(no subject)
So there was this Supernatural essay contest going on a little while ago. I submitted an entry but unfortunately wasn't picked.
:(
Oh, well! I thought I would post my essay here, since there's no use in letting it gather dust on my computer.
An Unconventional Love
by Marie S. Crosswell
It has always been clear that the focal point of Supernatural is the relationship between Sam and Dean Winchester, the show’s two protagonists who also happen to be brothers. Besides their lifestyle of hunting the paranormal and living out of Dean’s Impala and motel rooms (which they often pay for with fraudulent credit cards), this relationship sets the young men apart from all other family member pairs on television and, to some degree, family member pairs in real life. Watching Sam and Dean is like watching their supernatural prey materialize every episode - real enough to believe in their world and yet nowhere to be found in our own. What exactly is the nature of this relationship? How can it be adequately described? Some choose to see a romantic, erotic undercurrent, while others simply see a strong fraternal bond, but I think it reaches a place beyond common fraternity and usurps mainstream society’s glass ceiling of eroticism. Sam and Dean, as I see them, are soul mates. This is my interpretation for the exact point that it is in the nature of the soul mate concept to renounce all physical attributes of a pair as being irrelevant in comparison to the spiritual. Soul mates need not be a romantic couple engaging in sex, however familiar that assumption is; as the name itself implies, soul mates need only be a pair of souls made for each other, regardless of their physical manifestations. A person’s soul mate could be anyone - lover, friend, or family member. In the case of the Winchester boys, brotherhood serves as soul mate relationship too.
If we accept, as viewers, that all humans have souls in the Winchesters’ world (as is evident by the numerous spirits they themselves have hunted), this soul mate theory has room for plausibility. “Soul mates” may sound like an overused, corny, fantastical idea - and after the media’s abuse of it, that’s understandable - but if we throw out all the sickly sweet, Hallmark card, chick flick rehash of what it “should be,” we can redefine it. I define a soul mate connection as one of genuine need, emotional passion, profound understanding, unconditional love, and a mutual ability between two people to help each other fulfill their potential. A soul mate knows, loves, and depends upon a person as no other soul in existence does. Sam and Dean, as a pair, go right down the list and check every point off. In this context, the intensity of their bond makes more sense, without having to imagine an incestuous undertone. The downside to this approach is that anything regarding the spiritual is nebulous; it can only ever be theory to us. Yet Sam and Dean, at least as I see them, do provide possible evidence.
Since their mother’s premature death, the brothers have been thrown into the world of “hunting” because of their father’s quest to avenge her. With so much moving around and leading a life that no one else their age knew about, Sam and Dean had to have found themselves as children and adolescents with enough reason to especially value each other. Whatever friends or girlfriends they may have had in childhood could never fix themselves permanently into the boys’ lives because of that environmental instability and could never fully know or understand who each brother was, while hunting remained a family secret. The acceptance of paranormal creatures’ existence, hunter training, and killing or banishing of said creatures was only shared with each other, an aspect of their young lives too time-consuming to be insignificant. This shared knowledge separated Dean and Sam from the world, together; they knew and believed in a truth none of their peers did, sparking an early sense of union. After growing up in this manner, both brothers seem to have an inability to lead a traditional lifestyle. A small exception was Sam’s years spent at Stanford University, during which he neither saw nor spoke to his father or, for at least two years, his brother. Stanford is where we find Sam in the pilot episode of Supernatural, living with his girlfriend Jessica (who knows nothing of his past), and anticipating an interview for law school. He seems to have acclimated well to the “normal” life, something he is said to have wanted all his childhood. Yet when Dean appears, asking for his help to track down their father who disappeared on a hunt, and when Jessica is murdered by the same demon who killed the boys’ mother, Sam leaves Stanford behind. He is pulled back to his brother, and his interest in hunting becomes personal from then on, not just something required of him by his father. As for Dean, he never shows any serious sign of intending to leave the job. He never tried college like Sam, instead playing the part of loyal son and making the job a priority only inferior to his family. Though we catch glimpses of Dean’s secret desire for elements of “normalcy” throughout the show, they are portrayed as unreasonable; Dean cannot quit hunting to pursue a “selfish” form of happiness when people will die without his help. He tells an old lover in the episode “The Kids Are All Right”, “It's weird, you know, your life... I mean, this house and a kid... it's not my life. Never will be.” When she tells him he is welcome to stay, he wistfully reiterates, “I can’t. I got a lot of work to do, and it’s not my life (3-2).”
It isn’t until after Sam leaves Stanford at the beginning of Season One that the brothers work together without their father, John. This liberty to hunt as adults, as well as the opportunity to stay together without anyone else’s regular company has visibly drawn the brothers even closer, in less than three years. The age gap matters less now that they’re both grown, although the big brother-little brother dynamic will never disappear, and this equality has served as another element to further cement their bond. The boys complement each other as hunters and make a successful team of two. They act as each other’s balance - a kind of physical manifestation of the basic concept behind soul mates: two people as halves forming one whole.
