and yet more SPN S8 thoughts.
I have absolutely no intention of shutting up about Supernatural.
So last week I kept starting to read reactions to Sacrifice, and then having to check out immediately because I kept having the same problem with all of them, which is the (likely predictable) apparent consensus of accepting Dean's contention that Sam should have known Dean DIDN'T MEEAAAAAN all the awful things he's said that led Sam to believe he didn't care if Sam lived or died. Sam, apparently, was just making things up, hearing things that weren't said and seeing things that weren't there, projecting his own self-loathing onto his poor, badly-spoken but clearly devoted brother. That wacky Sam!
IMO, this is a highly convenient misrepresentation Dean made in a hot moment - one which he may half believe, but which isn't really borne out by their interactions all this time. So I find the unspoken acceptance of it to absolutely chafe on a lot of levels, but the one I keep coming back to is how convinced Sam was that Dean despises him in the same way he despises himself. How closely it was all tied in with Sam's conviction that he's "unclean." And just how relentlessly Sam has been encouraged to think that way. I'm not pretending to be objective here, because I'm so far past being able to separate from this in some ways, but I really do think it's tough to deny that there is a pattern. This is by no means exhaustive - it's just the list of things that occurred to me at the gym this week and stuck with me long enough to come home and pull them off the SuperWiki. I tried to minimize the editorializing. (Tried.)
Dean manipulating Sam with Sam's inherent awfulness starts in the first conversation we see between them.
DEAN Does Jessica know the truth about you? I mean, does she know about the things you've done?
SAM No, and she's not ever going to know.
DEAN Well, that's healthy. You can pretend all you want, Sammy. But sooner or later you're going to have to face up to who you really are. (Pilot)
The only reason Jess can STAND you is that she doesn't know anything about you. Leave this life and come with me, because nobody else could possibly want you.
This stops being about "one of us" and starts being about Sam himself.
DEAN: So you've been using your, uh, freaky ESP stuff?
SAM: No.
DEAN: You sure about that? Well, I mean, now that you've got... immunity, whatever the hell that is... just wondering what other kind of weirdo crap you've got going on.
SAM: Nothing, Dean. Look, you didn't want me to go down that road, so I didn't go down that road. It was practically your dying wish.
DEAN: Yeah, well, let's keep it that way. (Lazarus Rising)
The "freaky" reason you survived my insane plan which was basically guaranteed to take you down with me three months ago? Even if all you did was stand there and be a "weirdo" AT something, DON'T DO THAT IT'S AWFUL.
But hey, sticks and stones may break my bones but - oh.
SAM: Hold on. Dean, come on, man.
DEAN turns around and punches him in the face with his right hand. SAM whirls around by the force. DEAN just watches him as he turns back around to DEAN.
SAM: You satisfied?
DEAN hits him again, and then throws his bag on the floor. SAM touches his lip, which is bleeding.
SAM: I guess not.
DEAN: Do you even know how far off the reservation you've gone? How far from normal? From human? (Metamorphosis)
Bear in mind that this violent fucking tantrum is precipitated by Sam.....performing an exorcism. A thing Dean has seen Sam do. A thing Dean has asked Sam to do. A thing Dean has done himself on numerous occasions. But Sam did it in a way particular to his "non-human" state of being, and THAT apparently (and going by Sam's non-reaction, predictably) merited a beat-down. Sam is supposed to deny, deny, deny, spend his life pretending he is not who and what he is, no matter what the cost to him or anyone else.
SAM: [Dealing with Samhain, who is about to throw a demon party and kill HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE, m]ight take more than the usual weapons.
DEAN:
Sam, no, you’re not using your psychic whatever. Don’t even think about it. Ruby’s knife is enough.
SAM: Why?
DEAN: Well because the angels said so for one -
SAM: I thought you said they were a bunch of fanatics.
DEAN: Well they happen to be right about this one. (It's the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester)
I don't give a fuck what the angels think, unless they're saying something about you is dirty, in which case they're bang on target! Ruby's knife - IE A WEAPON FROM A DEMON - is morally acceptable, while something inside of you is WRONG. HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE DYING is less bad than you using your brain in this particular way.
And of course:
DEAN: Because it's not something that you're doing, it's what you are! It means-
SAM: What? No. Say it.
DEAN: It means you're a monster. (Levee)
But hey, this was Dean "try[ing] to help him." (Lucifer Rising) What a generous font of useful information you are, Dean!
