it’s a lot steadier and less broken, as if every day seems like there’s a risk of that becoming relevant.
In camp, I should add that Sam has gone through a lot. I played out the just-after-Dean-coming-back stuff when I first apped him and the progression toward his mindset of desperation of needing the blood, post-starting the Apocalypse, post-his death and coming to deal with living again, being Lucifer, not being updated with Dean to soulless him, being soulless, being ensouled again, and the ramifications and potential of what he’s capable of. All this had large splatterings of fighting with Dean, fighting with other people, and everything with Jennifer thrown in. Sam still has issues with being a monster, but it’s less a constant issue and more something that he’s just accepted about himself. In a lot of ways, it’s a non-issue in comparison to getting the job done.
One thing Sam wants is to be of more use to other people around camp, and he’s done his best with that during the carnival plot, but he recognizes that in the big picture, he’s just a human dude with human capabilities. He tries to make up for that a lot, and tries to come up with failsafes. A part of Sam doesn’t know how to think of a normal life or how to sustain many aspects of that; he thinks of life the way he lives it in camp-always researching, occasionally taking a break to enjoy things with people, and he’s probably settled into destroying his liver pretty regularly.
The biggest thing is: Sam as Sam isn’t really a necessary aspect of his experience. He’s so gone past that that most of his personal feelings come into play with Jennifer, and with Dean (Dean needs him, he recognizes this now and that’s okay, though he hasn’t consciously addressed it, it’s obviously a part of his psyche because it’s a part of the way he is in the finale). Sam doesn’t live for himself and he doesn’t really know how to be happy. He can joke, but in a lot of ways, he’s stunted himself with everything that’s happened. He’s okay, though. It’s not something that he angsts about. Whether or not he’s happy is a moot point in his mind, and he just lives life accepting that his self-actualization will be gained through other people; when he did it otherwise, he started the Apocalypse, so he thinks this is a pretty good way to be.
Sam and the Camp Plot
In a lot of ways, the camp plot has helped Sam move forward and focus on something specific rather than the general nature of camp and its creatures. Having a database and an idea of what’s in camp is good, but he’s also done so much research that in a lot of ways, it’s almost irrelevant until October rolls around or until shit shows up and he realizes that the people causing that are campers themselves. Or if in game CFUW games happen. Things like that are good to know for daily life, but they don’t reveal the bigger picture or what’s necessary.
When Sam latched on to the plot, he wasn’t sure he’d get much, and then Erin showed up and he learned some things, and he’s been obsessed with it-and interested in her-ever since. Part of this interest is genuine; Sam genuinely is attracted to Erin and finds aspects of her personality and the way she carries herself intriguing. A lot of it is because he understands, which she made even clearer during the soiree, the need to do anything possible. But Sam knows he’s missing the bigger philosophical picture and while he’s trying to keep an open-mind, he thinks it might be a contradiction of values between him and some people on Erin’s staff (mainly Noir, though he’s not sure about the others, too).
The plot itself confuses him, but the biggest issue for Sam is the potential that everything that is camp, everything that people have come to define as a home, might be threatened. There are some people who can’t just leave camp because they don’t necessarily have a place to go home to, and as far as he can see, he’s still piecing together information on what it all means. But it does mean something.
A large portion of it frustrates him because he wonders if he was given information just to have it, or maybe it was something else. He knows some people have information that he doesn’t have (people who, for example, might get along better with Noir or Charlotte), and he knows that Erin does what she can. But that’s where he’s recently run into some problems.
The limit of information that he’s been given and that he has to work with really bothers him. He’s hit a wall, and what happened at the soiree only served to upset him. People getting hurt is never an acceptable loss, and the fact of the matter is, Erin has made it clear time and time again that Noir is a member of her staff, that Noir is someone that she trusts, and that they just work differently. Regardless of any conflict of interests, Erin is just as responsible for the choices that Noir makes as Noir is, because she’s her captain. Sam doesn’t alleviate Erin from that.
The virus itself may be minor in the big picture, as it could be something contained within time, but it’s led to him wondering if there’s something else that Erin would be willing and capable of doing to get something done. Or something that Noir might be willing to do. Sam has seen and done the means to an end game; he ended up nearly ending his own world to do it, and it was only through sheer stubbornness that things ended up differently. But he doesn’t trust Erin to not know the limits, and not understand that; to put it simply, he’s a little pissed off at her, and he’s considering different tactics in his approach to her.