Dean, more than either his father or brother, has always had a passionate need for and loyalty to his family. His obedience to his father, often criticized by Sam, and his overwhelming love for his brother has always been the driving forces behind everything Dean is. They anchor him, and his devotion is so complete, it leaves little room for anything else, including romance and any purely self-centered desire irrelevant to them. Dean’s deepest yearning throughout Season One is not to kill the yellow-eyed demon, not to find the perfect woman and settle down, but to have his brother and father with him again. In the episode “Shadow,” he confesses this to Sam, saying, “I don’t want you to leave the second this thing’s over, Sam.... You and me and Dad, I mean, I want us... I want us to be together again. I want us to be a family again (1-16).” At the time, Sam’s disinclination toward this lifestyle leaves Dean visibly disappointed. A few episodes later, in “Salvation,” he confides in Sam during a fight: “Sammy, look…the three of us-that’s all we have. And that’s all I have. Sometimes I feel like I’m barely holding it together, man. Without you and Dad… (1-21)” He doesn’t finish the thought, but Sam understands. In the season finale, after having killed a possessed man who was beating his brother, Dean tells Sam, “...For you or Dad, the things I’m willing to do or kill, it just... it scares me sometimes.” One of the yellow-eyed demon’s comments to him, minutes later, while possessing John’s body is, “You know, you fight and you fight for this family, but the truth is… they don’t need you. Not like you need them (1-22).” It is a known fact that demons often make personal attacks most likely to warp a victim’s mind, and all Dean can do in response is stare, with a defensive smile. That his love and need for his father and brother is unreturned is one of Dean’s greatest fears.
He has arguably defined himself by his brotherhood with Sam since their mother’s death. One moment in particular stands out as the catalyst. The family home is burning, John Winchester snatches baby Sam from the nursery, hands him to four-year-old Dean and says, “Take your brother outside as fast as you can! Don’t look back! (1-1)” Dean’s older brother role suddenly thrust upon him the keeping of Sam’s life, in a situation that most fortunately do not experience. Dean did as he was told, keeping Sam safe, and as far as Supernatural has shown, he’s never stopped. The natural inclination of older brother protecting the younger was intensified by their childhood and their dangerous immersion in hunting; Dean took on the role of caretaker not only for love but necessity. Their father was often gone, preoccupied with hunting, and that left Dean as a kind of surrogate parent to Sam, besides sibling. His brother’s protector is an identity hardwired into Dean, and he doesn’t bother trying to hide it. In “All Hell Breaks Loose Part II,” Dean says to his brother’s corpse, “I always tried to protect you... Keep you safe... Dad didn't even have to tell me. It was just always my responsibility, you know? (2-22)” Later on in the episode, when he admits to Sam that he sold his soul, he defends his choice by saying, “I had to look out for you. That’s my job.”
Dean’s deal attests to his love for Sam more than anything. Regardless of the demon offering only one more year of life rather than the standard ten, Dean agrees with little hesitation. The irony lies in his parallelism to John, who sold his soul to save Dean; Dean spent months agonizing over that knowledge, condemning the choice as unfair. All of his previous arguments against it disintegrate when he is faced with the loss of his brother. Most people would bury their dead loved one and do their best to move on, as the Winchester brothers did with their father. Dean could not take that path with Sam. He makes that clear in “The Magnificent Seven”, when Sam asks how he could have made the deal. “’Cuz I couldn’t live with you dead. Couldn’t do it (3-1),” Dean responds. In the world of Supernatural, deal-making with a demon is an option and the one that Dean chose; in our own world, the only other alternative is suicide. Had Dean been unable to seal his deal to revive Sam, all his desperation points to suicide as the next likeliest outcome. His immediate response, prior to approaching a crossroads demon, is to withdraw. When a family friend, Bobby, comments that the end of the world may come, Dean shouts to let it end (2-22); without Sam, he abandons the fight he spent his whole life working in. He feels as if he failed Sam and asks, “How am I supposed to live with that?” as he sits by Sam’s corpse, in tears (2-22). Few people in our own world respond to a loved one’s death with suicide, but to Dean, who loves Sam most and perhaps even exclusively, self-destruction stands as the only option. As Bobby confronts him for making the deal, Dean looks at him in anguish and says, “I couldn’t let him die, Bobby. I couldn’t. He’s my brother.” This attitude of Dean’s made itself clear even before Sam’s death, in the episode “Croatoan” (2-9). A paranormal disease causes its victims to develop homicidal, violent tendencies, and Sam is thought to be infected. As the few remaining townspeople plan to leave, Dean chooses to stay behind with his brother, not allowing Sam to kill himself but volunteering for death also. Dean is incapable of surviving without Sam, though he can bear all other suffering, and that kind of need, while not often present in even the best of romances, exists unabashedly between the Winchester brothers.
