So! I imagine there's a lot of Sam vs. Dean going around in fandom right now, or so I hear. Somehow I have managed to avoid all of it on my various social media outlets
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Everyone's an Asshole and Everything Hurts. The best thing about SPN is that every character has perfectly understandable and sympathetic reasons for doing what they're doing.
YES. My default response to emotionally heavy eps of this show is to clap my hands and sing, "Their misery is DELICIOUS!" There are so many well-drawn, solidly-built, character-grounded *foundations* to everything these people do; when things fall apart between them, when they find themselves in opposition, it's just so SATISFYING. Both as a narrative and as character/relationship development. (Don't get me wrong: I'm looking forward to the boys fixing things between themselves just as much. The gut-wrenching misery and horror is fun, but it's only one part of the story; I want it ALL.)
I think the reason I love the conflict this season is because it's so divorced of the pressures of The Apocalypse.AGREED. It's conflict from within; not that there aren't plenty of external sources providing strife, but the central tensions this season are grounded in character
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SRSLY. I think what I like about the current conflicts is how rooted it is in both characters' fundamental issues, how far back some of it goes, all of the unresolved stuff both between them and that's been done to them out of their control. It just feels very real to me, very human, when you can so thoroughly empathize with both sides of a conflict like this. So much of this has to do with Dean's foundational abandonment issues, which have a lot more to do with Mary dying and John's treatment of him than Sam leaving him, but John's conditioning of him to see Sam as his primary mission in life meant that when Sam left for Stanford, that's the abandonment that Dean can deal with actually feeling. There's so much there psychologically, about betrayal trauma and how it was easier for Dean to blame Sam for leaving than it was to really face what John had done to him as a kid, and even now when he has realized a lot of the damage John did, he can't just erase those feelings of being abandoned by Sam
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just the weight of all their baggage and pain. IT'S BEAUTIFUL, OKAY. :D:D :DI so totally agree! And its not that they don't want things to work - there were moments where you could see that. But the hurt and anger each is carrying is just gets in the way
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OH MAN yeah, the moment where Dean says the line about Benny never letting him down, and you can tell he realizes once he says it how it's going to come across to Sam, and how he tries to walk it back after Sam's response but it's too late. And Sam just gives up any pretense of trying to listen to Dean after that, which isn't really fair either, but geez. Ouch
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What no one seems to have pointed out is that Benny could have handled the Martin situation by calling Dean to help and that could have majorly changed the fallout not only for Martin and Benny but also for Dean and Sam!
Good point about Benny, yeah, he could have called Dean in. I don't know if he really had time, and I don't particularly blame him for not calling for help under those circumstances, but again, all of these characters are flawed and make big mistakes and bad decisions that have consequences. I don't think Benny's mistake is any bigger than Sam's or Dean's in this one. It was a tragic confluence of circumstances made awful by all of their bad decisions made out of their own flaws and pain, which is something I appreciated.
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An wonderfully insightful post! Thanks so much for sharing this. :)
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YES. My default response to emotionally heavy eps of this show is to clap my hands and sing, "Their misery is DELICIOUS!" There are so many well-drawn, solidly-built, character-grounded *foundations* to everything these people do; when things fall apart between them, when they find themselves in opposition, it's just so SATISFYING. Both as a narrative and as character/relationship development. (Don't get me wrong: I'm looking forward to the boys fixing things between themselves just as much. The gut-wrenching misery and horror is fun, but it's only one part of the story; I want it ALL.)
I think the reason I love the conflict this season is because it's so divorced of the pressures of The Apocalypse.AGREED. It's conflict from within; not that there aren't plenty of external sources providing strife, but the central tensions this season are grounded in character ( ... )
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I really liked your insight into Dean--and the passive bystander way he may be seeing Sam. It makes a lot of sense.
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What no one seems to have pointed out is that Benny could have handled the Martin situation by calling Dean to help and that could have majorly changed the fallout not only for Martin and Benny but also for Dean and Sam!
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