in fact, I have watched the pilot. I'm still right.
I read through this post and would like not to let it pass without comment. In the first part of my response I will do my best to explain how Dean’s behavior toward Sam meets a lot of the criteria for intimate partner abuse, because the OP does not seem to grasp the argument we are making. I will assume good faith, though - this is a difficult
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I'm curious to know whether you think the writers have deliberately written Dean has an abusive character? Over the years they have added canon to suggest that John was possibly abusive - certainly neglectful. Do you think they've just added canon over the years that have built up a picture of an abusive person or that they've deliberately set out to make him one?
Authorial intent is slippery, and I don't think I really read enough interviews to go as far as one can with it, so all of this comes with a big HIGHLY SPECULATIVE disclaimer. On top of that, this is the kind of thing that happens slowly and people don't usually notice IRL, otherwise everyone would bail on abusers quickly and with ease, and I think it also got worse and worse over time and the people who lived with Dean in their heads could easily have been lacking in perspective in a similar way.
I think that awareness of Dean's capacity for cruelty, for sadism, was something that everyone involved has been aware of since Kripke was on board. It came across not just on the big stuff - "I tortured souls and I liked it" - but in the mundane, petty ways that nasty people get to be nasty - the glee he takes in the vicious game of dodgeball during the episode at their high school, his contraction of the ghost sickness that only affects alpha-male-wannabe personalities commonly known as "dicks." Then there has been awareness of the unhealthiness of his attitude toward Sam since the beginning, obviously. In the end, though, the maudlin romanticizing of the relationship in that last arc of S5 suggest it's unlikely that anyone with executive authority consciously put two and two together and realized that he was turning those controlling patterns onto Sam in a very RL kind of way.
I do think that Gamble was very well aware of the problem, but was also very well aware of how risky it would be to alienate the viewership by following through on it, and so we saw a lot of "Dean does terribly abusive thing -> narrative gives him a way out so BRUDDERS -> Dean seizes the opportunity to do another terribly abusive thing." His beating of Soulless, his obstructionism to Sam getting his soul back until it would be a violation of Sam's autonomy, the gaslighting of the wall, the gaslighting over Amy, the bullying about Hallucifer - it happened too frequently and too brutally to be an accident.
So moving up to the real question of how consciously this storyline is happening! I don't know if I'm actually remembering this from an interview or just making it up, but I think I remember Carver saying at some point that he mainlined S6&7 when he made the decision to come back to and take over the show. I tend to believe it, precisely because of the way things have unfolded since he took over. People who have been watching the show from week to week (because again, problems happen gradually) seem likely to have a very different take on the show than those of us who caught up relatively recently. It's much easier to miss a pattern that's repeating from last April than the one you saw both take place and be "resolved" last Saturday. So...I don't know who would use what precise wording when, per se, but I do think this group of writers are the most clear-eyed about the power dynamic between Sam and Dean, and the most committed to actually working through it.
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