Sam may not have always had the same degree of extreme loyalty to his family, but after almost three years of living alone with his brother and the experiences they shared in that time, he has grown to love and depend on Dean with equal intensity as Dean has for him. This change of heart is portrayed through three episodes in particular, one for each season. In Season One’s “Shadow,” Sam and Dean argue over what they will do after they kill the yellow-eyed demon, and Sam tells his brother, “I'm not gonna live this life forever. Dean, when this is all over, you're gonna have to let me go my own way (1-16).” Shortly after their father dies, Sam begins to rethink his future. In Season Two’s “Everybody Loves a Clown,” when Dean confronts him about it, Sam says, “I’m having second thoughts” [regarding a return to college] and “Dad would have wanted me to stick with the job (2-2).” We learn later on in the episode that, as Dean suspected, Sam is suffering from guilt over their father’s death; while this undoubtedly provoked Sam’s initial change, it makes it no less real as time goes on. By Season Three’s “Sin City,” Sam indicates in a dialogue with a priest that he has settled into the hunting life. The priest asks him if he’s thought about doing something else: “You seem like a pretty smart kid. Somehow, I see you in front of the pack. You could do some great things.” Sam answers with a brief smile: “I don’t know. I like what I’m doing, I guess (3-4).” Although the yellow-eyed demon dies in the Season Two finale, Sam shows no sign in Season Three of leaving his brother and returning to a “normal” life. One reason is his need to break Dean out of his deal; another does seem to be a lack of interest in that normalcy. In a peculiar reversal of roles, he is the one to reassure his brother that hunting is what they should be doing, after Dean’s encounter with a Djinn in “What Is and What Should Never Be”: “But people are alive because of you. It's worth it, Dean. It is. It's not fair, and, you know, it hurts like hell, but it's worth it (2-20).” Sam has come to feel the value of the job in a way he never completely did as a boy; he believes in it because of the good it does others.
Sam spent his childhood only ever being the “little brother,” but now as a man, he has accepted a sense of mutual duty toward Dean. He realizes how important Dean is to him and how much they belong together. As early as Season One’s “Skin,” Sam acknowledges to himself that despite his longing for a normal life, he could never be a part of it. “You know, truth is, even at Stanford, deep down, I never really fit in (1-6),” he tells Dean. Dean says that’s because he’s a freak. “Well I’m a freak too,” Dean adds. “I’m right there with you, all the way.” He reminds not only us but Sam that he is the one person who Sam fits with completely. In Season One’s “Salvation,” Sam openly recognizes Dean’s lifelong devotion to him: “Even when I couldn’t count on anyone, I could always count on you (1-21).” The following episode, “Devil’s Trap,” proves Sam’s ultimate loyalty to Dean, when Dean points the Colt at their father, who he suspects is possessed. After only a few moments of indecision, Sam moves to stand at his brother’s side, trusting that Dean is right even if it means their father’s death. When John urges Sam to kill him, thereby destroying the yellow-eyed demon, Dean lies bleeding on the floor nearby and pleads with Sam not to do it. Sam doesn’t - whether because of his own need for John or his brother’s pleas or a combination of the two. In the closing scene, John chastises Sam for failing to do so, saying, “Killing this demon comes first. Before me, before everything (1-22).” Sam peers into the rearview mirror at Dean in the back seat and says, “No, sir. Not everything.” A year later, in the aftermath of the demon’s death and Dean’s deal, Sam makes his devotion clear: “You've saved my life over and over. I mean, you sacrifice everything for me. Don't you think I'd do the same for you? You're my big brother. There's nothing I wouldn't do for you (2-22).”
