Gadreel and audience expectations
I could give a long list of things that I like about Carver's run of the show so far and it'd be totally honest. He's doing a lot of interesting stuff. But I think the core reason I'm enjoying it so much is that he manages to give me what I want but not at all in the way I'd expect it. And I think the opposite of that is happening for a lot of people: they're getting exactly what they expected they would like, and they're getting it in a way that shows those desires badly. I would argue that the Gadreel storyline is an almost-certainly deliberate deconstruction of what the General Fandom We think that we want.
Note: I didn’t want to do the vague passive-voice ~~SOME PEOPLE argument here, so I decided to link to some examples of what I’m talking about. To be clear, though, I’m not singling any of these posts out for being particularly egregious, I’ve chosen them as examples precisely because they are representative of fandom-at-large.
My favorite anecdote supporting this reading would be about the acafans who went to a conference and argued with Ackles about what character Ackles himself was playing in the dreamscape, because they love Dean Winchester so fucking much they can’t even tell whether or not they’re looking at him on screen. Now, I’m not saying they necessarily have to accept his interpretation. For example, I am not sure I agree with Richards on the question of Death/”Death” in Sam’s dreamscape, because there was no textual indication either way. However, the fact that the entity appearing in Sam’s head looking like “Dean” was actually the angel calling itself Ezekiel was sufficiently conveyed not just by Ackles’ affect (which was, as always, impeccable) but by the rules of the ‘verse generally - angels must be given “consent” themselves, it cannot happen by proxy - and by the specific wording Gadreel used.
But still, people WANTED so badly for “Dean” to be really Dean, and I don’t think that’s quite as simple as they liked what the character was saying. I think that Gadreel-as-Dean was putting on a show that Sam bought because it was uncannily in line with the persona Dean has convinced Sam to believe. People are still using “there ain’t no me if there ain’t no you” as an example of the ~brotherly love~ even though OH MY GOD, IT WAS NOT EVEN DEAN, HAHAHAHAHA. Finally we had a moment where Dean was talking and acting like the does-it-all-for-love brother so much of fandom wants to believe that he is, and it was discernibly not Dean.
But the brouhaha persisted, despite the minimal interruption to Dean’s identity here (or perhaps because of the manageable size of the issue): “Zeke” was in and out of him in a few minutes, accomplished the task he and Dean had agreed upon, and was, after all, performing a role that Dean himself strives to present to others and IMO consciously believes himself most of the time. But I think we also saw Gadreel work his slippery POV-warping magic on us for the first time. This tiny toe in the door happens when we think we are on top of all the untruths here. We are aware that we are in Sam’s fuzzy, subjective dreamscape, and we are equally aware of the deception that occurred. In that moment, we’re comfortably insulated by what looks like an omniscient and objective POV.
Or, you know. The other thing.
I mentioned the other day that I was enjoying the standalone episodes at a much higher rate than usual, and I don’t think it’s an accident. There is no such thing as a standalone episode in this kind of arc. Every episode forces us to reevaluate what we know and why we think we know it. Is that Sam? Can we tell if that’s Sam? What does it mean that we have to ask ourselves this? And look: this is not sloppiness, it is not obfuscation. Every episode since the season premiere has been about experiencing the slip of Dean’s grasp on his own POV, and our own understanding of the viewer POV changing. Sam is the only person operating with the confidence the audience had during the initial perception, and Sam is shockingly wrong - indeed, the fact that Sam consciously buys into the construct the fandom wants to believe is a big part of what's keeping him from the truth.
Gadreel’s defining quality so far seems to be a desperate, eager malleability, needing so badly to be accepted by someone that he threw his own identity to the wind for Dean and then became a murderer for Metatron. (It's all about giving people what they want, after all.) I’d argue that this is what people expect of Sam, and I don’t think that just because this is the only way SamnDean is even possible, either. The posts I still see flying across my dash about how Meg “should” have been saved/grieved onscreen are frankly astounding to me. Now, whether or not people were unhappy about her dying (meh) or whether the death was a good thing from a plotting perspective (I think it was since she was both an obvious and insufficient candidate for the final trial) is a different set of issues. But people really think that the characters - and it’s usually Sam specifically - were somehow obligated to voice the audience’s feelings about Meg. If we cared about Sam-as-subject, we’d probably think “well, their ~history mostly consists of her aiding and abetting in the plot to murder his mom and girlfriend, stalking him, sexually assaulting him and his friend, and implicating him in a whole bunch of murders, and also he was busy with all the dying by that point in S8, so maybe his not totally losing his shit over her biting it on a mission she happily signed on for was understandable.” But no, Sam was expected to absorb and reflect our affection for his abuser, and the fact that he didn’t means that THE RITURRRZZZ dropped the ball and were expressing unconscionable hostility toward Meg, because obviously Our Darling Little Sammy was just worried sick about her.
