SPN Meta: Character Motivation, Devil's Trap
Okay, I haven't posted a Supernatural meta yet cause, I don't know, I've tried to stay away from that end of things. Being an analytical type anyway, I can get a little carried away when I get on a tear, so I've done my best to redirect my efforts to the fiction side of the universe. Yeah, well guess that's come to a screeching halt, at least for tonight.
So here's the deal. In escelating my singular "know what I think, know what I wanna say" ficlet of Slaying Dragons to a trilogy of ficlets, I found myself doing some pretty intense brain work on Sam and John, in particular, about what drives them to act the way they act. Not on the surface, but at a very core, essentail level.
And in doing that kind of brain strain, I realized that not only do my thoughts on why Dean does what he does vary from what I've come to think of as the SPN fandom norm, but so does my take on what drives Sam and John.
Once I see something like that, I'm a gonner. 'Cause the more I recognize my thoughts as atypical of the norm when it comes to character analysis, the more I feel a need to share why I'm looking at it the way I do, and try and convince the norm that they're just simply wrong and should look at it my way.
Hey, I don't know why I do that, but I do. I think it has to do with every accepted stance needing a good devil's advocate to push and pull and poke and prod it enough to make sure it really stands up to scrutiny, and there ain't nothin I like better than playing devil's advocate, especially if the alternate view I'm fronting in that role happens to parallel my acutal thinking on the subject.
So here's my first meta on Supernatural. Given the length of my introduction, I'm going to assume y'all will realize it ain't gonna be a short, nor easy, read. If that doesn't scare you away, buckle up and grab your drawers, cause here we go ...
Cause I've just got to tell y'all:
It's all about the Sam, the Dean, the Dad, the Demon ...
I’ve noticed that, for the vast majority of the SPN fandom community, Dean is perceived to be all about the Sammy. Because I tend to disagree with this particular way of seeing things, I thought I’d wax eloquently on (many refer to it as babbling aimlessly) about why I feel the exact opposite is true, and how this affects who does what, and why.
So first, let me draw a motivational circle for y’all. This is the way I see it:
For Sam, it’s all about the Dean. (Don’t argue yet)
For Dean, it’s all about the Dad. (Not yet)
For Dad, it’s all about the Demon. (Well, duh)
For the Demon, it’s all about the Sam. (Again, duh)
And what I take this to mean is this:
The motivation for everything Sam does comes down to Dean. (Just let me make my case). The motivation for everything Dean does comes down to Dad. (Seriously, hear me out). The motivation for everything Dad does comes down to the Demon. (Obvious, anyone?). And the motivation for everything the Demon does comes down to Sam. (Ditto the Obviousness of it all).
While these motivations cover the gamut in terms of positive to negative, the importance of each is that it drives the behavior of the individuals involved based upon the needs of someone other than themselves, so no one acts in their own interests. They don’t do what is best for them, they do what is best (or worst) for the object of their motivational obsession. And it all becomes a circle jerk in that every character is the focus of another’s obsession, just as they are equally each obsessed with a character who is neither themselves nor he who obsesses upon them.
So what exactly does this mean, you might ask (I did, and I wrote it, but I asked it more like WTF? Rather than "you might ask"). The way I see it, each of these obsessions is not only the core of motivational drive for their respective character, but it is also their Achilles’ heel, or fatal flaw, if you will.
Now I don’t mean fatal flaw in a "makes them a bad person" kind of way. Rather, I mean it in a hamartia kind of way, as in a tragic flaw of character that dooms each to live their lives in tragedy rather than as the person they should rightfully be: happy, carefree (except for tax season), loving, being loved, gainfully employed in a non-bloodletting-related occupation … something along those lines. In this context, I’m also going to use the term "redemption" in a relatively nontraditional way, applying it to mean the capacity to redeem one’s self from the singular fatal flaw that dooms each to a tragic life rather than anything resembling a functional life one might assumably want to live. I’m just telling you that sose you know: I’m not using it in any sort of a "redeemed soul" kind of was.
So now that the ground rules are in place, let’s tackle John, the most obviously fucked up of our characters (we’re not counting the Demon right now … he’s not tragically flawed, he’s just fugly evil). John may love his sons, he may be a moral man, he could even be a relatively sane fellow depending upon your definition of the word sane; but the single motivator that overwhelmingly drives his every action far and above any other character aspect (including his love for his sons) is his singular obsession with killing the demon that toasted Mary.