Although the outcome of Dean’s deal remains to be seen, we have already received a preview of what Sam’s life would be without Dean, in the Season Three episode, “Mystery Spot.” Caught in a time loop created by a Trickster, Sam lives the same Tuesday over and over again, watching Dean die in every way imaginable. When Sam finally figures out the situation and confronts the Trickster, the brothers wake up on Wednesday, thinking the fiasco is over. Instead, Dean is shot and killed - and stays dead. Sam lives for at least three months afterward, transforming into a cold and hardened man. Rather than moving on to a “normal” life, he continues hunting alone, obsessively tracking the Trickster while taking other cases. He doesn’t answer Bobby’s calls, never seems to smile, and makes a habit of keeping his motel rooms neat with military precision. The bed is always tightly made, and his research clippings are arranged in straight lines on the wall. He eats in his room alone, travels alone, and tends to his own wounds without help. His extremity far surpasses his father’s, and by the time Bobby convinces him to meet up, Sam is ready to murder an innocent person for the sake of summoning the Trickster. When the Trickster does show up, one of the first lines out of his mouth is, “Whoever said Dean was the dysfunctional one has never seen you with a sharp object in your hands (3-11).” His loss makes Sam into the opposite of who he naturally is, into the person he always said he never wanted to be. While Dean’s response to losing Sam is externalized grief and self-destruction, Sam’s response to losing Dean is internalized grief manifesting as violence and a vengeance obsession. What the Trickster tells Sam resounds with chilling truth: “The way you two keep sacrificing yourselves for each other? Nothing good comes out of it. Just blood and pain. Dean’s your weakness. The bad guys know it, too. It’s gonna be the death of you, Sam... Sometimes, you gotta know when to let people go (3-11).” Echoing Dean’s words, Sam’s only reply is, “He’s my brother.” He ignores the Trickster’s warning, softly begging for Dean until he wakes up on that original Wednesday. Life returns to the way it was, the months alone now only a memory, but one that will haunt Sam as he tries to find a way to break the crossroads deal.
Supernatural is a show in which sex plays a surprisingly insignificant role, which is one reason why viewing Sam and Dean as nonsexual soul mates can make a peculiar amount of sense. Dean is sexually hedonistic, a womanizer who flirts and seduces tirelessly. He has sex on what seems to be a regular basis, the women changing with every town by weeks. His only use for sex is pleasure and otherwise, he’s made it almost to the age of thirty with only one emotional attachment to a lover - Cassie Robinson. She may not have physically been in Dean’s life long, but from her brief appearance on the show, it is obvious she affected him. He trusted her enough to tell her the truth about hunting, which is why it stung so badly when she rejected him for it. In contrast to Sam, Cassie’s love for Dean was instinctively conditional; it taught Dean not to trust anyone outside the hunting world to understand what he does, unless they experience it first-hand. Although Cassie discovers the truth to Dean’s confession, it doesn’t seem to change anything; her parting words in “Route 666” (1-13) are, “I’m a realist. I don’t see much hope for us, Dean.” After that, Dean returns to his habit of casual sex and wastes little time moping about the lack of romance.
Sam is the complete opposite of his brother when it comes to women. His relationship with Jessica was one of love, to the point where it was revealed he had intended to propose. After her death, Sam refused to forget her for several months. In the episode “What Is and What Should Never Be,” it is even portrayed that, if Mary Winchester had never died and spurred on her family’s involvement in hunting, Sam still would have gone on to fall in love with Jessica and marry her. While his brother has sex with any woman willing, Sam has shown little interest in it throughout the series. The two exceptions are Sarah in Season 1 and Madison in Season 2. His involvement with Sarah was only a flirtation, a brief connection that seemed to be mostly interest in personality. They shared a parting kiss when Sam and Dean left her town, but she has not been mentioned again. Madison is the one woman Sam was openly sexual towards on the show, although emotion had little to do with that attraction; it ended in grim terms, with Sam having to consensually kill her because she was a werewolf. Otherwise, Sam focuses on the job and his brother. He, unlike Dean, seems to connect sex with emotion; since he doesn’t have the opportunity to emotionally connect with women in a romantic way, he isn’t shown to have much sex. Being the more intellectual of the two, Sam indirectly suggests that there are more important matters - even for a twenty-five year-old.
Regardless of viewers’ religious beliefs, it can be agreed that the brothers share a love that reaches a level few people are familiar with. As indescribable as it is, a spiritual context is most suitable to understand their brotherhood. Sam and Dean could have ended up in separate families, could have died in the fire that claimed their mother, could have grown up hating each other for their differences or stayed apart after Sam’s departure for college. Instead, they were born brothers in a world of almost seven billion people and lived to manhood with an overwhelming love between them. That seems more than just a meaningless accident.
I do not pretend to know Eric Kripke’s intentions for Supernatural, including the nature of Sam and Dean’s connection. I may be entirely wrong - but I think there is some value to considering this theory of the brothers as nonsexual soul mates. Their love, no matter what its nature, leaves us in awe; looking at it with this spiritual element in mind not only fleshes it out but causes us as viewers to think. Sam and Dean, brother soul mates, cause us to reconsider and re-evaluate all of our ideas about love and human connection. They cause us to recognize and remember that a bond can exist between two people that is more powerful than sex, that the epic union of a lifetime may not come in tradition’s wrapping. They require us to accept that the greatest love isn’t confined to what is physical or worldly. In opening our minds to these ideas, Sam and Dean offer the opportunity to experience more, to be liberated instead of liberalized. Each man, when confronted with his desperate need for the other, says simply, “He’s my brother.” We know what they mean - and yet we can only begin to understand.