Even sincere attempts to take a stab at the ethical issues in the Gadreel situation are operating at surface level, claiming that Sam HONESTLY AND TRULY WANTED TO DIE and that’s why his survival may be morally questionable. And the only evidence supporting the surface level interpretation is that Sam says “it’s what I want” to a manifestation of his own subconscious - he is literally trying to convince himself that it is what he wants, which strongly suggests that it’s not really what he wants. The evidence against the surface level interpretation of what he says is, of course, his behavior over the course of two full episodes. If Sam didn’t REALLY, REALLY want to live, he would have closed the gates. Even assuming for the sake of argument that he (not unreasonably) decided on some level that it was a tactically unsound idea to do anything Metatron seemed down with and so dying then and there was a bad move in terms of strategy, that still doesn’t explain why a Sam who desperately WANTED to die would drag his feet for a full day, make acceptance of his death contingent on an impossible guarantee (“nobody else can get hurt because of me” - as if he and Dean didn’t have their whole lives fucked up BECAUSE OF Mary who was irreversibly dead, as much as it wasn’t what she wanted), and then walk away from it based on the detailed and airtight proposition of “SAM THERE’S A THING PLEASE DO THE THING!”
No, a death wish is the problem fandom wants Sam to have, not the problem Sam does have. And I think we’re meant to feel discomfort with that impulse, to want Sam to be the one with the incorrect perception here, because then Sam can just be disabused of his wrong idea that suicide is good and living is bad, and that solves the problem! The problem is a great deal more complex than that. Sam does want to live, but his misery at certain aspects of his life (Dean’s abuse ~miscommunicated love~ being very high on the list) is strong enough that it threatens to overwhelm that desire for survival. This is even seeping into expectations of pacing for the season, this whole idea that the event dividing the status quo and the less-complicated fraternal happiness we seem to think they have in store is Sam finding out. Get Sam up to speed already, fix the inaccuracies in his perception, peachy-keenness follows! Or…not.
Last season, the in-universe problem was with the PTBs. The narrative gave us that chance, a plot where we could claim the problem really was THE RITURRRRZZZZ, as embodied by Naomi the idea-creator and Metatron the scribe. This season, though? This is ON US, or at least, on Dean the POV character, and by extension people who more or less share his POV. People want DA BRUDDERS together! Saving people! Hunting things! Having lots of moments of physical closeness and affection and pat heart-to-hearts at the end of each episode! Except that’s totally incompatible with the relationship as it’s developed thus far. And that is what we are getting, in the only possible honest way. Sam finally says he’s happy, look (never mind that he has an angel-roofie crawling around his brain and it might not even be him at all)! Look at all the hunting things, which always ends in Sam feeling useless and defeated and even more indebted to Dean (never mind that Dean’s co-conspirator in Sam’s gross exploitation is the one doing all the actual saving people)! Everything’s fine, Dean says so (as long as you forget that he’s lying his ass off)!
The only way we can have the visual shots fandom squees over so much is with these characters: (1) a Dean who’s at his most manipulative, needy, and self-pitying and (2) an equally needy, so desperate to soothe his shame complex with someone else’s approval that he will abandon any and all convictions he might have and become a killer, character played by JP who IS NOT EVEN SAM. Sam and Dean being happy together, if it’s possible (and I have serious misgivings on whether that can happen responsibly), is not going to look anything like this.
So no. It’s not THE RITURRRZZZ who don’t know the characters. They know Sam, Dean, and SamnDean, they know how we want to see the characters, and they’re calling us out hard on the discrepancies.
[SPOILERS FROM THE PROMO]
[9x10 promo spoilers]
I’m really interested to see if this is a fair representation of how things will shake out in this episode, and while I am nearly certain I’ll like whatever Carver et al put out there, I’m really hoping I’m picking up on the right aspects of these clips. Dean’s plan for fixing the problem caused by letting an angel into Sam? Let CROWLEY into Sam’s head. And this time he’s not desperately taking someone who’s offered help, he’s drafting a prisoner who he knows is an asshole. We’re now being forced to look at the reality of the manipulation of Sam: an angel, a demon, and a human, standing over Sam’s body, torturing Sam into being the Sam that someone else wants him to be. All of them convinced that it’s FOR SAM’S OWN GOOD, OF COURSE.
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