I'm leaving off the faked phone call because I'm more interested in Dean's state of mind, and ofc he didn't do that or know about it. I don't want to foist off blame on the angels and the apocalypse and blah blah blah. But it's worth mentioning (a) it is part of Sam's understanding of their relationship and (b) he didn't think to question it then or since precisely because it fit into their established pattern.
Aside from that, there are numerous things Dean doesn't (mean to) say to Sam that heavily contradict the idea that "he didn't mean it." I'm not saying that the "undermine Sam's self-confidence so that he can never leave me" scheme is in any way acceptable. Far from it. But, given that Dean's abandonment issues are the big stank red herring that gets waved around, I want to look separately at the lines which cannot be attributed to that strategic pattern, and still point to an express belief that Sam is metaphysically other, and morally less, than human.
DEAN (compelled by Andy to "tell the truth"): He's psychic. Kind of like you. Well, not really like you, but see, he thinks you're a murderer, and he's afraid that he's going to become one himself, 'cause you're all part of something that's terrible. And I hope to hell that he's wrong, but I'm starting to get a little scared that he might be right. (Simon Said)
No, he didn't mean to say it - he tried not to say it - but he meant it.
YED: Well, it's a better shake than your dad ever got. And you never wondered why? I'm surprised at you. I mean...you saw what your brother just did to Jake, right? That was pretty cold, wasn't it? How certain are you that what you brought back, is 100% pure Sam? (AHBL2)
DEAN: Are you feeling okay?
SAM: Uh, why are you always asking me that? (Malleus Maleficarum)
Sam doesn't quite know what's going on here, but we, the audience, do. Dean worries that Sam is not pure 100% Sam - ie, impure, part demon. Tarnished. Unclean. Same language.
BOBBY: And if he dies?
DEAN: Then at least he dies human! (Levee)
This is exactly what Sam was saying in that church. Sam thinks completion of the trials will purify him, will purge him of demon blood he had in him way before he started voluntarily dosing himself. And if at least he dies human....so what? We have more reason than Sam does to understand that this is Dean's viewpoint.
Sam is hardly pulling stuff out of thin air concerning Dean's opinion of him, and Dean's assertion that he is is pretty clearly highlighted in the text as victim-blaming (how DARE YOU think I said what I in fact actually said?!). But it takes as strongly as it does because Sam has gotten this same message from basically everyone else in his life.
JOHN: All right, something like this starts happening to your brother, you pick up the phone and you call me.
DEAN: Call you? Are you kidding me? Dad I called you from Lawrence all right? Sam called you when I was dying. (Salvation)
Look, I think it is perfectly fair to have most sympathy for Dean's POV here - that John is showing more attention toward Sam than toward him - but that doesn't mean Sam is completely irrelevant to this conversation. John is saying that one of his sons experiencing the demonic symptoms is more urgent than one of his sons DYING. Being you, living out this thing you did not choose and cannot stop, is WORSE. THAN. DEATH.
It'll kill you. So?
Tying this back to S8, John's behavior his hardly Dean's fault, ofc. But Dean's utter refusal in the seven years since John's death to pull his head out of his ass and acknowledge that he wasn't the only one negatively affected by John's crap? That is on him, and if he were told this story about anyone other than himself, he would be the first one to agree.
But John's just a dick, right? And it's not like Sam couldn't see through his bullshit.
BOBBY [You pulling me out of a terminal coma d]idn't have anything to do with... you know, your psychic stuff?
SAM No. I mean, I don't think so.
BOBBY (nods) Good. Good. (Dream a Little Dream)
I'd rather be dead than you do your freak sub-human thing!
Cas has numerous lines to this effect - almost his first line to Sam is to other him as "the boy with the demon blood"; as late as 99 Problems he is referring to Sam as "an abomination." From our third-person POV, we know that Cas has also become deeply loyal to and protective of Sam, particularly as seen in his scens with Anna and Lucifer in S5 and the great concern for Sam he shows in his POV episode in late S6, but Sam doesn't have this information. Moreover, we know a lot more about how questionable Castiel's value system is than Sam does. And, what with Cas having major limitations on his ability to communicate and with Sam's (UNDERSTANDABLE, in case I'm being too subtle here) (ed. note: LOL) tendency to assume the people around him think the worst of him, their sparse interactions have not done much to show Sam that Cas has reevaluated him. From Sam's perspective, Cas sticks around for Dean, only answers Sam's prayers when he is actually dying and needs help and Dean isn't offering, even claims to have saved Sam's sanity in preservation of his own. I want Sam and Cas to be besties at least as much as anyone, but they're not there yet, in large part because Sam ascribes the YOU SUCK SAM attitude he gets from everyone else in the world to Cas, with good reason. Thinking about it now, there's good evidence to interpret Cas as displaying the "bad representation of good feelings" that we're all rushing to attribute to Dean.
