OK, I admit it -- you got me.
I love the first few weeks of falling for a new fandom, when your head is so filled with the new characters that you can't seem to even *think* about anything else. I'm supposed to be *working* right now! There are about 10 different projects that absolutely *have* to be done by the end of August, and I have *no* idea how I'll manage to finish them in time, and I have no time to even sleep, let alone fall for yet another fandom, and yet all I can think about is the Winchester brothers, and counting off the minutes to when I can go home, so that I can rewatch some of the episodes again.
Ah, Supernatural, what have you done to me?!
Except it seems like this time, I have latched on to a different character from almost everybody else on my friends list. So, while almost everybody else seems to be going all crazy about Dean, I can't seem to think about anyone but Sam. I mean, I love Dean, too, don't get me wrong. But I seem to mostly be seeing him through Sam's POV. I have imprinted on Dean as the "big brother", and I find it difficult seeing him as anything else. There is always that little disconnect when I try to see his point of view. And while intellectually, I recognize that Dean is very pretty (those *arms*! I've always been a sucker for arms like that...), most of the time, I can no more find him truly attractive than I could my own big brother. *shrugs at my brother apologetically, in case he's reading this*
I wonder how much of that is because I am a younger sibling myself... (And in fact, even the age difference between my brother and me is similar to the age difference between Dean and Sam... I wonder if that makes a difference.) Sam and I are quite different in a lot of ways, and certainly Dean is *very* different from my brother, but something in the relationship still resonates for me, in a way that I wouldn't have expected. elishavah mentioned to me that she has a similar reaction to Sam that I have to Dean -- she finds him interesting, and even cute at times, but he reminds her too much of her own brother for her to find him truly attractive. I was thinking of doing a poll, seeing how people's preferences for Dean and Sam dovetailed with whether or not they were younger or older siblings, but I decided that since most of my friends list seems to prefer Dean anyway, the results would be too skewed to be all that helpful. (And besides, I'm too lazy to try and figure out how polls work, anyway. ;) )
But. If any of you have seen the first season of Supernatural and still aren't sure why I love Sam so much (and what are you, blind?!), you should totally check out this essay by ignipes from idol_reflection, because, *yes*. This is Sam exactly as I see him, in all his messed-up, self-absorbed, occasionally annoying, occasionally heart-breaking, all-too-human glory. (And also, the essay is hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time, just like a good Supernatural essay should be, and should therefore be enjoyed by all.) Be very careful of spoilers, though. This essay covers the whole season, and it isn't shy about giving specific examples from all the episodes. And while you are at it, you should also read the corresponding Dean essay by marinarusalka, because it has a lot of great insight into Dean, and because really, as ignipes says in her post, you can't really talk about one of the boys without talking about the other.
Here are some more specific thoughts I had after reading enough stories to get upset about some of the more common fandom cliches. This is mostly about Sam, but there are some thoughts about Dean, as well...
(Spoilers for most of Season 1 past this point)
1. Sam is good at being a demon hunter. He's is *not* just the "geek sidekick", as Dean calls him in Scarecrow. He's not just there to be a maiden in distress for Dean to always rescue. He's good at research, but that's not his only skill. He's a good fighter in his own right. Granted, he's a little rusty in the Pilot, when Dean overpowers him relatively easily, but by the 7th episode, Skin, he's able to hold off Shapeshifter!Dean for quite a long time even after having been knocked out and tied up *twice* in one day, despite the fact that, presumably, Shapeshifter!Dean not only has all of Dean's skills and knowledge at his disposal, but he's also stronger and more agile than normal humans, and might have had some tricks of his own other than Dean's. In Benders, Sam ends up basically rescuing himself *and* Dean, after Dean gets overpowered in much the same Sam must have been in the beginning of the episode. In Shadows, Sam is the one who knocks out Meg (although that might have been another part of Meg's trap, so it might not count), and he's the one who figures out the way to beat the shadow monsters, thinking quickly on his feet in the middle of a fight. And those are just the examples I can think of, off the top of my head.