Yes, Captain Obvious is in the house, but give me a minute, will you?
So this is John’s fatal flaw. It is the one thing that keeps him from being a good father, from finding love, from living a functional life, from doing any of the things that might make him happy. It is the one drive to which he will not only sacrifice himself, but to which he will equally sacrifice his sons, his happiness, all of his friends, his own moral code, pretty much anything he has to sacrifice. For John, it is all about the Demon. Whatever is required to pursue his obsession with the Demon comes first, everything else comes second.
And in this fatal flaw, John forms one extreme of the "potential for redemption" continuum. For whatever reasons (probably because Kripke wrote him this way) John is, from all appearances, virtually incapable of being redeemed or redeeming himself from this fatal flaw. His obsession with killing the Demon has already taken him places from whence he cannot return. He has sacrificed things in the name of that obsession - his sons’ childhoods; his sons’ futures; his law-abiding, societally acceptable persona; his career; his moral code; perhaps even his immortal soul, to name but a few of the more obvious - that would no doubt prove fatal to the man he once was, and might one day wanted to have again be, even if he were to redeem himself from this flaw now. Today. This second.
John redeeming himself from this fatal flaw at this late stage of the game would be a bit like deciding to stop smoking after you find you have lung cancer and less than a week to live. Will stopping (redeeming) help? Maybe a bit, but in the bigger picture, it’s already too late to do anything other than die in a week. The time to stop and try to return to a non-doomed state of being is long, long past. That ship has already sailed, baby, and it is half way to the Bahamas.
So at the risk of courting the ire of the John-loving amongst us, I posit that, at this point, John is virtually irredeemable from his fatal flaw, that flaw being the fact that he is all about the Demon. And when I say that, I mean to say this: If John were to destroy the demon tomorrow, he would have no more reason for living. Without the Demon to pursue, the man he is would become irrelevant and the man he should be no longer exists. If he succeeds in killing the Demon, I dare say he will not find happiness with his sons, will not live a functional life, will never find love … all because he will no longer have any purpose to drive him, and all the things that he needed to succeed at any life-after-Demon pursuit are things he has already sacrificed in the name of said pursuit.
John kills the demon and his fate is this: he dies, or he lives the living death with no purpose and only bitter regrets for sacrifices made. He no longer pursues other evils with the passion heretofore reserved for our Demon because, for John, it has never been about demons in general, or evil in general, or saving people; it has always been about killing that one Demon. Vengeance for Mary. Once he achieves that end, all other courses of endeavor become moot.
So I consider John’s failure to evade his own tragic doom a virtual certainty, primarily because he will never find any measure of redemption from a fatal flaw he has indulged far too long to ever toss aside. And equally, I find the fact that his fate is already written in stone by his own hand to be the best reason to assume John isn’t going to survive that crash whether he sticks with Gray’s Anatomy or not. And I only use the term "virtually" to 1) keep from getting lynched by Papa Winchester fans and 2) allow for what I consider about a 1% chance that John may still have some capacity to exist beyond his own purpose in finding some other purpose through his sons. I find this almost ridiculously improbable, but will concede the slimmest of possibilities that Kripke might write it in a way that would ring true, cause he’s a talented fella, and I buy most of what he’s selling.
So that’s John. Let’s move on to Dean.
Despite overwhelming fan concept to the contrary, I think Dean’s fatal flaw is John, not Sam. Every choice Dean makes is ultimately driven by his relationship with John, and his obsessive need not to fail in John’s eyes. Now I’m not saying he doesn’t love Sammy more than anyone else: To the contrary, I think he does. Nor am I saying that protecting Sam is not Dean’s most important agenda in everything he does: To the contrary, I think it is. What I am saying, however, is that Dean’s need to protect Sam does not rise from his love of Sam; but rather, from his fatal flaw, his obsessive relationship with John.
Before I expound further on that, let me pause for a moment to say this: Dean’s emotional psyche suspended itself at five years of age. It got caught, stuck, frozen in time; never developing beyond this point even though the rest of him, including the way he applies that psyche, kept aging at a normal rate.