For as much interest as he’s expressed in Erin, his courting and interest in her has always been seen as part of the job. He assumes she does things the same way. Sam isn’t stupid, and while he’s let his own desire for her to be good cloud his judgment, he shut off an aspect of that when he ended up speaking to Jalen after Erin took off. Sam knows he needs to go back over the information without a clouded judgment, all to see if he missed a facet of information. She might be hiding something if it’s a failsafe, if it’s a way, and it might also hit a point where their free will might come into question. He isn’t sure, because he’s trying to approach things without the biases of his experiences, and that’s damn near impossible.
The biggest thing is that he doesn’t trust Erin anymore. This isn’t about Noir or her tactics, it’s that Erin employs someone who’s willing to go ahead to do those things. Dean has put it into Sam’s head over and over that there’s always another way. And Sam is at the point in his life where he recognizes those harsher choices exist, and he used them a lot while he was without a soul, but he knows there’s a reason why he doesn’t do them.
If anything, he’s going to do what he can to try and keep those choices from being on the table as it comes to camp, but he doesn’t know how likely that is.
Sam and Jennifer
A lot of Sam’s most conflicting feelings aren’t to do with the plot-because he’s able to hold his head together, and even if he’s disappointed in Erin, it’s not something that is going to hurt him personally-but with Jennifer. A couple months ago, he hit a point to where his frustration with a lot of her way of carrying herself got to be too much, and he cut things off. In his mind, he wants her to be something that she’s not, and she’s even admitted that she can’t be anything but that (under the guise of truth, but still).
Sam feels guilty, and he feels like he owes her, and more than anything-he’s unstable to stabilize what emotions and feelings he does have for her because they’re always evolving. The biggest thing is that he’s come to accept that she’s a permanent fixture in his life now. It’s the same way he’s come to understand that Ganymede, Apollo, and Robin are always going to be around from now on. Jennifer is family. Maybe she’s the kind of family that Dean doesn’t want over for dinner at any point, but she’s a permanent fixture in his life. He can’t cut the ties there, because he feels responsible for her. He knows she doesn’t have anyone and feels that way, and he couldn’t deal with leaving her alone. It’s partly guilt and partly just the way things have gone.
Is he good for her? Probably not, and Sam recognizes that. Even as he tells her good-bye every other dramatic conversation they have about their lives never intersecting, he knows he’s continually trying to find and secure a way for her to be in a good place. He knows he’s keeping an eye on her from a distance because he’s afraid she’s going to slip up and do something reckless. Because Jennifer is Jennifer. She’s a perpetual teenager at this point, and though she’s changing and claiming she doesn’t care, Sam, even more, wants to be someone who’s good for her.
In a lot of ways, it’s something that runs deeper than romantic feelings. It’s pretty much codependency-Sam doesn’t see it as much, but she’s a part of his identity at this point. She’s the first person that he came to truly love in a long time, and she’s someone who’s been there through it all. Sam can’t really say why; she’s nothing like Jessica or Sarah or Madison. She’s a lot more like Ruby, in that way, but someone who isn’t out to use him or make him do anything. There’s obviously a part of self-gratification in there, too, in being there for her that he wouldn’t get from someone else (and in a way, Sam needs to be needed, and if anything, it can be continuously argued that Jennifer needs Sam because what else would she have?).
More than anything, she’s the one person in camp aside from Dean who can inspire impulsive feelings in him. Even when it comes to Robin, he wouldn’t do that, but he can’t always control things. Putting words to it is difficult for him and therefore difficult for me, because Sam has shared a lot with Jennifer, but more than that, he’s hurt her so much that it’s almost like returning from that point is an impossibility. It’s not something he fully realizes or wants to recognize, but it is definitely a factor in a lot of his behavior.
Other Stuff
The only other thing I can think to mention is that I’ve been having a harder time playing with Robin, and have therefore been dropping threads, because Sam feels helpless there. He doesn’t know what to do, and he doesn’t know how to help without seeming … judgmental or as if he’s refusing acknowledgement of choices of what she wants or how she can handle things. It’s a big point of conflict for him.
And if anything in this didn’t make sense, it’s because I admittedly do a lot with Sam on instinct, because I’ve been playing him for so long. Also, I wrote it on a bus after falling asleep outlining it in my head.