#and I'm going to censor the less charitable things I was going to say here lol

[egipci]

re: “where does that come from” i think it literally all comes from them being separated in the pilot, even though all of the framing comes across like dean being excited to go out and prove himself to john, AND we’re immediately given context with sam going “dad let you out of his sight??? 🤨”

Hello pal <3 Yeah, I see the appeal of this sort of headcanon for dean-whump reasons, but as you say it seems pretty inconsistent with canon. Like, even if you want to delineate the timeline into "first 2 years during which Sam and Dean remained in touch" + "second 2 years during which Sam and Dean were not in touch" it still sounds like Dean would have been almost consistently with John -- Sam is surprised based on what he'd last heard (two years ago) and Dean explicitly clarifies he was with Dad everyday "for the past two years," which pretty much covers the entirety of the period Sam was at college. It could be that Dean is lying there, but it's not obvious to me that he is or why he would, and as far as I remember that specific detail was never fully retconned later on either.