SPN 9x1-9 meta the first
I say "the first" because you all can probably count on a lot more pointedly-not-saying-I-told-you-so posts over the next five weeks.
A couple of weekends ago I rewatched a bunch of Angel: the Series S4 episodes. I’m going to describe this in as unspoilery a way as possible, because the parallels (a) are uncanny and (b) give me enough of a control comparison that I feel pretty comfortable in my reaction to the Gadreel storyline. [Character], initially a character with a lot of verve and independence, lost a lot of their emotional honesty and confidence throughout middle seasons of the show, largely because [Character] was trying to fit into an intense and exclusive emotional partnership with [Character B]. In the next season, [Character] had actually been tricked into handing over control of their brain and body to a dangerous unknown entity. [Character] is a character I often liked, though certainly not one that I loved in the way I love Sam, but I had and have now the same response as I have to the Gadreel situation: that “terrible thing happened to [Character] and was a clear violation of their autonomy” was/is a sad but fascinating storyline for me, while “[Character] hollows themselves out trying to fit into someone else’s generic perfect partner role” was distressing to me because I felt like their internal character logic was vanishing. Or, in short, I love watching a very bad thing be acknowledged as a BFD, but I despise watching a bad-but-undisrupted pattern be treated as acceptable or even good. I do believe things will end better for Sam than they did for [Character], who was replaceable in plot structure - THOUGH NOT IN OUR HEARTS - due to a relatively large ensemble of regulars and an even more complex and long-running intimate partnership set up for [Character B]. The permanent disappearance of Sam, among other things, would disrupt SPN in a way even AtS didn’t have the nerve to try and pull off.
So yeah. I feel...as confident as I can about the following.
It’s not that I think people who are concerned about Sam being swallowed up by someone else’s identity are wrong to be concerned? I just can’t wrap my brain about suddenly getting worried about that NOW when it has been happening for ages now.
In an episode review a while back I talked about reading “Zeke” as a metaphor for the Winchester codependency. (I don’t know whether it’s happening consciously, or just the symbiosis of plot threads that happen to be developing at the same time, but DAMN.) Every once in a while someone points out that fandom is fixated on how “the codependency” affects Dean but “~~nobody gets” how it affects Sam. Well, HAPPY FLAG DAY, HOOKAS, because that has been THE #1 PRIORITY of the first half of S9. If people STILL choose not to get it after this arc, you can just know that they’re yapping on in bad faith and ignore them!
And I think we’re also seeing an interrogation of viewer reaction through the guys’ different experiences of the Gadreel situation. It’s not easy on Dean, for sure. But between the two of them, he’s the one most responsible for the situation, he’s actively trying to call as many shots as possible, he’s making an active effort to keep Sam in the dark. Insofar as they can make choices in this situation, Dean’s the one driving. But Sam…Sam’s the one who’s just disappearing. Sam’s the one who’s clear on wanting to do something different with his life, have more relationship, at least have options, and so every time he buys into the codependency, it really is a zero-sum balance against parts of his identity. We’re watching Sam disappear because we have been doing so, during every OMG DA BRUDDERS!!! moment and choice we’ve seen along the way.
So yeah. Gadreel exists to show us the problems inherent to the SamnDean arrangement. I’ve mentioned this offhand more than once, but I think we have to be really careful about how we try to ~find the upside of Sam and Dean. After 9x8, everyone creamed themselves over Jody telling Sam that he and Dean “have something special,” totally ignoring Sam’s baffled, uncomfortable face there, and then creamed themselves again over his confessed unhappiness at the end of the episode, and then showed ZERO recognition that the first thing they were all excited about was a serious contributing factor to the second thing. I’ve been fairly certain that Sam knows something’s up in the more recent episodes, even before he snapped at Dean about missing the roadmarkers in the beginning of 9x9. But, with the constant indoctrination that things are so great with Dean you’re so lucky to have Dean Dean loves you so much OMG DEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENNN, Sam swallows any misgivings he might have about the alarm bells Dean’s behavior is setting off and just decides that this is yet more evidence that he is all wrong in his perceptions (because he thinks something doesn’t add up logically) and his emotions (because what’s wrong with him that he doesn’t appreciate their epic love??) so OF COURSE he thinks he is terrible.