:(
Oh, well! I thought I would post my essay here, since there's no use in letting it gather dust on my computer.
An Unconventional Love
by Marie S. Crosswell
It has always been clear that the focal point of Supernatural is the relationship between Sam and Dean Winchester, the show’s two protagonists who also happen to be brothers. Besides their lifestyle of hunting the paranormal and living out of Dean’s Impala and motel rooms (which they often pay for with fraudulent credit cards), this relationship sets the young men apart from all other family member pairs on television and, to some degree, family member pairs in real life. Watching Sam and Dean is like watching their supernatural prey materialize every episode - real enough to believe in their world and yet nowhere to be found in our own. What exactly is the nature of this relationship? How can it be adequately described? Some choose to see a romantic, erotic undercurrent, while others simply see a strong fraternal bond, but I think it reaches a place beyond common fraternity and usurps mainstream society’s glass ceiling of eroticism. Sam and Dean, as I see them, are soul mates. This is my interpretation for the exact point that it is in the nature of the soul mate concept to renounce all physical attributes of a pair as being irrelevant in comparison to the spiritual. Soul mates need not be a romantic couple engaging in sex, however familiar that assumption is; as the name itself implies, soul mates need only be a pair of souls made for each other, regardless of their physical manifestations. A person’s soul mate could be anyone - lover, friend, or family member. In the case of the Winchester boys, brotherhood serves as soul mate relationship too.
If we accept, as viewers, that all humans have souls in the Winchesters’ world (as is evident by the numerous spirits they themselves have hunted), this soul mate theory has room for plausibility. “Soul mates” may sound like an overused, corny, fantastical idea - and after the media’s abuse of it, that’s understandable - but if we throw out all the sickly sweet, Hallmark card, chick flick rehash of what it “should be,” we can redefine it. I define a soul mate connection as one of genuine need, emotional passion, profound understanding, unconditional love, and a mutual ability between two people to help each other fulfill their potential. A soul mate knows, loves, and depends upon a person as no other soul in existence does. Sam and Dean, as a pair, go right down the list and check every point off. In this context, the intensity of their bond makes more sense, without having to imagine an incestuous undertone. The downside to this approach is that anything regarding the spiritual is nebulous; it can only ever be theory to us. Yet Sam and Dean, at least as I see them, do provide possible evidence.
Since their mother’s premature death, the brothers have been thrown into the world of “hunting” because of their father’s quest to avenge her. With so much moving around and leading a life that no one else their age knew about, Sam and Dean had to have found themselves as children and adolescents with enough reason to especially value each other. Whatever friends or girlfriends they may have had in childhood could never fix themselves permanently into the boys’ lives because of that environmental instability and could never fully know or understand who each brother was, while hunting remained a family secret. The acceptance of paranormal creatures’ existence, hunter training, and killing or banishing of said creatures was only shared with each other, an aspect of their young lives too time-consuming to be insignificant. This shared knowledge separated Dean and Sam from the world, together; they knew and believed in a truth none of their peers did, sparking an early sense of union. After growing up in this manner, both brothers seem to have an inability to lead a traditional lifestyle. A small exception was Sam’s years spent at Stanford University, during which he neither saw nor spoke to his father or, for at least two years, his brother. Stanford is where we find Sam in the pilot episode of Supernatural, living with his girlfriend Jessica (who knows nothing of his past), and anticipating an interview for law school. He seems to have acclimated well to the “normal” life, something he is said to have wanted all his childhood. Yet when Dean appears, asking for his help to track down their father who disappeared on a hunt, and when Jessica is murdered by the same demon who killed the boys’ mother, Sam leaves Stanford behind. He is pulled back to his brother, and his interest in hunting becomes personal from then on, not just something required of him by his father. As for Dean, he never shows any serious sign of intending to leave the job. He never tried college like Sam, instead playing the part of loyal son and making the job a priority only inferior to his family. Though we catch glimpses of Dean’s secret desire for elements of “normalcy” throughout the show, they are portrayed as unreasonable; Dean cannot quit hunting to pursue a “selfish” form of happiness when people will die without his help. He tells an old lover in the episode “The Kids Are All Right”, “It's weird, you know, your life... I mean, this house and a kid... it's not my life. Never will be.” When she tells him he is welcome to stay, he wistfully reiterates, “I can’t. I got a lot of work to do, and it’s not my life (3-2).”
It isn’t until after Sam leaves Stanford at the beginning of Season One that the brothers work together without their father, John. This liberty to hunt as adults, as well as the opportunity to stay together without anyone else’s regular company has visibly drawn the brothers even closer, in less than three years. The age gap matters less now that they’re both grown, although the big brother-little brother dynamic will never disappear, and this equality has served as another element to further cement their bond. The boys complement each other as hunters and make a successful team of two. They act as each other’s balance - a kind of physical manifestation of the basic concept behind soul mates: two people as halves forming one whole.