And honestly, other than a few teasing comments, Dean never treats Sam as anything but an equal partner in their hunting job. He's obviously quite protective of Sam, but he also has complete confidence in Sam's fighting skills and trusts him to guard his back. In Benders, Dean chose Sam as the one to be hunted, because he *knew* Sam would use the chance better than the cop would have. In other episodes, he's perfectly calm when the two of them split up in the middle of a job, because he knows Sam can take care of himself. Sam might not be as good a fighter as Dean (I don't think fighting comes as instinctively to him as it does to Dean), and I don't think he really enjoys fighting for its own sake, the way Dean sometimes seems to (or maybe the problem is that he enjoys it too much, and it scares him...), but he can hold his own. Nothing turns me off a story faster than seeing poor incompetent Sam being always saved from danger by his super-skilled perfect big brother. Come on! Give Sam a little more credit, please! Dean is great at what he does, but so is Sam. They really are equals, and that's what makes them such a great team.
Which brings me to my second point:
2. Before Sam left for college, Sam couldn't have always been the "protected child", waiting at home doing his homework while his big brother and father went off to kill the monsters, the way so many pre-series fics portray him. He went on enough hunts with Dean for hunting to still be second nature to him after at least 2 years (possibly more) of being away.
I read a pre-series story recently that I really enjoyed, right up until the point when 19-year-old Dean suddenly decided that "it was time" to teach 15-year-old Sam how to shoot guns, and... no. Just no. The latest Sam would have learned how to shoot a gun would have been when he was 9. (When his father gave him a .45 to defend himself from the monster in his closet.) I'm betting that he learned how to shoot earlier. He might have been more protected than Dean, and I can easily believe that Dean and their Dad did go on at least some hunts without Sam, while Sam did some school-related things, but those were the exception, not the rule. And really, despite all the fanon that says otherwise, I suspect that Sam actually went on his first hunt at a younger age than Dean. Not because he learned faster, or was better at it than Dean was, *or* because he had to grow up faster than Dean (obviously, he didn't), but because John and Dean would *not* have left Sam alone without Dean's protection when Sam was little, so Dean had to stay with Sam at least until Sam could learn to take care of himself. And at that point, they might as well have taken Sam along with them. I can believe that Sam was given the easiest tasks on the hunts, but I bet they started taking him along with them pretty early on.
Now that I think about it, that might actually be another reason for the difference in the boys' attitude towards the hunt. Dean saw the hunts as an honor that he had to earn -- something that he *finally* got to do, after *years* of having to stay home to babysit Sammy when what he really wanted to do was to go back up his father. By the time he finally got to join his Dad in the hunts, he must have been really excited about it. Sam, on the other hand, sees hunts as just something he's always done. He never really had to stay home and wish that he was on a hunt; he never really had to think about *why* he was doing it -- they have always been part of his life, and he never really had a choice about it. So instead of it being an honor, the hunts were just another way that his family was different from everybody else's. And by the time he was a teenager, he must have been really sick of them.
3. For all Sam's objections about certain jobs to Dean during the series, once he actually is on a hunt, he takes it seriously, no matter his reservations. Even in the Pilot, once he decides to go with Dean, he's clearly curious about what is going on. He cares about finding his Dad, sure, but he's also curious about figuring out the mystery of what is happening. And in Wendigo, he complains to Dean about not going immediately to the coordinates to find their Dad, but when they do go to interview the girl, he listens carefully and asks questions, and he's the one who finds the three-frame fast-moving shadow in the video, which would have required careful watching, not just a half-assed angry glance at the tape. And when they are running away from the Wendigo and the younger brother stumbles, Sam is immediately there to help him, all thoughts of his other problems forgotten. Even in Assylum (*shudder* much as I really don't like thinking about that episode), the episode where Sam comes the closest to doing a half-assed job on a hunt, Sam still takes the hunt seriously enough to figure out that the ghosts of the assylum patients weren't the real threat, and he is quite protective of the two kids they find hiding in the assylum.