I also find it very frustrating when people bend themselves into pretzels trying to say that Sam should be reacting “rationally” or to figure out how Sam “should” proportionately respond. As if the pattern of Sam’s behavior in response to Dean’s escalating manipulations has so far been rational, because apparently nodding along and knuckling under and stifling everything about himself because he wanted to make himself be Dean’s little cabbage patch doll was the CORRECT response, and for Sam to start doing things WRONG now by LETTING Dean get away with this SHOCKING crossing of the line, well, that would be INCONSISTENT! Guys, no, this is how their dynamic has been for a very long time - IMO since Dean started to regret his crossroads deal early in S3, though others might pinpoint it elsewhere - Dean makes a big decision for both of them and throws around his distress visibly, while Sam retreats into self-blame and self-silencing. I could not be more thrilled at the narrative choice to stomp around and wave in our faces how awful that is FOR SAM. Not because ~Dean cares too much~ or because ~Sam just feels so much guilt about What He’s Done~ but because Dean hurts Sam badly and Sam warps his view on the world and himself in order to believe that he deserves it.
One key aspect of this which fandom misrepresents is that Dean has failed to talk directly to Sam for a very long time now. Toward the end of last season I saw a lot of “why doesn’t Dean TELL SAM that he believes in Sam, why is he being SO STUPID??!” (or of course the bullshit “THE RITURRRZZZ are making Dean SO STUPID!!”). NO. WRONG. That is about what Dean SAYS, not what he DOES. Dean wasn’t conveniently remembering he believed in Sam in front of outsiders and then mysteriously forgetting about it the other 23 hours a day they were together. Dean defended Sam to outsiders but failed to bolster Sam’s confidence for the same set of reasons: status and self-image. Anyone else talking shit about Sam’s capabilities is disrespect to Dean because it’s an assault on the Winchester brand. But if Sam starts to believe in himself, then Dean loses the bulk of his control over Sam. Ain’t nobody fuckin’ with my clique - but make no mistake, it is MY clique and not OUR family. Dean is a lot less likely to miscalculate what information people need to understand something than he is to filter, skillfully, the information people will get so they think what he wants them to think. But all that stonewalling comes at a cost: that when Dean does need to get something through, Sam isn't able to hear it.
And that’s why I’ve been getting steadily more pissed off with “Dean is lying to Sam to PROTECT HIM!” If he’d tried to have Kevin look for this new spell six weeks ago, I could roll with that, but he didn’t. As Dean OPENLY ACKNOWLEDGES, “Zeke” could “end [Sam] in a heartbeat” and neither of them would be able to do anything to stop it as long as Sam didn’t know. Dean’s decision not to tell Sam or anyone else about “Zeke” has put Sam himself - not to mention Kevin and Cas - at GREATER risk. Leaving Sam out of it (and you know how hard that is for me), Dean’s failure to clue in Kevin and especially Cas is what most strongly suggests to me that this is about Dean’s ego and not Sam’s safety. He dances around the subject even when he’s trying to shake Cas early in 9x9; even after Cas tells him that Ezekiel is dead, Dean fails to impress the urgency of the situation on Cas not because he doesn’t need angelic help dealing with “Zeke” but because he doesn’t want to admit what he did to Cas.
This, too, is a pattern that has gone back a very long way - again, I would pinpoint it at All Hell Breaks Loose. People point to Dean’s heartrending speech at the beginning of Part 2 as an example of his love for his brother, assuming that because the character is very sympathetic there (and he is!), he is also a reliable narrator of his usual emotional state. This is such a mistake. But most telling of all is the fact that SAM ISN’T THERE for this ~~moment of brotherly love. Sam has left the building. Dean says all this to Sam’s corpse, to a lifeless object - again, understandable as an expression of his grief, but contextualizing this moment with the other 180 episodes of the show so far, it says something about the character that he is his most affectionate with “Sam” when Sam cannot hear him or talk back. This is why I think the seeming replacement of Sam with a Sam-lookalike is so brilliant and crucial to any hope they might have of salvaging this relationship. Dean has a pronounced tendency to accept Sam-substitutes, and then resent Sam for not being one of those idealized substitutes. Gadreel looks like Sam, can “play Sam convincingly,” but unlike Sam is tirelessly devoted, more than content with the Winchester isolation, and openly desperate to please: exactly what Dean has often wished Sam himself would be.