Dean, more than either his father or brother, has always had a passionate need for and loyalty to his family. His obedience to his father, often criticized by Sam, and his overwhelming love for his brother has always been the driving forces behind everything Dean is. They anchor him, and his devotion is so complete, it leaves little room for anything else, including romance and any purely self-centered desire irrelevant to them. Dean’s deepest yearning throughout Season One is not to kill the yellow-eyed demon, not to find the perfect woman and settle down, but to have his brother and father with him again. In the episode “Shadow,” he confesses this to Sam, saying, “I don’t want you to leave the second this thing’s over, Sam.... You and me and Dad, I mean, I want us... I want us to be together again. I want us to be a family again (1-16).” At the time, Sam’s disinclination toward this lifestyle leaves Dean visibly disappointed. A few episodes later, in “Salvation,” he confides in Sam during a fight: “Sammy, look…the three of us-that’s all we have. And that’s all I have. Sometimes I feel like I’m barely holding it together, man. Without you and Dad… (1-21)” He doesn’t finish the thought, but Sam understands. In the season finale, after having killed a possessed man who was beating his brother, Dean tells Sam, “...For you or Dad, the things I’m willing to do or kill, it just... it scares me sometimes.” One of the yellow-eyed demon’s comments to him, minutes later, while possessing John’s body is, “You know, you fight and you fight for this family, but the truth is… they don’t need you. Not like you need them (1-22).” It is a known fact that demons often make personal attacks most likely to warp a victim’s mind, and all Dean can do in response is stare, with a defensive smile. That his love and need for his father and brother is unreturned is one of Dean’s greatest fears.
He has arguably defined himself by his brotherhood with Sam since their mother’s death. One moment in particular stands out as the catalyst. The family home is burning, John Winchester snatches baby Sam from the nursery, hands him to four-year-old Dean and says, “Take your brother outside as fast as you can! Don’t look back! (1-1)” Dean’s older brother role suddenly thrust upon him the keeping of Sam’s life, in a situation that most fortunately do not experience. Dean did as he was told, keeping Sam safe, and as far as Supernatural has shown, he’s never stopped. The natural inclination of older brother protecting the younger was intensified by their childhood and their dangerous immersion in hunting; Dean took on the role of caretaker not only for love but necessity. Their father was often gone, preoccupied with hunting, and that left Dean as a kind of surrogate parent to Sam, besides sibling. His brother’s protector is an identity hardwired into Dean, and he doesn’t bother trying to hide it. In “All Hell Breaks Loose Part II,” Dean says to his brother’s corpse, “I always tried to protect you... Keep you safe... Dad didn't even have to tell me. It was just always my responsibility, you know? (2-22)” Later on in the episode, when he admits to Sam that he sold his soul, he defends his choice by saying, “I had to look out for you. That’s my job.”
Dean’s deal attests to his love for Sam more than anything. Regardless of the demon offering only one more year of life rather than the standard ten, Dean agrees with little hesitation. The irony lies in his parallelism to John, who sold his soul to save Dean; Dean spent months agonizing over that knowledge, condemning the choice as unfair. All of his previous arguments against it disintegrate when he is faced with the loss of his brother. Most people would bury their dead loved one and do their best to move on, as the Winchester brothers did with their father. Dean could not take that path with Sam. He makes that clear in “The Magnificent Seven”, when Sam asks how he could have made the deal. “’Cuz I couldn’t live with you dead. Couldn’t do it (3-1),” Dean responds. In the world of Supernatural, deal-making with a demon is an option and the one that Dean chose; in our own world, the only other alternative is suicide. Had Dean been unable to seal his deal to revive Sam, all his desperation points to suicide as the next likeliest outcome. His immediate response, prior to approaching a crossroads demon, is to withdraw. When a family friend, Bobby, comments that the end of the world may come, Dean shouts to let it end (2-22); without Sam, he abandons the fight he spent his whole life working in. He feels as if he failed Sam and asks, “How am I supposed to live with that?” as he sits by Sam’s corpse, in tears (2-22). Few people in our own world respond to a loved one’s death with suicide, but to Dean, who loves Sam most and perhaps even exclusively, self-destruction stands as the only option. As Bobby confronts him for making the deal, Dean looks at him in anguish and says, “I couldn’t let him die, Bobby. I couldn’t. He’s my brother.” This attitude of Dean’s made itself clear even before Sam’s death, in the episode “Croatoan” (2-9). A paranormal disease causes its victims to develop homicidal, violent tendencies, and Sam is thought to be infected. As the few remaining townspeople plan to leave, Dean chooses to stay behind with his brother, not allowing Sam to kill himself but volunteering for death also. Dean is incapable of surviving without Sam, though he can bear all other suffering, and that kind of need, while not often present in even the best of romances, exists unabashedly between the Winchester brothers.
