#<-- very vaguely implied but still obvious enough it probably requires a trigger warning

[chiisana-sukima]

@blue-chimera- I want to reply to your reblog, but the post chain is so long now and my autism goblin can't stand to have another long, long post on my dash again for dumb esthetic reasons. So I'm just pasting the relevant part into a new chain from the original first post. I hope that's okay with everyone involved.

To explain Sam's statement about his flashbacks from a Doylist perspective: the writers had Sam say what he did to ensure that the extent of his suffering was clear to us as viewers despite the show not having the time/budget to show a whole lot in the way of actual torture. (They didn't want us to see a brief seizure and think, "Oh, but that wasn't so bad!") They weren't trying to send people down some complicated rabbit hole. They expected us to interpret Sam's statement as an assertion about the subjective experience of the flashback, not as an objective claim of time dilation.²

To explain Sam's statement from a Watsonian perspective: Sam is trying to wrap his head around what's happening in the real world vs. what he's feeling, which is a break with reality that's both highly painful & highly disorienting. The torture aspect makes it painful. The time skew makes it disorienting. That's what's motivating his observation: an attempt to grapple with this dissonance.

¹On a similar note, it also makes sense that souls attached to bodies do not feel the effects of Hell's time dilation, either. Mrswhozeewhatsis offers a reasonable theory here, and one that would be consistent with what we saw.

² If this was an attempt at an objective claim, it would be one inconsistent with earlier statements about the rate of time's passage in Hell, in any case. And if we're just going to argue that the show was broadly inconsistent, there's no point in analyzing any of it. Once you agree that nothing needs logically coherence with the rest of the show to be a valid interpretation, then anything goes. You could just as easily argue that the rate of passage of time in Hell changed depending on the phase of the Moon — we'd have no more or less evidence for that than anything else.

To get where we agree and where we disagree out of the way because I want to talk primarily about something else:

I agree Dean and Alastair were making claims of fact about how fast time actually passes in Hell, whereas Sam was talking about how much of his time in the Cage he was subjectively remembering during the 2-3 minute seizure those memories caused.

I disagree the narrative purpose of that dialogue was to show the extent of his current suffering; I think the narrative purpose was to show that remembering the Cage was dangerous to the point it could be easily fatal, and therefore he shouldn't be "scratching the wall". If remembering a week of the Cage causes a seizure of near fatal length, then remembering *more* (i.e. a longer period of) the Cage would probably kill him. This isn't, on the Watsonian level, a fact claim by Sam that X amount of time on earth = Y amount of time in Hell, but on a Doylist level, it does serve the purpose of showing the viewer that these aren't normal "flashbacks"; there is some kind of weird, dangerous, extra-horrible, supernatural thing going on in relation to perceived Hell Time vs real earth time. Which we already know is the case because of Dean and Alastair's earlier statements about Hell Time.

I also agree that as fanwank goes (I apologize if I explain terms you already know; I had never heard the term "fanwank" until my old school fandom friends used it, so: fanwank is the old school term for filling in inconsistency holes in canon in ways that make as much sense as possible, when there's been no meaningful attempt to do so in canon. It doesn't have a negative connotation like "wank" as Discourse does) as fanwank goes, I love @mrswhozeewhatsis's (which is also some of my friends') "the body grounds you in Hell and that's why time passes 'normally' in Hell if you are embodied" explanation. On a purely logical level it still doesn't entirely work, because if that was the case, how would embodied people interact in Hell with souls? Their time would be running at grossly different speeds. Conversation or fighting would be impossible. And we see alive!Sam interacting with dead souls in Taxi Driver, and dead!Crowley and Rowena interacting with alive!TFW in Hell when presumably by necessity they must interact with dead souls on the regular as well. However, vibes-wise it works really well and I am incorporating it into my spn headcanons as we speak.

And if we're just going to argue that the show was broadly inconsistent, there's no point in analyzing any of it.

So this is the part I mostly want to discuss if you're up for it. A friend and I were discussing 'what are people's motivations for arguing about fandom-related topics?' because it seems like often what ends up happening is people get more entrenched in their original positions, so why engage with it in the first place?

I think for me, I can't deny part of it is sometimes I see a position that I view very differently and if it's on a touchy topic, sometimes I get reactive, and then my reactivity comes out in the classic autistic 'if I explain enough, the other person will see I'm right and stop believing the thing that makes me reactive'. This is ofc not necessarily true in the slightest lol but it's a hard tendency to break out of.

But my best self also likes to argue, and for my best self, it's mostly about seeing and being seen. For my best self convincing the other party is secondary, or sometimes not a goal at all; what I'm on about is just wanting to know the other person and I have engaged with each other honestly and compassionately and that we have learned more about one another and life through that engagement.