I have seen a bunch of people who are all concerned about how “Sammy” might be gone, which, bite me. That is a perfect microcosmic example of WHY the show NEEDS to do this. How many times has Sam tried to assert his own identity, starting from “it’s not Sammy, it’s Sam” in the PILOT? And how much does fandom romanticize Dean’s rejection of Sam’s autonomy, not least by situating Sam in his relationship to Dean as “Sammy,” a diminuitive form that Dean imposes on Sam? The name itself can be cute, I get it, generally speaking. But I think it’s really telling that this is the form of Sam’s name that I’m seeing in contexts that privilege DEAN’s experience of how victimizing Sam is blowing up in his face over SAM’s experience of being seriously imperiled. This is the central question asked of Dean (and by extension the viewers who evaluate the relationship from Dean’s POV): are “Sam” and “Sammy” entirely fungible, and if “Sammy,” then why not “Gadreel/Ezekiel/Zeke/whatever his goddamn name is”? Who gets to decide what qualifies as "Sam" - Sam, or Dean? And if you're even hesitating to answer that question, why?
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/320521.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
A couple of weekends ago I rewatched a bunch of Angel: the Series S4 episodes. I’m going to describe this in as unspoilery a way as possible, because the parallels (a) are uncanny and (b) give me enough of a control comparison that I feel pretty comfortable in my reaction to the Gadreel storyline. [Character], initially a character with a lot of verve and independence, lost a lot of their emotional honesty and confidence throughout middle seasons of the show, largely because [Character] was trying to fit into an intense and exclusive emotional partnership with [Character B]. In the next season, [Character] had actually been tricked into handing over control of their brain and body to a dangerous unknown entity. [Character] is a character I often liked, though certainly not one that I loved in the way I love Sam, but I had and have now the same response as I have to the Gadreel situation: that “terrible thing happened to [Character] and was a clear violation of their autonomy” was/is a sad but fascinating storyline for me, while “[Character] hollows themselves out trying to fit into someone else’s generic perfect partner role” was distressing to me because I felt like their internal character logic was vanishing. Or, in short, I love watching a very bad thing be acknowledged as a BFD, but I despise watching a bad-but-undisrupted pattern be treated as acceptable or even good. I do believe things will end better for Sam than they did for [Character], who was replaceable in plot structure - THOUGH NOT IN OUR HEARTS - due to a relatively large ensemble of regulars and an even more complex and long-running intimate partnership set up for [Character B]. The permanent disappearance of Sam, among other things, would disrupt SPN in a way even AtS didn’t have the nerve to try and pull off.
So yeah. I feel...as confident as I can about the following.
It’s not that I think people who are concerned about Sam being swallowed up by someone else’s identity are wrong to be concerned? I just can’t wrap my brain about suddenly getting worried about that NOW when it has been happening for ages now.
In an episode review a while back I talked about reading “Zeke” as a metaphor for the Winchester codependency. (I don’t know whether it’s happening consciously, or just the symbiosis of plot threads that happen to be developing at the same time, but DAMN.) Every once in a while someone points out that fandom is fixated on how “the codependency” affects Dean but “~~nobody gets” how it affects Sam. Well, HAPPY FLAG DAY, HOOKAS, because that has been THE #1 PRIORITY of the first half of S9. If people STILL choose not to get it after this arc, you can just know that they’re yapping on in bad faith and ignore them!
- The name it gives itself is well-known as something good, even admirable. Dean then gives it a cute, snappy nickname, something that allows him to feel like he’s affectionately, benevolently, in control of the situation.