The violent murder of his mother is the axis upon which Dean’s entire persona turns. It is in the emotional context defined by this devastatingly destructive and world-view destabilizing event that John becomes the begin-all and end-all to a child who loses, in a single instant, every other stability in his life. This critical trauma not only strips Dean of his mother, but also of his every expectation that the world can be expected to play by any of the rules by which the world is supposed to play; and it does so at an emotionally vulnerable time when 5-year-old Dean has only just solidified his understanding of these axioms of reality as inflexible … an understanding that means they now shatter rather than bending to accommodate a restructuring of that which he has only newly taken as immutable fact.
So in once singularly violent event, Dean loses every place in the universe he can stand with any measure of confidence it will remain constant save one: His father. John becomes the only defined variable in an existence where every other variable is not only unknown, but also in a constant state of flux. And thus, John becomes Dean’s only touch point to the concepts of reality, or sanity, or safety. It is at that moment, for Dean, that it all became about the Dad.
I believe this is why Dean goes where he goes (emotionally speaking) in Devil’s Trap when he is begging his father not to let the Demon kill him. I do not find those tears to be a designed manipulation to reach his father inside the demon and motivate John to action. Neither do I find those tears to be a manifestation of pain or fear or despair or any other fracture of Dean’s stoic intention to endure. Rather, I find those tears to be one thing: the visual evidence of the internal regression of a 28 year old man to the 5 year old he was when his world changed forever into a world where only one thing could ever be fully trusted: the begin-all, the end-all, the Daddy.
I believe Dean’s way of expressing himself at that particular moment - the word choices, the tears, the expression - are all evidence that underneath all his bravada and courage and demon-hunting prowess he is still, and always will be, a five-year-old who believes with every fiber of his being that his dad can do anything, up to and including, de-possessing himself of a Demon upon request. John is, quite literally, the only God Dean has ever known, ever accepted, ever believed in. And when everything else is stripped away, Dean falls to his emotional knees and begs mercy of his God: Please don’t let the demon kill me, Daddy.
And it works because Jensen totally sells it with every ounce of his considerable acting skill.
That being said, back to the notion that Dean’s need to protect Sam stems from John, not simply from his love for Sam. For Dean, to break faith with John, is to break faith with God. And the one thing that John has always demanded of Dean, the one thing that has always been most important to John when it comes to Dean, and the one thing that John has over and over and over and over commanded Dean to do above all else is simply this: Protect Sammy. Commandment Number One: Protect Sammy. To break faith with John is to break faith with God.
Just to be clear: I actually have no doubt that Dean loves Sammy more than John. Nor do I doubt that Dean would give up his life in a heartbeat for Sam out of nothing more than this intense brotherly love. However, his obsessive need to protect Sammy at all costs is driven not by that love, but rather by the fact that John’s First Commandment is to Protect Sammy.
If the driving motivation were love for Sam, if Sam died and Dean had done everything he could to save him and simply failed, Dean would grieve a horrible grief, but he would eventually be able to go on. I do not believe this is the case. If Sam died while in Dean’s charge, I believe the man Dean is would cease to exist. He might not kill himself, he might not curl into a ball and cease to interact with the world, but the Dean we all know and love would no longer exist. And that man would never return when the agony of losing Sam eventually faded, as all such agonies must. Dean would be gone. And he would be gone because he failed in John’s singular demand of him, not because he loves Sam so much that he can’t survive Sam’s death without imploding to irretrievable degree.
In this context, I find the fact that, for Dean, it is all about the John to be Dean’s fatal flaw. It is what keeps him from living his own life, from making choices that would make him happy, from doing anything for himself rather than doing everything because it is what he must do to keep the faith with his father.
Now don’t take this to mean that I’m saying Dean would never stand up to his father. Obviously, such is not the case, as he does stand up to John in Devil’s Trap for Sam. And I consider this to be proof positive that Dean is not beyond the capacity to redeem himself from his fatal flaw. And because his reason for going against John, even if only in a small degree, is Sam; I believe Sam to be the only thing capable of serving as a catalyst to that redemption. It is only through his relationship with Sam that Dean will ever redeem himself from the fatal flaw that dooms him to a tragic life. Only through Sam, will Dean ever act in his own interests, rather than at the behest of what he must do to keep the faith with Daddy.
