super-briefly: We’ve had a couple of times now this season where I’ve seen people argue the case that a monster can be echoing either Sam or Dean (‘which is Kate and which is Tasha?’ and now 'who is Olivia representing?’ stuff) and I feel like that’s pretty thematically appropriate, because that’s a large part of the problem that’s kept the boys in stasis – if one of them tries to loosen up the chains of their childhood, the other one (reflexively?) tries to tighten them back up again. This is easier to notice when Dean is making an effort to let go, that Sam will pick up the slack and yank them back together (back into the life and the personas their father built for them – this was kinda lampshaded in 10x03, where Sam explicitly called on the specter of their father as his attempt at a trump card to shame demon!Dean), because we’re used to thinking of Dean doing this as just part of ~who he is~. But it very much goes both ways and was taught/trained into both of the boys.
Original Post:
brief version expansion on this from this morning.
It ties back into what we’ve heard ‘Dean’ say twice this season so far: [John] brainwashed us; [John] took away our own free will. Even when, as a demon, Dean felt no particular emotional need to take care of Sam, he could see that Sam had been as screwed up by John as Dean was. Marie, in writing the play, was also able to note that John harmed both the boys in how he raised him – even before we got to hear that line in the play, we had a hint of her feelings when she called “Dark Side of the Moon” a 'masterpiece’. That’s the episode where we got several major scenes about John’s relationship to his family and none were a pretty look into the dynamic. Sam wanted to be anywhere but near his father, Dean was terrified by the memory of what his father did when he came home and learned Sam had gone missing, and we find out from Dean’s oldest memory that John would fight with Mary and then go off by himself (possibly to drink, given what else we know about him).
While Marie was able to see more clearly about John, she still idealized the boys’ relationship, having Sam see Dean as a 'man without sin’ and Dean see Sam as a strong man he envies. And while elements of that are true, those points are also things we’ve seen them resent about each other – Sam resents Dean acting like he has the moral high-ground over Sam (see: early season 9 - Benny), while Dean resents that Sam has shown himself more capable of cutting himself of from the family business than Dean is capable of doing (see: early season 9 – Amelia).
And, as we’ve seen many times over the course of the seasons, in the absence of their father, the boys police each other – in proper family behavior (never give up on family), proper 'manly’ behavior (also based on what they learned from John), and their proper respective 'places’ in their family dynamic. Because they reinforce this behavior in each other, it’s much harder for them to truly let go. Both Sam and Dean have come close to escaping this dynamic and, while, in the early seasons, it tended to be the world/monsters (blamed for) forcing them back into the life, more recently, the show has made it clear that it’s them doing it to each other. Very explicitly, in the case of demon!Dean, who had completely shaken off the obligations that John had forced on him (while still obviously feeling the effects of that childhood & the coping mechanisms it compelled him to adopt) only to have Sam track him down and force him back into his 'big brother’ role.
Another problem is that they get very little help about this aspect of their life from everyone around them – people around them mostly see their bond as a positive thing, as maybe the one good thing in their otherwise terrible lives. Sam and Dean show more awareness themselves that their bond is tainted by the actions they’ve been willing to take to preserve it (to the point where the “SamAndDean” unit is treated as more valuable than either Sam or Dean are as individual people with wants and needs), but don’t have the tools to fix it. They make attempts but because they don’t have the right emotional tools to fix the problem, those attempts always founder and break apart, leaving the boys trapped inside a destructive spiral that destroys everything else they care about.
So, how do you fix this problem (without giving the boys a therapist, which is sadly unlikely to happen)? The path that the narrative has been taking so far is to make things so horrible that the boys will eventually hit rock-bottom (and then learn from there?). The problem being that, so far, they’ve kept finding deeper places to dig, and every time one of them is ready to throw in the shovel and finally rest, the other one forces him to start digging again.
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i don't actually have an answer tbh except that we've been trying and failing to 'hit rock bottom' for a while so i'm wondering if maybe the successful approach will actually be something different sam and dean stuff supernatural supernatural season 10 spn s10 spn 10x05 spn 10x06 spoilers in the link not a john winchester appreciation blogOriginal Post:
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