- Gadreel saves Sam’s life but drains Sam and keeps him weak and unsettled, as the fraternal “you ~need me” mind games destabilize him.
- Gadreel actively drives away anyone else who might challenge the status quo.
- He constantly, shamelessly, shifts the goalposts for what hoops need to be jumped through before things can be okay.
- Sam’s claim of happiness in the season premiere, clearly intended not to be believed, reminded me of nothing so much as the “family! Is! The best! Thing! Ever!” insistence we’ve gotten throughout the series, not least from the characters themselves. Um, it’s not like people haven’t heard of this wacky newfangled “family” deal? If it’s really that great, why the hard sell, hmmmmmm?
- The situation undermines Sam's belief in his own humanity and encourages him to look outward for the source of that dehumanization.
And I think we’re also seeing an interrogation of viewer reaction through the guys’ different experiences of the Gadreel situation. It’s not easy on Dean, for sure. But between the two of them, he’s the one most responsible for the situation, he’s actively trying to call as many shots as possible, he’s making an active effort to keep Sam in the dark. Insofar as they can make choices in this situation, Dean’s the one driving. But Sam…Sam’s the one who’s just disappearing. Sam’s the one who’s clear on wanting to do something different with his life, have more relationship, at least have options, and so every time he buys into the codependency, it really is a zero-sum balance against parts of his identity. We’re watching Sam disappear because we have been doing so, during every OMG DA BRUDDERS!!! moment and choice we’ve seen along the way.
So yeah. Gadreel exists to show us the problems inherent to the SamnDean arrangement. I’ve mentioned this offhand more than once, but I think we have to be really careful about how we try to ~find the upside of Sam and Dean. After 9x8, everyone creamed themselves over Jody telling Sam that he and Dean “have something special,” totally ignoring Sam’s baffled, uncomfortable face there, and then creamed themselves again over his confessed unhappiness at the end of the episode, and then showed ZERO recognition that the first thing they were all excited about was a serious contributing factor to the second thing. I’ve been fairly certain that Sam knows something’s up in the more recent episodes, even before he snapped at Dean about missing the roadmarkers in the beginning of 9x9. But, with the constant indoctrination that things are so great with Dean you’re so lucky to have Dean Dean loves you so much OMG DEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENNN, Sam swallows any misgivings he might have about the alarm bells Dean’s behavior is setting off and just decides that this is yet more evidence that he is all wrong in his perceptions (because he thinks something doesn’t add up logically) and his emotions (because what’s wrong with him that he doesn’t appreciate their epic love??) so OF COURSE he thinks he is terrible.
I also find it very frustrating when people bend themselves into pretzels trying to say that Sam should be reacting “rationally” or to figure out how Sam “should” proportionately respond. As if the pattern of Sam’s behavior in response to Dean’s escalating manipulations has so far been rational, because apparently nodding along and knuckling under and stifling everything about himself because he wanted to make himself be Dean’s little cabbage patch doll was the CORRECT response, and for Sam to start doing things WRONG now by LETTING Dean get away with this SHOCKING crossing of the line, well, that would be INCONSISTENT! Guys, no, this is how their dynamic has been for a very long time - IMO since Dean started to regret his crossroads deal early in S3, though others might pinpoint it elsewhere - Dean makes a big decision for both of them and throws around his distress visibly, while Sam retreats into self-blame and self-silencing. I could not be more thrilled at the narrative choice to stomp around and wave in our faces how awful that is FOR SAM. Not because ~Dean cares too much~ or because ~Sam just feels so much guilt about What He’s Done~ but because Dean hurts Sam badly and Sam warps his view on the world and himself in order to believe that he deserves it.