So in terms of that "potential for redemption" continuum in which John is the "ice-cube-in-hell" guy, Dean becomes the mid-mark. He has thus far sacrificed his life, his happiness, perhaps his future, perhaps portions of his soul in the name of serving the demands of his fatal flaw; but he is not yet to the place where John exists. Therefore, I posit that Dean is redeemable, but there’s only 50/50 shot at whether or not he will find that redemption. If he can redeem himself, it will be through the catalyst of Sam; and through that relationship, he will become the man he is intended to be, capable of living for himself, capable of being happy, of finding love, of becoming a functional part of society, even if the role he chooses is to continue hunting evil, which Dean - unlike John - does for the purpose of saving people, not to avenge his mother’s death.
So if Dean can break free of it all being about the Daddy, he can still be a demon hunter without leading the tragic life to which he is doomed if he fails to redeem himself from that fatal flaw. If he cannot break free of it, he will continue on as he is, living for John, making choices to the agenda of whatever it takes to keep from failing John until he eventually becomes John, irredeemable and doomed to a life that will never be anything other than tragic, for it will have no meaning or purpose of it’s own that is relevant to Dean, rather than dictated by the need for approval from John.
Which brings us to Sam. For Sammy, it is all about the Dean. As Dean sees his father, so Sam sees Dean. While John is the only source of stability for young Dean, Dean is the only source of stability for young Sam. Dean is the protector, the one who can be trusted, the one who is there, the one who defines stability in the instability of a world gone evil in a way that the rest of the world can’t/won’t/doesn’t see.
Unlike Dean, however, Sam isn’t broken. When Mary goes all fire and brimstone, he isn’t old enough to have an awareness of the nature of the world. And without that awareness, he doesn’t suffer the irretrievable breakage of everything he has ever believed safe to a degree that the only thing that remains constant becomes the only thing by which he can ever measure the world (which is what John is for Dean).
Without that breakage, Sam doesn’t suffer the suspension of psyche development that makes Dean so resilient (like a child) yet so fragile (like a child), so selfish (like a child), so demanding (like a child), yet so generous (like a child) and genuinely compassionate (like a child), so emotionally unsophisticated (like a child) while being so emotionally vulnerable (like a child). Sam is not a man who must save the world because it is the right thing to do (like a child). Sam is not a man who believes his Daddy can do anything (like a child). Sam is not a man who believes that in the end, he must always win because good always triumphs over evil, even if it does takes a while (like a child).
Because Dean is broken as a five year old and the only glue available is John (himself, equally broken and equally without glue), and because Dean is raised by John, Dean becomes the man we see. And that emotional immaturity is reflected in his basal impulse control issues (want, need, now!), it is reflected in his complete capitulation to that which he accepts as valid authority (dad) and in his simplistically comprehensive rebellion against all things authoritarian that he considers invalid (not John), and it is reflected in his relatively simplistic, black-and-white view of the morality of the world (good, evil, us, them, family, not-family).
Sam, on the other hand, is never broken. He is raised by someone who cares for him with extraordinary compassion and provides him with an unshakeable and absolute sense of safety both because that individual (Dean) loves him beyond all else and because that individual (again, Dean) is charged to raise him this way by the man he (Dean) considers his God (John). So you’ve got busted up Dean and relatively functional Sam: both products of the men who raise them and the impact (or lack thereof) of an axial trauma that defines Dean, but never even exists for Sam.
And it is this dynamic that makes Sam all about the Dean: a man he loves like a father and a brother and a teacher and a hero all rolled up into one. But unlike Dean and John, Sam is actually a relatively functional individual. Prior to Devil’s Trap, while you can consider Dean a fatal flaw for Sam in some ways, in others, he is merely the most influential motivator. Because unlike what John did with Dean, Dean gave Sam the childhood he needs in order to want, require, demand his own life the same way all functional individuals eventually want, require, demand what they need to make themselves happy, rather than what makes their parents happy.
So while Sam’s loyalty to Dean no doubt dictates virtually all of Sam’s choices up until the point where he leaves for Standford, Sam’s loyalty to Dean does NOT supercede Sam’s loyalty to himself. Dean gives Sam the emotional capacity to choose what he wants, and the emotional strength to rebel against both John and Dean in order to pursue it.
Because of this, Sam does redeem himself right out of it all being about the Dean, and he begins to live his own life with Jess. And every indication is that, once he rights the wrongs done to Jess, he will once again redeem himself out of a dynamic that might otherwise become the fatal flaw in it all being about the Dean.