4. As for Dean (yes, I'm finally getting to Dean *g*), I find that my problem with his characterization in fanon is the opposite of my problem with Sam's. Just like Sam is not just the "geek sidekick" of the pair, Dean is not just "the fighter of the outfit", the brawn to Sam's brain. Dean is very smart and capable in his own right, and he is very confident in his own abilities. He's good with gadgets of all kinds. (He can convert an old walkman into an EMF reader, and much as Sam scoffs at that, it doesn't sound like a trivial thing to do) He's at least as good as Sam at putting together the clues on each hunt to figure out what they are hunting (and whether or not it's their kind of problem). And (and this is the part where I seem to disagree with commonly-held fanon beliefs) he definitely knows his way around a library just as well as Sam does.
He is good at doing research, online or from books in a library. He doesn't doze off or get glazed eyes when he sees a book he has to go through (like some fics imply that he does). He might not like it as much as Sam does, but it's clear that he's done a *lot* of research in his day, and he's confident in his abilities not to miss a clue. In Bloody Mary, Dean is the one who thinks of widening the search, and looks through all the necessary sites to find the real Mary. (While *Sam* is the one who dozes off, if I remember correctly.) In many other episodes, Dean is right there with Sam, doing his equal share. When Sam suggests that Dean might have missed something in his research, in Bloody Mary and Hookman, Dean is completely confident when he says no. It's true that in later episodes, as Sam gets more involved in the hunts and stops complaining so much about them, Dean starts leaving the greater share of the researching to Sam, but that doesn't mean that he can't do it himself, or that he isn't confident in his own abilities to do so. Actually, I suspect that he gives Sam the bigger share of the researching after Faith to make Sam feel more connected to the hunts. It has less to do with Dean not wanting to do the research himself, and more to do with him wanting to enjoy the fact that Sam is actually getting interested in the hunts for their own sake.
The dichotomy a lot of stories seem to set up, with Sam being the geeky research guy and Dean being the fighter of the outfit, is a false one. Not to mention that it makes things more boring, IMO. Dean and Sam have different ways of doing things, and they look at things very differently (Sam often can't see the forest for the trees, getting so caught up in details, and figuring out the reasons for everything, that he misses seeing the big picture, and Dean sometimes gets so focused on the big picture that he misses the small clues that can help explain everything), but they are both good at what they do, and as I said before, they are equal partners when they hunt.
5. I am not as sure about the seamier, less legal side of the Winchester lifestyle. I mean, clearly, they are not equal partners there, since in all the episodes I've seen, Sam is never involved in any of the illegal dealings -- not the credit card scams, or the pool hustling. But because we never get to see it, I'm also not actually sure if Sam is any good at them at all. Sam mentions in Bugs that he had to learn how to hustle pool when they were growing up, so I assume he *can* actually play pool, but we never get to see it. As someone who is actually horrible at most games but has a big brother who is great at most of them myself, I can believe that Sam is not nearly as good at, say, pool, as Dean is. Of course, I *prefer* to believe that Sam *is* good at pool (mostly because I find the idea of Sam playing pool, especially of Sam and Dean playing pool together, strangely hot -- mmmm... those pool sticks, all that bending down over the pool table... Damn, now I want to see Sam and Dean playing pool together!) But if it's necessary for a story, I can believe that he isn't. Certainly, I don't think he has the flair necessary to hustle pool well -- he's not really that great a liar in general, not unless he absolutely *has* to be, and I don't know if he can pretend to be bad at something he is good at. Although the fact that he *looks* like an easy mark, with that shaggy hair and innocent eyes, might help him there. I don't know.
We know Sam knows how to hot-wire a car (he steals a car in Scarecrow), and we've seen him pick a few locks (the motel room in Pilot, and the fire engine in Devil's Trap, at the very least), so he does have a few less than legal skills. But we never see him use them for anything other than hunting. We've never even seen him pick the lock of any handcuffs, although I assume he can do it if he has to (though probably not as easily and fast as Dean can). I suspect that if Sam were separated from Dean at some point, and had to survive on his own, he would probably try to get a day job before he'd try to get money through illegal means. (Just like he probably took a day job in college.) He might change his mind when he realizes how tiring it would be to hunt *and* hold a dayjob at the same time, though.
