#sam winchester & bodily autonomy

[2sw]

You poisoned me.

Supernatural S2E21 All Hell Breaks Loose: Part One S3E15 Time Is on My Side // S4E14 Sex and Violence S5E02 Good God, Y'all S5E03 Free to Be You and Me S7E08 Season Seven, Time for a Wedding! S7E17 The Born-Again Identity

[peanutbutterandbananasandwichs]

If A Body Catch a Body

- little remake of an old graphic (the bottom image is the same but I always hated the top one in the old version, I like this much better)

[lambmotifz]

“sam doesn’t care about dean!” he literally offers dean to use his body as a punching bag every time dean’s angry because he knows violence is the only way for dean to get some relief and sam doesn’t want him to keep all that grief & anger in so he’s always willing to take dean’s fists and even urges him to lash out. it is about caring for dean and making him feel better!

[dareduffie]

loving sam winchester is a trap that you will not ever find your way out of. i've been here for over a decade. i keep thinking i've escaped. and then it's 2 in the morning. a tuesday. i'm crying because sam winchester fought tooth and nail to break free of his upbringing's teachings that his life is not his own, only to learn that it isn't, it never was, and he was destined from birth to belong to the devil

[homehauntsyou]

Day Six (May 1st): Autonomy / Abuse / Trauma "The Rest" by Jane Huffman // 01x01 / 05x22 / 09x10 / 13x21

[hexedwinchester]

Why Being Manipulated into Letting Gadreel in a Huge Deal for Sam?

I know a lot of Dean Girls were very upset (and will be upset after reading this post) with Sam when Dean asked him if the roles were reversed if he would have done the same thing (letting an angel possess him to save his life). Sam simply says no! Some fans have gone to the extent of calling him selfish but no, Sam is not being selfish in that scene. It wasn't that he didn't care about his brother. He really does and that is why him saying no is actually a good thing.

Now see, Dean never had to go through the whole loss of bodily autonomy due to a possession issue (not until after he was possessed by Michael but that's way after the Gadreel plot) like Sam has been and disturbingly a lot more number of times than Dean's single rodeo with Otherworld Michael (or is it AU Michael? whatever!). Just to keep the argument simple, I am purely focusing on the loss of bodily autonomy purely from a possession POV.

When Meg possessed Sam in S2, she used his body to kill other hunters, to assault Jo and to beat Dean. Maybe she did a lot worse than that, we don't know. Who is left with the trauma of that knowledge? Sam!

The Gary-Sam body swap. This one though seems funny on the surface, it's actually kinda disturbing because Gary used Sam's body to have sex and the kid. Kinda gross enough already but that dumb kid could have easily handed over the vessel to Lucifer. Imagine, that's how it played and Sam was back into his body. Now who is trapped with Lucifer, the Devil? Sam!

Speaking of, understandably saying yes to Lucifer was Sam's call to put him back in the box but it didn't go down without blood on his hand. The moment Lucifer took control of Sam's body, he killed the demons from Sam's life that deceived him. I am guessing these were possessed people he killed in the process and not just wisps of black smoke. At Stull cemetery, he exploded Cas to bits, snapped Bobby's neck and beat up Dean to pulp! all by whose hands? Sam's!

Gadreel's possession did help Sam get better but at what cost? Kevin's death? How many nightmares did Sam have seeing his hands burning Kevin hollow? Now let me point out the aftermath of this possession which is somehow even worse than the actual possession: Crowley skewered Sam's brains with needles, hell, he even possessed Sam to wake him as if one possession was not enough. Sam literally had two supernatural beings possessing him at one time! Don't even get me started on the painful, torturous grace extraction process. Sam was willing to die in that moment because he believed his life wasn't worth saving, definitely not at the cost of Kevin's life!

Before this role reversal scene, Dean wasn't possessed by anything, so he doesn't understand how horrible it is to lose autonomy over one's mind and body. I don't expect him to grasp the gravity of it. He sees it as a healing from within. For him, if 'ends justifying the means' that's all that matters.

When every single possession has caused nothing but grave trauma to Sam Winchester, tell me why would he or anyone for that matter, in their sane heads do this on their own brother, especially when they love them so much?

Here's another very real life perspective for all those who feel Sam saying 'no' if the situation was reversed was a horrible betrayal and proof that he doesn't love Dean enough: Ever had someone you love on life support or gone through a situation where you had to put down your beloved pet? Why do we do this? is it because we don't love them? because we don't care? no! Because sometimes, it is better to let them go than to prolong their suffering by putting them through this pain. So next time you feel Sam was being selfish, or disloyal to Dean or that he didn't care enough, think about a loved one suffering through something horrible because you didn't have the guts to let go!

