child abuse in 10x09
Dec. 12th, 2014 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
butterfly“I was part of this gang, right? They were my family. I lived, breathed, I would have even died for them. You know where it got me? 15 years in a correctional facility. And for what? Being loyal? To who? I should have been loyal to myself. Because you get one shot at this game, Dean, and when you look in the mirror, you want the guy looking back at you to be his own man.” Sonny; 9x07; “Bad Boys”
So, I was thinking more about the spn mid-season finale, and kinda mentally separating out the types of abuse that the episode focused on:
1) treating your child as a resource instead of a person
a. Rowena – wanting to trade young Fergus/Crowley for three pigs
b. Randy – training his ~kids~ to steal for him and pay his debts, and then also willing to sell Claire if he got a ‘damn good deal’ for it.
(implied c. John Winchester – who admitted in 1x21 to treating his children as soldiers rather than kids; like Randy, he also trained his kids, especially Dean, to steal and otherwise break the law for him and his mission)
2) abandonment/neglect
a. Jimmy chose Heaven (being Heaven’s chosen) over Claire and Amelia.
b. Amelia chose herself over Claire.
c. Randy chose himself over Claire.
d. Rowena chose herself over Crowley/Fergus.
(implied e. John Winchester chose (his desire for) revenge over Dean and Sam, and he frequently abandoned them on a short-term basis, ex. “Something Wicked” and leaving Dean in the boys’ home in “Bad Boys”; and he was willing to cut his kids loose entirely if the right reasons came along – like anger over one of his kids’ wanting to have a normal life and go to college).
3) direct emotional abuse
a) Rowena telling Crowley that he would die in a gutter.
(implied b. John Winchester, who also liked to make cutting remarks to lower his sons’ self-esteems)
This specific episode didn’t touch on physical abuse, though I think Crowley may have alluded to it in an earlier episode? I’ll need to rewatch.
It bothered some people, I know, that Dean and Sam defended John in an episode all about bad parenting. But that, too, is reflected in the other recipients of bad parenting – Crowley accepts Rowena back, Claire believed that Randy loves her and would take care of her and protect her. Someone ( dustydreamsanddirtyscars?) put together a gifset of Rowena and Crowley and mentioned that, when you’re desperate for love, you’ll settle for bad love over no love (paraphrased).
Dean and Sam, like Rowena and Claire, are willing to settle for bad love or inadequate love over no love at all. We know that Claire’s defense of Randy is based on false hope because of the evidence we see in the episode; we know that Crowley’s acceptance of Rowena is based on false hope because of the evidence in the episode. But John Winchester doesn’t appear in the episode; all we have to go by is what his version of Claire/Crowley have to say about him – maybe not a number one dad but there when they needed him.
Except, of course, that the entire rest of the show has happened, so we know for a fact that John wasn’t always there when they needed him. He was there, on occasion (though they had to pick a pretty ugly memory in order to actually find an example), but not always or even often. Dean has even been able to admit this, from time to time (mostly when he’s dead or dreaming). So, because John is dead, he can’t appear in the episode to contradict Dean’s statement, the way Randy making the deal contradicts Claire’s or the way Rowena getting that demon to lie for her shows that Crowley is making a mistake to accept her back at the end.
Dean and Sam can keep up the pretense and the audience can choose to believe it, just like Dean lied about being fine for several episodes and Sam (and the audience) could choose to believe that, too. Or, the audience could have look deeper during the last few episodes and seen that Dean wasn’t fine ; similarly they can look now and remember that John wasn’t always there for the boys. But just like the hunger and violence lurking under Dean’s desperate attempt to play normal; this lie is also laying in wait as a weapon to hurt the boys. It hurts them every time they justify their own misery by saying that they need to live up to John’s standards; every time they fiercely try to force the other brother to live up to John’s standards, too. And as long as they polish up and sanitize John’s ghost, they’ll keep living in his shadow.