OK, I could continue, but it's already taken me a long time to write this post, and I haven't even gotten to what I want to say about John Winchester, or any of my questions about the timeline of the show.
Ah, Supernatural, what have you done to me?!
Except it seems like this time, I have latched on to a different character from almost everybody else on my friends list. So, while almost everybody else seems to be going all crazy about Dean, I can't seem to think about anyone but Sam. I mean, I love Dean, too, don't get me wrong. But I seem to mostly be seeing him through Sam's POV. I have imprinted on Dean as the "big brother", and I find it difficult seeing him as anything else. There is always that little disconnect when I try to see his point of view. And while intellectually, I recognize that Dean is very pretty (those *arms*! I've always been a sucker for arms like that...), most of the time, I can no more find him truly attractive than I could my own big brother. *shrugs at my brother apologetically, in case he's reading this*
I wonder how much of that is because I am a younger sibling myself... (And in fact, even the age difference between my brother and me is similar to the age difference between Dean and Sam... I wonder if that makes a difference.) Sam and I are quite different in a lot of ways, and certainly Dean is *very* different from my brother, but something in the relationship still resonates for me, in a way that I wouldn't have expected. elishavah mentioned to me that she has a similar reaction to Sam that I have to Dean -- she finds him interesting, and even cute at times, but he reminds her too much of her own brother for her to find him truly attractive. I was thinking of doing a poll, seeing how people's preferences for Dean and Sam dovetailed with whether or not they were younger or older siblings, but I decided that since most of my friends list seems to prefer Dean anyway, the results would be too skewed to be all that helpful. (And besides, I'm too lazy to try and figure out how polls work, anyway. ;) )
But. If any of you have seen the first season of Supernatural and still aren't sure why I love Sam so much (and what are you, blind?!), you should totally check out this essay by ignipes from idol_reflection, because, *yes*. This is Sam exactly as I see him, in all his messed-up, self-absorbed, occasionally annoying, occasionally heart-breaking, all-too-human glory. (And also, the essay is hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time, just like a good Supernatural essay should be, and should therefore be enjoyed by all.) Be very careful of spoilers, though. This essay covers the whole season, and it isn't shy about giving specific examples from all the episodes. And while you are at it, you should also read the corresponding Dean essay by marinarusalka, because it has a lot of great insight into Dean, and because really, as ignipes says in her post, you can't really talk about one of the boys without talking about the other.
Here are some more specific thoughts I had after reading enough stories to get upset about some of the more common fandom cliches. This is mostly about Sam, but there are some thoughts about Dean, as well...
(Spoilers for most of Season 1 past this point)
1. Sam is good at being a demon hunter. He's is *not* just the "geek sidekick", as Dean calls him in Scarecrow. He's not just there to be a maiden in distress for Dean to always rescue. He's good at research, but that's not his only skill. He's a good fighter in his own right. Granted, he's a little rusty in the Pilot, when Dean overpowers him relatively easily, but by the 7th episode, Skin, he's able to hold off Shapeshifter!Dean for quite a long time even after having been knocked out and tied up *twice* in one day, despite the fact that, presumably, Shapeshifter!Dean not only has all of Dean's skills and knowledge at his disposal, but he's also stronger and more agile than normal humans, and might have had some tricks of his own other than Dean's. In Benders, Sam ends up basically rescuing himself *and* Dean, after Dean gets overpowered in much the same Sam must have been in the beginning of the episode. In Shadows, Sam is the one who knocks out Meg (although that might have been another part of Meg's trap, so it might not count), and he's the one who figures out the way to beat the shadow monsters, thinking quickly on his feet in the middle of a fight. And those are just the examples I can think of, off the top of my head.