[sammygender]

spn 7x15 was truly crazy. having the resurgence of the narrative showing us sam’s hallucinations of lucifer in the same episode where we see ex-vessel of a demon, his entire life wrecked by the possession, completely obsessed & in stockholm syndrome-y love w the demon that possessed him. i want to analyse this episode scene by scene. who wrote this one. what did they mean by it

[pentacentric]

S2 E21 | All Hell Breaks Loose: Part I

[spnintheyearofourlord]

Thinking about Sam and how central autonomy and violation is to his character. How many times and ways he had his choice taken away throughout the series. All the things we don’t know about his time with Lucifer, but are also so heavily implied that we do.

Imagining he eventually gets out of The Life and becomes a victim’s advocate. He ultimately decides not to try and pursue law school at this stage in his life—it’s been so long and so much has changed—but finishes his bachelor’s and pursues a master’s in social work. He never expected to end up here: the boy with the demon blood, no longer living out some doomed and twisted fate, helping people. He’s passionate about representing those made most vulnerable and unsafe in their own skin, supporting others as they come out the other side survivors, lending the compassion he’s always struggled to have for himself. Every time he listens to someone else’s story, helps connect them to resources, advocates for their case, he heals a little bit too.

[deansguns]

I might be an idiot but sam and dean didn't share a heaven, right??? like I thought that it was very central to the episode that their heavens were complete opposites???

[motelnatural]

a study on the seductive nature of fate ; regarding jessica moore + lucifer + sam winchester

helen oyeyemi, “white is for witching” / katy perry, thinking of you / lisa marie basile, from andalucia / postcolonial love poem, natalie diaz / somatoparaphrenia, lennelle

[peanutbutterandbananasandwichs]

[twochildreninamoteldemo]

In ten years I need to swing by your house for a little something, that's all.

“Ptolemaea” by Ethel Cain / Supernatural (2005-2011)

[homehauntsyou]

text from an original poem <3 // 12x02 / 02x21 / 09x09 / 05x22

[mothgardens]

Super cute of Dean to give permission to an angel and a demon to possess his younger brother. Then, instead of apologizing, he began talking about how much people are hurt when they are around him.

Super adorable how he didn’t even let Sam get his frustrations out or even really talk the situation through. Super sweet how he immediately turned the situation around to be a Dean moment.

[panicroomsammy]

Sam Winchester, queer coding, and CSA themes

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time but what finally got me to write it down was this post about Sam and queer coding. For this reason (and that this got ridiculously long) I will not be restating all of the points made in that post, though I do agree with them.

I think the reason so many people refuse to see that Sam is queer coded is that he is queer coded in unpalatable ways, including being csa coded. I am only on season seven, but I am going to try and break down some of the ways that he has been queer coded so far. I must begin by explaining what I mean by queer coding and what coding is in general. When I say the word “queer” I do not necessarily mean “gay” or “bisexual” or any other lgbt label. I mean outside the norm. This is because “queer coding” is not so much about purposefully portraying a character as a certain sexuality, but about othering that character from those around them. Sam is clearly an othered character. We will start, as all things in Supernatural do, with Azazel.

When Azazel makes his deal with Mary that ultimately results in the othering of Sam via his psychic powers, the deals are csa coded in a variety of ways. The most obvious is that he possesses Mary’s father’s corpse to kiss her and make the deal. Hunting families are already incest coded in that it is a secret and something that children raised in it are taught no one outside of their family will understand, and in this case hunting is something Mary is trying very hard to escape. Her love for John (who is also her means of escape) seems to be a love for his “innocence” in the way that he does not know of the supernatural. She tells Dean that what she fears more than anything is her own children being raised into hunting. This is a very typical incestuous family melodrama plot (that I could cite in many academic articles but alas this is a tumblr post). Besides the explicitly incestuous kiss and the familiar plot, there is also the way that Azazel obscures what exactly he is asking for in the deals. When he makes the deal with Mary, he has taken both the familiarity of her family and her route of escape from her. He then offers the escape back to her, in exchange for something. He never tells her what this “something” is. This is a more insidious piece of csa coding. Mary lacks the knowledge necessary to consent to the deal - the same way that a child lacks the knowledge necessary to meaningfully consent to sex. All demon deals in the show are sa coded in that they are extortive and about owning someone and depriving them of autonomy, but in this particular case Mary not knowing what she is consenting to is highlighted. He also phrases is as “permission” (to do what he’s going to do to baby Sam), similar to language of asking for consent and implying that whatever he does that she does not understand she will have allowed so she cannot take issue with it later.

Fast forward ten years. Azazel comes to collect on his deal. Two significant things happen - he feeds baby Sam his blood and he is caught in the act by Mary. Let’s focus first on the latter. Azazel kills Mary because she walked in on him with Sam. The way he talks about this in the show has a stomach turning amount of innuendo to it. Specifically, he says she had to die because “she walked in on us” to Sam. The use of “us” is very clearly supposed to invoke an abuser’s attempt to convince a victim that they did in fact have agency in the situation and were just as active a participant as the abuser, though the audience knows this cannot be the case as Sam was an infant.