Sam may not have always had the same degree of extreme loyalty to his family, but after almost three years of living alone with his brother and the experiences they shared in that time, he has grown to love and depend on Dean with equal intensity as Dean has for him. This change of heart is portrayed through three episodes in particular, one for each season. In Season One’s “Shadow,” Sam and Dean argue over what they will do after they kill the yellow-eyed demon, and Sam tells his brother, “I'm not gonna live this life forever. Dean, when this is all over, you're gonna have to let me go my own way (1-16).” Shortly after their father dies, Sam begins to rethink his future. In Season Two’s “Everybody Loves a Clown,” when Dean confronts him about it, Sam says, “I’m having second thoughts” [regarding a return to college] and “Dad would have wanted me to stick with the job (2-2).” We learn later on in the episode that, as Dean suspected, Sam is suffering from guilt over their father’s death; while this undoubtedly provoked Sam’s initial change, it makes it no less real as time goes on. By Season Three’s “Sin City,” Sam indicates in a dialogue with a priest that he has settled into the hunting life. The priest asks him if he’s thought about doing something else: “You seem like a pretty smart kid. Somehow, I see you in front of the pack. You could do some great things.” Sam answers with a brief smile: “I don’t know. I like what I’m doing, I guess (3-4).” Although the yellow-eyed demon dies in the Season Two finale, Sam shows no sign in Season Three of leaving his brother and returning to a “normal” life. One reason is his need to break Dean out of his deal; another does seem to be a lack of interest in that normalcy. In a peculiar reversal of roles, he is the one to reassure his brother that hunting is what they should be doing, after Dean’s encounter with a Djinn in “What Is and What Should Never Be”: “But people are alive because of you. It's worth it, Dean. It is. It's not fair, and, you know, it hurts like hell, but it's worth it (2-20).” Sam has come to feel the value of the job in a way he never completely did as a boy; he believes in it because of the good it does others.
Sam spent his childhood only ever being the “little brother,” but now as a man, he has accepted a sense of mutual duty toward Dean. He realizes how important Dean is to him and how much they belong together. As early as Season One’s “Skin,” Sam acknowledges to himself that despite his longing for a normal life, he could never be a part of it. “You know, truth is, even at Stanford, deep down, I never really fit in (1-6),” he tells Dean. Dean says that’s because he’s a freak. “Well I’m a freak too,” Dean adds. “I’m right there with you, all the way.” He reminds not only us but Sam that he is the one person who Sam fits with completely. In Season One’s “Salvation,” Sam openly recognizes Dean’s lifelong devotion to him: “Even when I couldn’t count on anyone, I could always count on you (1-21).” The following episode, “Devil’s Trap,” proves Sam’s ultimate loyalty to Dean, when Dean points the Colt at their father, who he suspects is possessed. After only a few moments of indecision, Sam moves to stand at his brother’s side, trusting that Dean is right even if it means their father’s death. When John urges Sam to kill him, thereby destroying the yellow-eyed demon, Dean lies bleeding on the floor nearby and pleads with Sam not to do it. Sam doesn’t - whether because of his own need for John or his brother’s pleas or a combination of the two. In the closing scene, John chastises Sam for failing to do so, saying, “Killing this demon comes first. Before me, before everything (1-22).” Sam peers into the rearview mirror at Dean in the back seat and says, “No, sir. Not everything.” A year later, in the aftermath of the demon’s death and Dean’s deal, Sam makes his devotion clear: “You've saved my life over and over. I mean, you sacrifice everything for me. Don't you think I'd do the same for you? You're my big brother. There's nothing I wouldn't do for you (2-22).”