And honestly, other than a few teasing comments, Dean never treats Sam as anything but an equal partner in their hunting job. He's obviously quite protective of Sam, but he also has complete confidence in Sam's fighting skills and trusts him to guard his back. In Benders, Dean chose Sam as the one to be hunted, because he *knew* Sam would use the chance better than the cop would have. In other episodes, he's perfectly calm when the two of them split up in the middle of a job, because he knows Sam can take care of himself. Sam might not be as good a fighter as Dean (I don't think fighting comes as instinctively to him as it does to Dean), and I don't think he really enjoys fighting for its own sake, the way Dean sometimes seems to (or maybe the problem is that he enjoys it too much, and it scares him...), but he can hold his own. Nothing turns me off a story faster than seeing poor incompetent Sam being always saved from danger by his super-skilled perfect big brother. Come on! Give Sam a little more credit, please! Dean is great at what he does, but so is Sam. They really are equals, and that's what makes them such a great team.
Which brings me to my second point:
2. Before Sam left for college, Sam couldn't have always been the "protected child", waiting at home doing his homework while his big brother and father went off to kill the monsters, the way so many pre-series fics portray him. He went on enough hunts with Dean for hunting to still be second nature to him after at least 2 years (possibly more) of being away.
I read a pre-series story recently that I really enjoyed, right up until the point when 19-year-old Dean suddenly decided that "it was time" to teach 15-year-old Sam how to shoot guns, and... no. Just no. The latest Sam would have learned how to shoot a gun would have been when he was 9. (When his father gave him a .45 to defend himself from the monster in his closet.) I'm betting that he learned how to shoot earlier. He might have been more protected than Dean, and I can easily believe that Dean and their Dad did go on at least some hunts without Sam, while Sam did some school-related things, but those were the exception, not the rule. And really, despite all the fanon that says otherwise, I suspect that Sam actually went on his first hunt at a younger age than Dean. Not because he learned faster, or was better at it than Dean was, *or* because he had to grow up faster than Dean (obviously, he didn't), but because John and Dean would *not* have left Sam alone without Dean's protection when Sam was little, so Dean had to stay with Sam at least until Sam could learn to take care of himself. And at that point, they might as well have taken Sam along with them. I can believe that Sam was given the easiest tasks on the hunts, but I bet they started taking him along with them pretty early on.
Now that I think about it, that might actually be another reason for the difference in the boys' attitude towards the hunt. Dean saw the hunts as an honor that he had to earn -- something that he *finally* got to do, after *years* of having to stay home to babysit Sammy when what he really wanted to do was to go back up his father. By the time he finally got to join his Dad in the hunts, he must have been really excited about it. Sam, on the other hand, sees hunts as just something he's always done. He never really had to stay home and wish that he was on a hunt; he never really had to think about *why* he was doing it -- they have always been part of his life, and he never really had a choice about it. So instead of it being an honor, the hunts were just another way that his family was different from everybody else's. And by the time he was a teenager, he must have been really sick of them.
3. For all Sam's objections about certain jobs to Dean during the series, once he actually is on a hunt, he takes it seriously, no matter his reservations. Even in the Pilot, once he decides to go with Dean, he's clearly curious about what is going on. He cares about finding his Dad, sure, but he's also curious about figuring out the mystery of what is happening. And in Wendigo, he complains to Dean about not going immediately to the coordinates to find their Dad, but when they do go to interview the girl, he listens carefully and asks questions, and he's the one who finds the three-frame fast-moving shadow in the video, which would have required careful watching, not just a half-assed angry glance at the tape. And when they are running away from the Wendigo and the younger brother stumbles, Sam is immediately there to help him, all thoughts of his other problems forgotten. Even in Assylum (*shudder* much as I really don't like thinking about that episode), the episode where Sam comes the closest to doing a half-assed job on a hunt, Sam still takes the hunt seriously enough to figure out that the ghosts of the assylum patients weren't the real threat, and he is quite protective of the two kids they find hiding in the assylum.