When Azazel feeds Sam his blood this is without consent which already gives it a csa implication. The way that he made the deal with Mary in the first place does the same. Then there is the way that Sam feels dirty because of the demon blood in him. “Something that I could not control happened to me as a child and now I feel dirty forever” is glaringly a metaphor for csa. The way that Sam says “so he could bleed in my mouth” made me pause the episode and sit there for a moment because of how much it sounded like a euphemism.

Then Sam becomes addicted to demon blood. The parallels would almost make me laugh if they didn’t make me nauseous. Ruby forces herself on Sam sexually before she starts feeding him her blood, and then later it seems that their routine is feeding Sam the blood and then having sex. This creates an association between demon blood and sex. There is also a more sinister undertone to it if you read with this in mind. Sam’s desire for demon blood invokes, for me at least, queer desire. Unlike what some people on tumblr would like to believe, sexual desire isn’t something that people only start feeling when they turn 18. It isn’t even something that we only start feeling when we reach puberty. Everyone has a human body that is capable of feeling arousal from the moment they are born. This is a simple fact of life, but it is one everyone likes to ignore. With this in mind we can understand the quote “within childhood sexual trauma, the experience of violation may be viewed in the moment as uncontrollably stimulating and overwhelmingly arousing” from this post. When someone experiences violation as a child, they may at the time feel pleasure in it or desire for it to happen again. What I am saying is that his whole life after Azazel fed him his blood maybe Sam, for all his fight against being a freak, deep down felt some kind of desire for something even without knowing quite what. And then Ruby gave it to him. This is an unacceptable desire and therefore coded as queer (sexual) desire. But as it is not just queer desire but one associated with both childhood and non consent, which makes it unpalatable to many people who may otherwise enjoy reading for queerness in subtext, therefore the queerness here is missed.

Sam’s fight against being a freak is also part of his queer coding. Some may see this and take it at face value, but truly what queer person can honestly say they have never tried to fit into heteronormative society? When one is constantly told by society that they are wrong, they will try to change to fit - even if just out of a desire for safety. Sam trying and failing at normality (including the ideal heterosexual romantic relationship which is taken from him with Jess’s death in the first episode) is a glaring example of queer coding.

Yet another aspect of Sam’s sexuality that I believe leads to his queer coding being ignored is that the vast majority of sexual situations we see him in are non consensual and he makes it explicitly clear that he wishes not to be in those situations. The first time we see him in such a situation is the pilot where the woman in white forces herself on him and tells him that he will be unfaithful to Jess. At the time this felt pretty extreme to me for putting in the first episode, even for trying to establish that a character highly values their morality. From there they just don’t stop putting Sam in these situations. The next time this happens is with Meg touching Sam sexually while she has him and Dean tied up with no motivation other than that she wants to. She later possesses him, which is used throughout the show as a sexual assault allegory. The next time I remember something like this happening is Becky groping Sam and refusing to stop when he asks her in season four. Later in season seven she roofies him with love potion and kidnaps him. When Sam and Dean investigate the mental hospital in season five, one of the patients grabs both Dean and Sam and makes out with them at different times. While Dean goes with it and does not resist, Sam tries to push the girl away. While neither of these situations had consent, it is much easier for the audience to swallow Dean’s reaction than Sam’s, as Dean’s reaction plays into the notion that men cannot be sexually assaulted because they should always want to have sex with women, while Sam’s forces one to confront that men are capable of not consenting. In the very next episode a high school boy uses a spell to swap his and Sam’s bodies. While in Sam’s body the boy has sex with a woman. Throughout much of season six I would argue something similar occurs. While I’m a bit fuzzy in the metaphysics of what exactly is happening here, Sam is functionally anywhere from two to three people over the course of the season. Despite the fact that they are all technically Sam, I would argue (as a system myself) that any one person within a system using the body to do things that the others would stop them from doing given the chance is non consent. We also know that soulless!Sam slept around with a lot of people during that year and a half. Again, as a system, I would say that is noncon. There is also the fact that during all of this Sam-in-hell (soul!Sam?) was being tortured and more than implied to be raped by Lucifer. All of this makes Sam and sexuality a much less palatable thing to focus on than Dean and sexuality. (Though Dean has his fair share of sa coding as well he covers it up with jokes that make it easier to ignore. But that’s another post.)

The bottom line is that Sam’s demon blood addiction is coded as queer in that it is a desire that is taboo, but it is a bit too taboo for most fans to enjoy or even acknowledge, leading them to voice outright denial of it, with the unpalatable themes of rape surrounding Sam and sexuality adding to the lack of desire to discuss this aspect of the character.