#supernatural there's something about mary

[incesthemes]

something i keep thinking about is who mary is to sam. she didn't raise him; he doesn't know her except through the stories john and dean told him. she exists in pictures and print, not in memories. she's a stranger to him, yet his entire life has revolved around her. he seeks revenge for a woman he's never met or known or loved. she's just a secondhand god to a nonbeliever, omnipresent but never actually there, never actually touched or held or shared. he's outside the church looking in on the mass but never able to partake. it must be alienating, for your family to have known god while you're left only to your own faith.

[winchestress]

12x21 | 13x01

[let-me-be-your-home]

Dean Winchester Birthday Week - Day 2 - Favorite Action Moment.

[dogearedheart]

anna x mary

[beatsheetromanroy]

both parents know evil could be lurking at any corner. and yet

[alaynestone]

s a m . . . i'm good. i am. 14.01 STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

[ananke-xiii]

Perhaps the most interesting thing Chuck ever said is "humans… they'll break your heart every time".

[blahwithasideofblah]

One reason Dean Winchester became a bad father to Jack Kline is Dean's own beliefs about being a father vs a brother became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Both times he explicitly acts as a father, he hurts his children (or fails to stop them being hurt). His guilt confirms what he learned from his own dad, which is that fathers cause fear and hurt. In this essay I will

[assigned-boyking-at-birth]

Sam would find out he was a C-section baby and would take it as indisputable proof that he’s actually evil

[monotonouscigarette]

Something about Sam trying so hard to escape the life of hunting and actually escaping and being happy just to be dragged back in. Something about Mary cutting all ties to her family to try and have a normal life with her family only to become the reason her family gets become hunters in the first place. Something about being doomed to repeat the same things that happened to your family. Something about having an inescapable faith that you hate.

[incesthemes]

see what gets me about provenance is that sam is really scared of pursuing a relationship with sarah and other girls because he's afraid they're going to die. sam is cursed, the people he loves will die bloody, he doesn't want that, so he's staying away from people.

but this curse, textually, from sam's own mouth, can affect his family too:

so this isn't just limited to his romantic endeavors. anyone who's close to him, including his family, might die if they stick around him.

so what about dean??? he fits the criteria, but sam is still hanging onto him like a monkey on a vine. and what does this say about sam?

in some ways, i think there's a sense of hero-worship at play, like sam truly believes that dean can handle whatever comes his way and he'll be safe. there's a sense of protectiveness from sam throughout season 1, but dean carries himself in a way that is reassuring to sam. when he tells sam that he'll protect him, sam believes him without question, even if he's still worried. sam believes, or wants to believe, in dean's bravado.

which is interesting considering the episode faith, where sam very well could have blamed himself for dean getting hurt and almost dying (and maybe he did, and that was why he was so desperate to save him, no matter the cost—dean saw it as his time coming, but sam saw it as an unnatural death brought on by his curse, perhaps, and so he was willing to go to unnatural lengths to prevent it).

in other ways though, the context of the season makes me feel like above anything else the reason is that sam can't do this without dean, and he's willing to take the risk (and therefore handle the consequences himself, do whatever he has to do to keep dean safe from him). even in a story where sam has to choose between opposing forces that can't coexist—his revenge or dean, he can only pick one—dean is woven into every fiber of his quest for revenge. the revenge can't be pursued without dean, and dean is the opposition to sam's revenge, so sam never really had a choice to begin with: he was always going to pick dean.

i just love that even sam's greatest fears exempt dean—he wants dean there with him so badly that his no-relationships rule doesn't apply to him (and the same goes for dean, too, what a coincidence), and he accepts whatever risk there might be because he can't do this without him. dean is the exception, dean is sam's big brother, dean is the one person he can't lose even when he believes he's putting dean in danger just by driving around with him.

and dean doesn't even know any of this. he doesn't have a clue about the extent of sam's love or what sam is willing to risk to be with him, because sam never told him.

[winchestress]

why did they have to give such a savage line to such an unlikeable character

[aphony-cree]

“Kelly's now in the clutches of the Winchesters' love slave, Castiel”

This line doesn’t get enough attention

[dogearedheart]

you grow up in a life you don't want. you have to kill monsters from a very young age. you are way too young for this, but again, you don't get asked what kind of life you want. it's already been decided for you. nobody cares that you want to get out, that you want to live a normal life. so you kill the monsters, and you make the deals because, above all else, you care and you love, and if you can't get that happy ending, hell, someone else has to. but one day, you've enough, and you have lost so much already. you deserve another life, you want to get out and try it one lost time. but life is rarely fair, and the only way for you to get out of this is by dying. to die by the hands of the things you've been fighting your whole life to keep others safe.

people will idolize you after your death. that's what they do with heroes, after all. it's not what you would've wanted, but heroes rarely get what they want, do they? so you'll always be the mother who died in a fire to save her son. you become the main catalyst for your husbands vengeance, even though all you ever wanted to be was mary winchester, or maybe even just... mary.

[aidenwaites]

Man. And I was ready to see ten year old Jamie get fed up and get confrontational / get some kind of angry kid arc or something

[red-hood-vigilante]

thinking about sam and his relationship to music - growing up with 60s 70s 80s rock blasting all the time and how he probably rejected or criticized that when he could just to distance himself from john and dean. and when he gets to stanford he's be utterly out of touch or uninterested in music his peers listens to and prefers the stabilizing silence he now surrounds himself with after 20 years filled with static noise of the motel TVs, impala engine revving, guitar riffs and mullet rock. but he misses john and dean on occasion so he'll hum songs now and then. he starts digging a little and tries to find music mary might have liked, because then he could get to know her and understand who she was because if music was important to father and brother it must have been for mother too, right? he wants to understand and connect. jessica and other friends introduce him to some bands and they're cool and so sam starts branching out when he has the time so he can fit in. if they like it he should like it too. dean puts on the same old stuff and sings along while sam is bittersweet about it (it's nostalgic and lyrics are burned into him but the eternal soundtrack of a life he didn't want). he still listens to jessica's favourites and he gathers songs from people to remember; jo, ellen, ash, bobby, andy, madison, bela, deanna, samuel, sarah, charlie, even ruby. introduces castiel and jack to music he thinks they would like. talks to a resurrected mary about judy collins and the beatles to make her comfortable. nobody really knows what sam likes himself, he just knows what everyone else listens to.