CHUCK: Oh... You want to know if I know about the demon blood.
SAM: You didn't tell Dean.
CHUCK: I didn't even write it into the books. I was afraid it would make you look unsympathetic.
(A) UNSYMPATHETIC MY ASS. Go Chuck yourself, hater-bitch.* (B) You can BE a demon blood freak as long as you don't do ANYTHING which connotes acceptance of your demon blood freak-ness, in which case presumably anyone who finds out about it will stop tolerating you as a ~tragic freak who virtuously denies your own freak-ness.
QED: Sam is not making shit up. Sam is not doing this all to himself out of nowhere because he read the script. Sam has had this hateful dehumanization actively drilled into him before our eyes for years now. Dean is neither the instigator nor the sole perpetrator of this shaming campaign, but he is its most prominent and vocal participant. The fact that Sam doesn't call attention to it until he is actually dying does not mean this conditioning didn't happen. On the contrary, it means it really, really worked.
Which is clearly why I could hardly have loved the finale more. Because it not only recognized a pattern that I've found painfully consistent over the seasons, but also because it took the unspoken acceptance of that pattern and made it into a plot point. That Sam thought this all this time; that Dean the POV character has successfully convinced himself that he doesn't think the things he thinks and say the things he says. That even in the central relationship of the series, all is very much not as it seems, because we are all unreliable narrators. The way they've been seeing themselves, the story they've been telling themselves about their interactions with each other, has viewpoint and translation issues. This question of what's real is so deep and so intimate, and tweaking our perspective even a little changes everything.
*KIDDING. Unless you feel me on frigging Chuck, in which case:
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/298960.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
So last week I kept starting to read reactions to Sacrifice, and then having to check out immediately because I kept having the same problem with all of them, which is the (likely predictable) apparent consensus of accepting Dean's contention that Sam should have known Dean DIDN'T MEEAAAAAN all the awful things he's said that led Sam to believe he didn't care if Sam lived or died. Sam, apparently, was just making things up, hearing things that weren't said and seeing things that weren't there, projecting his own self-loathing onto his poor, badly-spoken but clearly devoted brother. That wacky Sam!
IMO, this is a highly convenient misrepresentation Dean made in a hot moment - one which he may half believe, but which isn't really borne out by their interactions all this time. So I find the unspoken acceptance of it to absolutely chafe on a lot of levels, but the one I keep coming back to is how convinced Sam was that Dean despises him in the same way he despises himself. How closely it was all tied in with Sam's conviction that he's "unclean." And just how relentlessly Sam has been encouraged to think that way. I'm not pretending to be objective here, because I'm so far past being able to separate from this in some ways, but I really do think it's tough to deny that there is a pattern. This is by no means exhaustive - it's just the list of things that occurred to me at the gym this week and stuck with me long enough to come home and pull them off the SuperWiki. I tried to minimize the editorializing. (Tried.)
Dean manipulating Sam with Sam's inherent awfulness starts in the first conversation we see between them.
DEAN Does Jessica know the truth about you? I mean, does she know about the things you've done?
SAM No, and she's not ever going to know.
DEAN Well, that's healthy. You can pretend all you want, Sammy. But sooner or later you're going to have to face up to who you really are. (Pilot)
The only reason Jess can STAND you is that she doesn't know anything about you. Leave this life and come with me, because nobody else could possibly want you.
This stops being about "one of us" and starts being about Sam himself.
DEAN: So you've been using your, uh, freaky ESP stuff?
SAM: No.
DEAN: You sure about that? Well, I mean, now that you've got... immunity, whatever the hell that is... just wondering what other kind of weirdo crap you've got going on.
SAM: Nothing, Dean. Look, you didn't want me to go down that road, so I didn't go down that road. It was practically your dying wish.