One key aspect of this which fandom misrepresents is that Dean has failed to talk directly to Sam for a very long time now. Toward the end of last season I saw a lot of “why doesn’t Dean TELL SAM that he believes in Sam, why is he being SO STUPID??!” (or of course the bullshit “THE RITURRRZZZ are making Dean SO STUPID!!”). NO. WRONG. That is about what Dean SAYS, not what he DOES. Dean wasn’t conveniently remembering he believed in Sam in front of outsiders and then mysteriously forgetting about it the other 23 hours a day they were together. Dean defended Sam to outsiders but failed to bolster Sam’s confidence for the same set of reasons: status and self-image. Anyone else talking shit about Sam’s capabilities is disrespect to Dean because it’s an assault on the Winchester brand. But if Sam starts to believe in himself, then Dean loses the bulk of his control over Sam. Ain’t nobody fuckin’ with my clique - but make no mistake, it is MY clique and not OUR family. Dean is a lot less likely to miscalculate what information people need to understand something than he is to filter, skillfully, the information people will get so they think what he wants them to think. But all that stonewalling comes at a cost: that when Dean does need to get something through, Sam isn't able to hear it.
And that’s why I’ve been getting steadily more pissed off with “Dean is lying to Sam to PROTECT HIM!” If he’d tried to have Kevin look for this new spell six weeks ago, I could roll with that, but he didn’t. As Dean OPENLY ACKNOWLEDGES, “Zeke” could “end [Sam] in a heartbeat” and neither of them would be able to do anything to stop it as long as Sam didn’t know. Dean’s decision not to tell Sam or anyone else about “Zeke” has put Sam himself - not to mention Kevin and Cas - at GREATER risk. Leaving Sam out of it (and you know how hard that is for me), Dean’s failure to clue in Kevin and especially Cas is what most strongly suggests to me that this is about Dean’s ego and not Sam’s safety. He dances around the subject even when he’s trying to shake Cas early in 9x9; even after Cas tells him that Ezekiel is dead, Dean fails to impress the urgency of the situation on Cas not because he doesn’t need angelic help dealing with “Zeke” but because he doesn’t want to admit what he did to Cas.
This, too, is a pattern that has gone back a very long way - again, I would pinpoint it at All Hell Breaks Loose. People point to Dean’s heartrending speech at the beginning of Part 2 as an example of his love for his brother, assuming that because the character is very sympathetic there (and he is!), he is also a reliable narrator of his usual emotional state. This is such a mistake. But most telling of all is the fact that SAM ISN’T THERE for this ~~moment of brotherly love. Sam has left the building. Dean says all this to Sam’s corpse, to a lifeless object - again, understandable as an expression of his grief, but contextualizing this moment with the other 180 episodes of the show so far, it says something about the character that he is his most affectionate with “Sam” when Sam cannot hear him or talk back. This is why I think the seeming replacement of Sam with a Sam-lookalike is so brilliant and crucial to any hope they might have of salvaging this relationship. Dean has a pronounced tendency to accept Sam-substitutes, and then resent Sam for not being one of those idealized substitutes. Gadreel looks like Sam, can “play Sam convincingly,” but unlike Sam is tirelessly devoted, more than content with the Winchester isolation, and openly desperate to please: exactly what Dean has often wished Sam himself would be.
I have seen a bunch of people who are all concerned about how “Sammy” might be gone, which, bite me. That is a perfect microcosmic example of WHY the show NEEDS to do this. How many times has Sam tried to assert his own identity, starting from “it’s not Sammy, it’s Sam” in the PILOT? And how much does fandom romanticize Dean’s rejection of Sam’s autonomy, not least by situating Sam in his relationship to Dean as “Sammy,” a diminuitive form that Dean imposes on Sam? The name itself can be cute, I get it, generally speaking. But I think it’s really telling that this is the form of Sam’s name that I’m seeing in contexts that privilege DEAN’s experience of how victimizing Sam is blowing up in his face over SAM’s experience of being seriously imperiled. This is the central question asked of Dean (and by extension the viewers who evaluate the relationship from Dean’s POV): are “Sam” and “Sammy” entirely fungible, and if “Sammy,” then why not “Gadreel/Ezekiel/Zeke/whatever his goddamn name is”? Who gets to decide what qualifies as "Sam" - Sam, or Dean? And if you're even hesitating to answer that question, why?
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/320521.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.