So in that spirit, I want to say that to me the show does seem broadly inconsistent on a near constant basis and that part of what makes analysis fun for me is exactly that inconsistency. That's why so many of my arguments are structured as "but why did they do it X way in episode A and Y way in episode B" rather than "X is on screen, so how do we square that with Y, which is also on screen". To me, for example, it would feel pointless to try to square s4 with Dean's later assertion in First Blood that Hell was not as bad as 2 months in solitary confinement in a black ops supermax. To me, the later assertion is patently ridiculous (and also wildly personally offensive for reactivity reasons having to do with my own life), and what interests me about it isn't so much 'how do I explain this in universe', as 'why did dabb choose to write it that way'. I do have friends who are bugged mostly by the inconsistency and I appreciate their efforts to fanwank something plausible about it up, but it's not the main draw of discussion for me.

But the fanwank way of engaging is equally valid as the "lets look at this as a sociological phenomenon" way. That's why there are multiple schools of literary/media analysis. It's just not my way. It just, because of how my brain is structured or whatever, doesn't intuitively make sense as a method of analysis to me.

To me, spn doesn't do a very good job as a single coherent story in terms of overall plot beats. It's the 'I shot Hitler and beat up God after he ate his evil sister' show. I can't even take it seriously. Where the quality and consistency comes in is mostly, for me, thematic/vibes-based--i.e 'wow is this show stupid but also damn does it ever do a great job making me feel specific things over and over again for 15 years worth of episodes'.

So, for me, the important part of discussing Dean's vs Sam's time in Hell is thematic/vibes-based--where by 'vibes' I mean 'how did the creators probably intend the audience to feel about Scene A or Scene B and do I and other people actually feel that way or did they fuck it up'.

To me, Sam's symptomology in s6-7 is his body's testimony. He's not making claims of specific, concrete facts, but vibes-wise his seizures and his initial comatose state and later hallucinations are symbolic recreations of the actual facts of his stay in Hell.

So, I'll go first. I'm not expecting reciprocation in oversharing; I'm sharing for the sake of being heard, because being heard is a valuable end goal of discussion to me on its own (although reciprocation and/or engagement with the topic are very welcome).

I just can't buy--on a vibes based level, not on a logical level--that Sam is reduced to psychosis and inevitable death without emergency supernatural psychiatric intervention by a year and a half in Lucifer's power.

I started out as a Dean girl (gn) and Dean's story is in many ways more like my own than Sam's is. My id only flipped to Sam in s6-7 purely because Sam's PTSD symptomology happens to be more like my own than Dean's is, and Jared's portrayal is the best, most respectful portrayal of severe dissociative PTSD I've ever seen.

Dean's Hell storyline is by far my favorite arc of his. Like many spn fans, my childhood was not ideal, and in my case, my scumbag father is in some ways a lot like Alastair. And even though on a plot level, the 40 year timeline gives me secondhand embarrassment because it's so excessive and stupid; on a vibes level, I think it's necessary and effective. Dean should be stronger than me. He should be the epic me I would've been if I was in a heroic adventure show instead of real life. He's a container for all those larger-than-life feelings people--but in this case, me--have about their own much smaller but still horrible experiences.

And Sam is this too. When I come right down to it--when I am as honest with myself as I'm capable of being--my emotional response to the idea of Sam in Lucifer's care for a year destroying him to the extent it does is anger and disgust. Because my Hell was longer.

Obviously, I know my rl childhood was in no way comparable to even a fraction of a particle of what Sam went through in the Cage, so my response makes no sense logically. But emotionally it makes very good sense. He's supposed to be larger than life. He's supposed to be larger than my life.

And it especially makes sense given the context that I had already internalized earlier in spn's run that Dean's Hell was a magnified version of my own, and he came out, I would say, approximately as damaged by it as I have been. Which is to say, on the grand scale, not that much. He has very apparent PTSD symptoms in s4, and it does fuck him up forever in ways you can see right through to the end of the show, but fundamentally he can still function. He has flashbacks but no psychosis. He has trouble sleeping, but not to the extent it will kill him. He self-medicates, but he doesn't down random pills he got off a stranger and then crash a car and end up in involuntary inpatient custody. I just can't imagine Lucifer with the power to mold reality being qualitatively so much worse than Alastair with the power to mold reality that anything but more time would explain Sam's hugely worse subsequent body's score card.

I really hate how trauma has become weaponized in fandom, and I hate that the (honestly pretty understandable) counter-weapon is "pfft, you're projecting" as a reason why someone's meta isn't valid. Of course I'm projecting--that's spn's brand--what are you doing at the devil's sacrament. Anyway, I want to specify that the above isn't about saying my way of interacting with this topic is the best one or the most right one or that people shouldn't still argue with me about it or anything of that nature. Rather it's an attempt to share why (because 'why' is my favorite question) my approach to the topic is what it is.

Does the show ever actual say how long Sam’s soul was in Lucifer’s cage in relative time? Because I know they specifically said for Dean that it was like 40 years, but at no other time do any of the characters that go to Hell experience time dilation/distortion so it seems just as likely that Dean’s time was messed with to hasten him breaking to jump start the apocalypse. But I’m wondering if I’ve just forgotten a reference or if we’ve all just assumed that Sam’s time down there was longer than the year or so that his soul wasn’t in his body.