Which means, in terms of that "potential for redemption" continuum, Sam is the polar opposite of John. He is a virtual lock to be able to redeem himself and return to a normal life the ilk of which he was already pursing at Standford until the Demon dragged him back to a life he had left. Sam will not doom himself to a tragic life with his fatal flaw because Dean has given him the capacity to want things for himself, to seek normalcy, to resist the impulse to place the needs of someone else before his own needs to a degree that it derails what Sam needs for himself, what Sam wants for himself.
But unlike Dean or John, both of whom are in full indulgence of their fatal flaws from the moment we meet them, Sam takes a tumble from his heretofore relatively functional status, falling prey to the full destructive power of his fatal flaw by indulging it at the one time when he could least afford to do so.
And by doing so, he dooms not only himself, but them all.
So when does Sam fall victim to his fatal flaw? When does Sam let the fact that it is all about the Dean doom him to a life of tragedy?
When he doesn’t shoot John to kill the demon.
I know most fan’s consider this a moment of truth for Sam, a place where he shows that he has triumphed because he sets aside his thirst for vengeance to do what Dean so desperately needs him to do. He puts family before obsession.
But for Sam, it isn’t all about the Demon. It never has been. For Sam, it has always been all about the Dean.
So I agree that this moment is a moment of truth for Sam, but I don’t agree that his choice is a triumph, but rather a failure. When he chooses not to shoot the demon, Sam becomes a true Winchester. Following in his father and his brother’s footsteps, he falls victim to his own fatal flaw.
The proof?
If Dean is not Sam’s fatal flaw - if it is not all about the Dean for Sam - then Sam would have taken the shot. He would have put what he needs - vengeance for Jess, the freedom for it to be over so he can return to his life, the need to do what he understands is the one thing his father wants most in the world, even if it does cost him his life - before what Dean needs, which is simply to not have John die, no matter what it cost anybody else, including himself, including Sam, including every other innocent victim that demon will destroy and including the world itself, if the storm is indeed a’coming as it appears to be a’coming.
But Sam doesn’t do that. Instead, he falls victim to his own fatal flaw. In putting what Dean needs above what he needs, above what John needs, above what the world needs, Sam fails them all. And the price for indulging that fatal flaw rather than redeeming himself from it? The price is everything.
Because Sam gives in to his fatal flaw, the demon lives to crash the semi into the Impala. Whatever tragedy stems from that attack is all on Sam’s head, because he failed in falling victim to his fatal flaw, in letting it all be about the Dean.
And this is why I say the reality of who is driven by what is exactly the opposite of general fan perception.
If Dean’s motivation is to protect Sammy, he would have told Sam to shoot John, because they all know the greatest danger to Sam is that Demon. As long as the Demon lives, Sammy can never be truly protected. In choosing to let it live, Dean proves his ultimate motivation is not protecting Sammy, but rather serving the needs of his relationship with John, which requires that he not allow John to die, no matter the cost to let him live.
If Sam’s motivation is anything other than Dean, he would have shot John, because the only reason to not shoot John is because Dean so obviously needs that. Every other need of every other character is served by Sam shooting John. Only what Dean needs is served by not shooting him. For Sam, it is all about the Dean.
And if John’s motivation is either Sam or Dean, he wouldn’t have allowed either of them to be anywhere near a Demon John can’t control when that Demon’s entire motivation is to get to Sam. John would have either killed or fail to kill the Demon at this confrontation, but neither of the boys would have been there because John would have not allowed them to stay under the auspices of "we’re stronger as a family." But because it is all about the Demon for John, he lets his boys participate because their participation ups his chance of killing the demon. Neither Dean nor Sam convince John of anything other than that they are stronger than he thought and thus, less of a detriment to his mission than an asset. And because killing that Demon matters more than the lives of either of his sons, John agrees to let his sons help him with a mission he refused to allow them to help him with when he viewed them as liabilities to mission success rather than assets.
Because for John, it is all about the Demon.
Just as for Dean, it is all about the John.
And for Sam, it is all about the Dean.
And Captain Obvious would like to bring this whole thing full circle by reminding everyone that, for the Demon, it is all about the Sam. Which is exactly why we call him Captain Obvious.
-finis-