4. As for Dean (yes, I'm finally getting to Dean *g*), I find that my problem with his characterization in fanon is the opposite of my problem with Sam's. Just like Sam is not just the "geek sidekick" of the pair, Dean is not just "the fighter of the outfit", the brawn to Sam's brain. Dean is very smart and capable in his own right, and he is very confident in his own abilities. He's good with gadgets of all kinds. (He can convert an old walkman into an EMF reader, and much as Sam scoffs at that, it doesn't sound like a trivial thing to do) He's at least as good as Sam at putting together the clues on each hunt to figure out what they are hunting (and whether or not it's their kind of problem). And (and this is the part where I seem to disagree with commonly-held fanon beliefs) he definitely knows his way around a library just as well as Sam does.
He is good at doing research, online or from books in a library. He doesn't doze off or get glazed eyes when he sees a book he has to go through (like some fics imply that he does). He might not like it as much as Sam does, but it's clear that he's done a *lot* of research in his day, and he's confident in his abilities not to miss a clue. In Bloody Mary, Dean is the one who thinks of widening the search, and looks through all the necessary sites to find the real Mary. (While *Sam* is the one who dozes off, if I remember correctly.) In many other episodes, Dean is right there with Sam, doing his equal share. When Sam suggests that Dean might have missed something in his research, in Bloody Mary and Hookman, Dean is completely confident when he says no. It's true that in later episodes, as Sam gets more involved in the hunts and stops complaining so much about them, Dean starts leaving the greater share of the researching to Sam, but that doesn't mean that he can't do it himself, or that he isn't confident in his own abilities to do so. Actually, I suspect that he gives Sam the bigger share of the researching after Faith to make Sam feel more connected to the hunts. It has less to do with Dean not wanting to do the research himself, and more to do with him wanting to enjoy the fact that Sam is actually getting interested in the hunts for their own sake.
The dichotomy a lot of stories seem to set up, with Sam being the geeky research guy and Dean being the fighter of the outfit, is a false one. Not to mention that it makes things more boring, IMO. Dean and Sam have different ways of doing things, and they look at things very differently (Sam often can't see the forest for the trees, getting so caught up in details, and figuring out the reasons for everything, that he misses seeing the big picture, and Dean sometimes gets so focused on the big picture that he misses the small clues that can help explain everything), but they are both good at what they do, and as I said before, they are equal partners when they hunt.
5. I am not as sure about the seamier, less legal side of the Winchester lifestyle. I mean, clearly, they are not equal partners there, since in all the episodes I've seen, Sam is never involved in any of the illegal dealings -- not the credit card scams, or the pool hustling. But because we never get to see it, I'm also not actually sure if Sam is any good at them at all. Sam mentions in Bugs that he had to learn how to hustle pool when they were growing up, so I assume he *can* actually play pool, but we never get to see it. As someone who is actually horrible at most games but has a big brother who is great at most of them myself, I can believe that Sam is not nearly as good at, say, pool, as Dean is. Of course, I *prefer* to believe that Sam *is* good at pool (mostly because I find the idea of Sam playing pool, especially of Sam and Dean playing pool together, strangely hot -- mmmm... those pool sticks, all that bending down over the pool table... Damn, now I want to see Sam and Dean playing pool together!) But if it's necessary for a story, I can believe that he isn't. Certainly, I don't think he has the flair necessary to hustle pool well -- he's not really that great a liar in general, not unless he absolutely *has* to be, and I don't know if he can pretend to be bad at something he is good at. Although the fact that he *looks* like an easy mark, with that shaggy hair and innocent eyes, might help him there. I don't know.
We know Sam knows how to hot-wire a car (he steals a car in Scarecrow), and we've seen him pick a few locks (the motel room in Pilot, and the fire engine in Devil's Trap, at the very least), so he does have a few less than legal skills. But we never see him use them for anything other than hunting. We've never even seen him pick the lock of any handcuffs, although I assume he can do it if he has to (though probably not as easily and fast as Dean can). I suspect that if Sam were separated from Dean at some point, and had to survive on his own, he would probably try to get a day job before he'd try to get money through illegal means. (Just like he probably took a day job in college.) He might change his mind when he realizes how tiring it would be to hunt *and* hold a dayjob at the same time, though.
OK, I could continue, but it's already taken me a long time to write this post, and I haven't even gotten to what I want to say about John Winchester, or any of my questions about the timeline of the show.