DEAN: Yeah, well, let's keep it that way. (Lazarus Rising)
The "freaky" reason you survived my insane plan which was basically guaranteed to take you down with me three months ago? Even if all you did was stand there and be a "weirdo" AT something, DON'T DO THAT IT'S AWFUL.
But hey, sticks and stones may break my bones but - oh.
SAM: Hold on. Dean, come on, man.
DEAN turns around and punches him in the face with his right hand. SAM whirls around by the force. DEAN just watches him as he turns back around to DEAN.
SAM: You satisfied?
DEAN hits him again, and then throws his bag on the floor. SAM touches his lip, which is bleeding.
SAM: I guess not.
DEAN: Do you even know how far off the reservation you've gone? How far from normal? From human? (Metamorphosis)
Bear in mind that this violent fucking tantrum is precipitated by Sam.....performing an exorcism. A thing Dean has seen Sam do. A thing Dean has asked Sam to do. A thing Dean has done himself on numerous occasions. But Sam did it in a way particular to his "non-human" state of being, and THAT apparently (and going by Sam's non-reaction, predictably) merited a beat-down. Sam is supposed to deny, deny, deny, spend his life pretending he is not who and what he is, no matter what the cost to him or anyone else.
SAM: [Dealing with Samhain, who is about to throw a demon party and kill HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE, m]ight take more than the usual weapons.
DEAN:
Sam, no, you’re not using your psychic whatever. Don’t even think about it. Ruby’s knife is enough.
SAM: Why?
DEAN: Well because the angels said so for one -
SAM: I thought you said they were a bunch of fanatics.
DEAN: Well they happen to be right about this one. (It's the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester)
I don't give a fuck what the angels think, unless they're saying something about you is dirty, in which case they're bang on target! Ruby's knife - IE A WEAPON FROM A DEMON - is morally acceptable, while something inside of you is WRONG. HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE DYING is less bad than you using your brain in this particular way.
And of course:
DEAN: Because it's not something that you're doing, it's what you are! It means-
SAM: What? No. Say it.
DEAN: It means you're a monster. (Levee)
But hey, this was Dean "try[ing] to help him." (Lucifer Rising) What a generous font of useful information you are, Dean!
I'm leaving off the faked phone call because I'm more interested in Dean's state of mind, and ofc he didn't do that or know about it. I don't want to foist off blame on the angels and the apocalypse and blah blah blah. But it's worth mentioning (a) it is part of Sam's understanding of their relationship and (b) he didn't think to question it then or since precisely because it fit into their established pattern.
Aside from that, there are numerous things Dean doesn't (mean to) say to Sam that heavily contradict the idea that "he didn't mean it." I'm not saying that the "undermine Sam's self-confidence so that he can never leave me" scheme is in any way acceptable. Far from it. But, given that Dean's abandonment issues are the big stank red herring that gets waved around, I want to look separately at the lines which cannot be attributed to that strategic pattern, and still point to an express belief that Sam is metaphysically other, and morally less, than human.
DEAN (compelled by Andy to "tell the truth"): He's psychic. Kind of like you. Well, not really like you, but see, he thinks you're a murderer, and he's afraid that he's going to become one himself, 'cause you're all part of something that's terrible. And I hope to hell that he's wrong, but I'm starting to get a little scared that he might be right. (Simon Said)
No, he didn't mean to say it - he tried not to say it - but he meant it.
YED: Well, it's a better shake than your dad ever got. And you never wondered why? I'm surprised at you. I mean...you saw what your brother just did to Jake, right? That was pretty cold, wasn't it? How certain are you that what you brought back, is 100% pure Sam? (AHBL2)
DEAN: Are you feeling okay?
SAM: Uh, why are you always asking me that? (Malleus Maleficarum)
Sam doesn't quite know what's going on here, but we, the audience, do. Dean worries that Sam is not pure 100% Sam - ie, impure, part demon. Tarnished. Unclean. Same language.
BOBBY: And if he dies?
DEAN: Then at least he dies human! (Levee)
This is exactly what Sam was saying in that church. Sam thinks completion of the trials will purify him, will purge him of demon blood he had in him way before he started voluntarily dosing himself. And if at least he dies human....so what? We have more reason than Sam does to understand that this is Dean's viewpoint.
