#sam winchester csa

[lovealwayssay]

Lucifer grooming Sam his entire life makes me want to scream.

[aliusfrater]

i was awake for some of it, dean. born under a bad sign [2.14] i don't remember anything. [6.12, 6.22] i can’t know that for sure. you understand me? hello, cruel world [7.02] he deserves to know. rock and a hard place [9.08] you've seen everything that he's seen, even if you can't remember. that's what i need you to do. i need you to remember. road trip [9.10]

[seasononesam]

2x12 "Nightshifter" // 3x12 "Jus in Bello"

[sammygender]

wrt prev post and sam’s original ‘fed demon blood by azazel as a baby’ arc like. actually that was the most insane thing to see depicted on my television especially when it seemed like no one else i knew or followed was talking about it. it felt so explicit and yet it was sooo deep in metaphor. she walked in on us. sammy, you’re my favourite. god it must be terrible to know something happened but that you’ll never be able to remember it or tell anyone about it. never be able to rip it out or scrub it clean. so azazel could get into my nursery and- bleed in my mouth? because i wasn’t clean. these trials - they’re purifying me. anyway. augh

[flowersintheimpala69]

john likes to make videos

[normalbrothershow]

samjohn so dear to me actually i wish it was more popular in terms of discussions and fan explorations (also fics though). john viewing/treating and trying to keep sam in this image of purity and innocence, because he knows hes not. but sam has to believe hes pure. john has to hold on to that. johns possessiveness over sam and the lashing out and rejection when sam forms a personality and john cant control sams thoughts anymore (which is all very incest adjacent to me). sam growing up and recognizing the abuse and trying to get away (sam often saying "getting away from Dad" specifically). azazel in johns body with sam + azazel in samuels body with mary. mary mistaking azazel for john. john driving to stanford and watching sam without sam knowing. dean feeling unloved compared to johns love for sam, and wanting to be loved like sam, not knowing sam feels trapped and like it wasnt love at all & dean blaming sam for how he talked to john and that sam shouldve been grateful for being loved like that (very alike to incestous sa victim blaming). sam thinking hes a disappointment for leaving and standing up to john/for himself. sam the rebellious one who was always the one to speak on the way john mistreated them but crumbles as soon as john says hes sorry or shows any form of affection/emotion. the change of how sam talks about john after his death re: forgiveness/understanding. sams conflict between love and hate for john and between following and rebelling. john saying the options are that sams either 1. under the protection and supervision of family to keep him pure/good/safe or 2. he has to die; and both is out of/despite his too extreme love for sam. all the ways mary and sam parallel each other, john listening to sam and hearing mary. the way sam and john always have that crazy eye contact going on and how john keeps staring at sam during 1.16. not even starting here with 14.13 or john pov lest i go insane

[blacknidstang]

Things that drive me insane is when ppl want sam to be the innocent normal one with less trauma and in the process completely brush off azazel's entire csa coded storyline + demons trying to kidnap and groom sam. Sorry it's just kinda sorta upsetting when you take Sam's feeling of being unclean and dirty and needing to run away to establish some ounce of control in his life and make it only about john abusing dean. It's kinda wretched actually.

[opheliasam]

among the grating cesspool that is spn youtube clips comment sections… found some peers.. academics.. people who get it if u will

[superabnormal]

virgin veins | sam winchester

cw for implied csa and abuse watch improved version on youtube

w* dni

[holyfreaks]

Dean finds out about Sam and John, and immediately starts going off about how terrible that was of John to do. Sam says "I wanted it. I asked for it. Did you ever ask to take care of me? To take care of him? I wanted to be his whore. Did you want to be his wife?"

- schizosamwincester

I WANTED TO BE HIS WHORE. DID YOU WANT TO BE HIS WIFE.

ohhhh my god I will be thinking about that for the rest of time

but YES I love this, the idea of dean being a stand-in for his wife while at the same time sam is his baby, his whore..... yes yes yes

[lovealwayssay]

One quick way to piss me off is to say that Sam is boring in the later seasons. SAM ISN’T BORING! SAM. IS. TRAUMATIZED.

[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.

[twochildreninamoteldemo]

Supernatural (2005-2010) / Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

[transprodigalson]

"How am I to know with this sick in my bones?" - my (op's) original poetry

aka sam winchester × his (violation of) autonomy

[thevillainsfangirl]

All I can say with every fiber of my being is that if John Winchester were a women, the Supernatural fandom would not hate on her nearly as much. (Or maybe they would; maybe this fandom hates women. Idk, I'm new here!)

Because flawed mothers get every excuse or defense in the book made for them, while flawed fathers get condemned to Hell and portrayed as a homophobic p*do/rapist who beats his kids daily. (Even outright abusive mothers get every excuse in the book made in their defense.)

[blacknidstang]

You ever just play cure's lullaby on repeat thinking about sam, azazel and shtriga and all the demons stalking and watching and invading Sam's life