Although the outcome of Dean’s deal remains to be seen, we have already received a preview of what Sam’s life would be without Dean, in the Season Three episode, “Mystery Spot.” Caught in a time loop created by a Trickster, Sam lives the same Tuesday over and over again, watching Dean die in every way imaginable. When Sam finally figures out the situation and confronts the Trickster, the brothers wake up on Wednesday, thinking the fiasco is over. Instead, Dean is shot and killed - and stays dead. Sam lives for at least three months afterward, transforming into a cold and hardened man. Rather than moving on to a “normal” life, he continues hunting alone, obsessively tracking the Trickster while taking other cases. He doesn’t answer Bobby’s calls, never seems to smile, and makes a habit of keeping his motel rooms neat with military precision. The bed is always tightly made, and his research clippings are arranged in straight lines on the wall. He eats in his room alone, travels alone, and tends to his own wounds without help. His extremity far surpasses his father’s, and by the time Bobby convinces him to meet up, Sam is ready to murder an innocent person for the sake of summoning the Trickster. When the Trickster does show up, one of the first lines out of his mouth is, “Whoever said Dean was the dysfunctional one has never seen you with a sharp object in your hands (3-11).” His loss makes Sam into the opposite of who he naturally is, into the person he always said he never wanted to be. While Dean’s response to losing Sam is externalized grief and self-destruction, Sam’s response to losing Dean is internalized grief manifesting as violence and a vengeance obsession. What the Trickster tells Sam resounds with chilling truth: “The way you two keep sacrificing yourselves for each other? Nothing good comes out of it. Just blood and pain. Dean’s your weakness. The bad guys know it, too. It’s gonna be the death of you, Sam... Sometimes, you gotta know when to let people go (3-11).” Echoing Dean’s words, Sam’s only reply is, “He’s my brother.” He ignores the Trickster’s warning, softly begging for Dean until he wakes up on that original Wednesday. Life returns to the way it was, the months alone now only a memory, but one that will haunt Sam as he tries to find a way to break the crossroads deal.
Supernatural is a show in which sex plays a surprisingly insignificant role, which is one reason why viewing Sam and Dean as nonsexual soul mates can make a peculiar amount of sense. Dean is sexually hedonistic, a womanizer who flirts and seduces tirelessly. He has sex on what seems to be a regular basis, the women changing with every town by weeks. His only use for sex is pleasure and otherwise, he’s made it almost to the age of thirty with only one emotional attachment to a lover - Cassie Robinson. She may not have physically been in Dean’s life long, but from her brief appearance on the show, it is obvious she affected him. He trusted her enough to tell her the truth about hunting, which is why it stung so badly when she rejected him for it. In contrast to Sam, Cassie’s love for Dean was instinctively conditional; it taught Dean not to trust anyone outside the hunting world to understand what he does, unless they experience it first-hand. Although Cassie discovers the truth to Dean’s confession, it doesn’t seem to change anything; her parting words in “Route 666” (1-13) are, “I’m a realist. I don’t see much hope for us, Dean.” After that, Dean returns to his habit of casual sex and wastes little time moping about the lack of romance.
Sam is the complete opposite of his brother when it comes to women. His relationship with Jessica was one of love, to the point where it was revealed he had intended to propose. After her death, Sam refused to forget her for several months. In the episode “What Is and What Should Never Be,” it is even portrayed that, if Mary Winchester had never died and spurred on her family’s involvement in hunting, Sam still would have gone on to fall in love with Jessica and marry her. While his brother has sex with any woman willing, Sam has shown little interest in it throughout the series. The two exceptions are Sarah in Season 1 and Madison in Season 2. His involvement with Sarah was only a flirtation, a brief connection that seemed to be mostly interest in personality. They shared a parting kiss when Sam and Dean left her town, but she has not been mentioned again. Madison is the one woman Sam was openly sexual towards on the show, although emotion had little to do with that attraction; it ended in grim terms, with Sam having to consensually kill her because she was a werewolf. Otherwise, Sam focuses on the job and his brother. He, unlike Dean, seems to connect sex with emotion; since he doesn’t have the opportunity to emotionally connect with women in a romantic way, he isn’t shown to have much sex. Being the more intellectual of the two, Sam indirectly suggests that there are more important matters - even for a twenty-five year-old.
Regardless of viewers’ religious beliefs, it can be agreed that the brothers share a love that reaches a level few people are familiar with. As indescribable as it is, a spiritual context is most suitable to understand their brotherhood. Sam and Dean could have ended up in separate families, could have died in the fire that claimed their mother, could have grown up hating each other for their differences or stayed apart after Sam’s departure for college. Instead, they were born brothers in a world of almost seven billion people and lived to manhood with an overwhelming love between them. That seems more than just a meaningless accident.
I do not pretend to know Eric Kripke’s intentions for Supernatural, including the nature of Sam and Dean’s connection. I may be entirely wrong - but I think there is some value to considering this theory of the brothers as nonsexual soul mates. Their love, no matter what its nature, leaves us in awe; looking at it with this spiritual element in mind not only fleshes it out but causes us as viewers to think. Sam and Dean, brother soul mates, cause us to reconsider and re-evaluate all of our ideas about love and human connection. They cause us to recognize and remember that a bond can exist between two people that is more powerful than sex, that the epic union of a lifetime may not come in tradition’s wrapping. They require us to accept that the greatest love isn’t confined to what is physical or worldly. In opening our minds to these ideas, Sam and Dean offer the opportunity to experience more, to be liberated instead of liberalized. Each man, when confronted with his desperate need for the other, says simply, “He’s my brother.” We know what they mean - and yet we can only begin to understand.