Sam is hardly pulling stuff out of thin air concerning Dean's opinion of him, and Dean's assertion that he is is pretty clearly highlighted in the text as victim-blaming (how DARE YOU think I said what I in fact actually said?!). But it takes as strongly as it does because Sam has gotten this same message from basically everyone else in his life.
JOHN: All right, something like this starts happening to your brother, you pick up the phone and you call me.
DEAN: Call you? Are you kidding me? Dad I called you from Lawrence all right? Sam called you when I was dying. (Salvation)
Look, I think it is perfectly fair to have most sympathy for Dean's POV here - that John is showing more attention toward Sam than toward him - but that doesn't mean Sam is completely irrelevant to this conversation. John is saying that one of his sons experiencing the demonic symptoms is more urgent than one of his sons DYING. Being you, living out this thing you did not choose and cannot stop, is WORSE. THAN. DEATH.
It'll kill you. So?
Tying this back to S8, John's behavior his hardly Dean's fault, ofc. But Dean's utter refusal in the seven years since John's death to pull his head out of his ass and acknowledge that he wasn't the only one negatively affected by John's crap? That is on him, and if he were told this story about anyone other than himself, he would be the first one to agree.
But John's just a dick, right? And it's not like Sam couldn't see through his bullshit.
BOBBY [You pulling me out of a terminal coma d]idn't have anything to do with... you know, your psychic stuff?
SAM No. I mean, I don't think so.
BOBBY (nods) Good. Good. (Dream a Little Dream)
I'd rather be dead than you do your freak sub-human thing!
Cas has numerous lines to this effect - almost his first line to Sam is to other him as "the boy with the demon blood"; as late as 99 Problems he is referring to Sam as "an abomination." From our third-person POV, we know that Cas has also become deeply loyal to and protective of Sam, particularly as seen in his scens with Anna and Lucifer in S5 and the great concern for Sam he shows in his POV episode in late S6, but Sam doesn't have this information. Moreover, we know a lot more about how questionable Castiel's value system is than Sam does. And, what with Cas having major limitations on his ability to communicate and with Sam's (UNDERSTANDABLE, in case I'm being too subtle here) (ed. note: LOL) tendency to assume the people around him think the worst of him, their sparse interactions have not done much to show Sam that Cas has reevaluated him. From Sam's perspective, Cas sticks around for Dean, only answers Sam's prayers when he is actually dying and needs help and Dean isn't offering, even claims to have saved Sam's sanity in preservation of his own. I want Sam and Cas to be besties at least as much as anyone, but they're not there yet, in large part because Sam ascribes the YOU SUCK SAM attitude he gets from everyone else in the world to Cas, with good reason. Thinking about it now, there's good evidence to interpret Cas as displaying the "bad representation of good feelings" that we're all rushing to attribute to Dean.
CHUCK: Oh... You want to know if I know about the demon blood.
SAM: You didn't tell Dean.
CHUCK: I didn't even write it into the books. I was afraid it would make you look unsympathetic.
(A) UNSYMPATHETIC MY ASS. Go Chuck yourself, hater-bitch.* (B) You can BE a demon blood freak as long as you don't do ANYTHING which connotes acceptance of your demon blood freak-ness, in which case presumably anyone who finds out about it will stop tolerating you as a ~tragic freak who virtuously denies your own freak-ness.
QED: Sam is not making shit up. Sam is not doing this all to himself out of nowhere because he read the script. Sam has had this hateful dehumanization actively drilled into him before our eyes for years now. Dean is neither the instigator nor the sole perpetrator of this shaming campaign, but he is its most prominent and vocal participant. The fact that Sam doesn't call attention to it until he is actually dying does not mean this conditioning didn't happen. On the contrary, it means it really, really worked.
Which is clearly why I could hardly have loved the finale more. Because it not only recognized a pattern that I've found painfully consistent over the seasons, but also because it took the unspoken acceptance of that pattern and made it into a plot point. That Sam thought this all this time; that Dean the POV character has successfully convinced himself that he doesn't think the things he thinks and say the things he says. That even in the central relationship of the series, all is very much not as it seems, because we are all unreliable narrators. The way they've been seeing themselves, the story they've been telling themselves about their interactions with each other, has viewpoint and translation issues. This question of what's real is so deep and so intimate, and tweaking our perspective even a little changes everything.
*KIDDING. Unless you feel me on frigging Chuck, in which case:
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/298960.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.