#the incredibly fun parallel of sam working with cas while he worked with ruby before while now dean is with crowley

[palatial-monstrosity]

they’re LITERALLY married

[mittensmorgul]

I love Eileen. And I love Saileen. I love that they introduced a character with a disability and made Sam happy But I agree with a lot of what you say about Saileen. They’re NOT canon. Yeah, they very well could be. But as of now, they aren’t. They seem more like a “will they/won’t they” relationship rather than a real established relationship. And with everything with Chuck and his control over her... idk. I love hearing what ppl think about it but they need to let you have your opinions

Thank you for this, seriously. I just feel like I’ve been pressured into seeing it differently. And I’m sorry for that, honestly! I wish I could see it as a purely cute, happy, no complications relationship. I wish I could see the parallels to destiel as direct mirrors instead of “spot the difference” mirrors.

I love Eileen as a character, and have seen potential for her to have a relationship with Sam since 11.11. It seemed like the show was seriously considering that in 12.17. And then the show proved they weren’t... Yes I was fully on board the “she can’t actually be dead because that was stupid and terrible” train back then. I was for a good long while afterward. (lol read my fic Winchester 275, with fun happy saileen!) But eventually, when it becomes obvious that the characters have moved on, we have to move on and see reality, too.

But after the show made her return a direct tool of manipulation by Chuck, and after she herself has expressed that because of that, BECAUSE Chuck’s interference in “writing Saileen” into the show as a romantic plot, when she questions what is real, she’s talking specifically about her relationship with Sam. If that wasn’t the case, if Chuck’s plot for her had been about ANYTHING else, I wouldn’t have so much difficulty with the state of Sam and Eileen’s relationship now. But Chuck specifically brought her back to romance Sam.

When Eileen says she doesn’t know what’s real, she specifically means between her and Sam. Between 15.06 and 15.09, Sam repeatedly denied they were like that (when Dean teased and then talked seriously to him about their obviously developing relationship based on what he’d seen of their interactions, and lampshaded by Dean himself as him viewing their interactions through the lens of his own personal issues he was struggling with at the time, having literally projected his own feelings onto their relationship). And I understand the desire to see Sam happy, to see him find a relationship like this. But I will always want that relationship for him to be real, of his own choosing, and with someone who can freely consent to it. And I want the same for Eileen, too. 

I’m doing my level best to look critically at what Chuck wants, at the plots and situations that he specifically engineers, and asking myself why. He’s been Gabriel-level manipulative/trickstery, Lucifer-level “smashing his own toys,” and Michael-level “monster apocalypse ftw,” and Raphael level “it just needs to be over.” I just watched Mystery Spot on the TNT loop, so maybe that’s why I’ve got Gabriel on the mind here, but I’m betting this week’s episode will have some heavy Gabriel style callbacks. What is the truth? What’s their own choices and what have they been “tricked” into believing was their only choice?

As long as Eileen feels that she had no choice in anything that happened between her and Sam, I’m gonna be eternally grateful that Sam had his foot on the brakes regarding their interactions to the point they learned of Chuck’s manipulation. Because it could’ve gone a hell of a lot worse if Sam had jumped into a romance with her, you know? Imagine if he had taken her up on her proposition in 15.07, only to have her doubt if it was even her choice after the fact? That would’ve been so, so much worse. For both of them.

The narrative has at least left them with POTENTIAL. Eileen could reexamine her whole relationship with Sam and decide she really does have feelings for him that are her own, completely untainted by Chuck’s interference. But I really need that to be her freely-made choice. Sam could welcome her back with open arms, ready to proceed with a relationship on their own terms, to build something real between them. If they’d consummated the relationship while Eileen was being controlled/used by Chuck, it wouldn’t even be a potential. Or maybe it would, but there would’ve always been that specter of what had happened to her hanging over the relationship, leaving them both to question if it was actually real or only based on what Chuck had pushed them into, you know? For however cute the potential of their relationship is or could be, it’s not founded in their own free will.

I completely understand why some people refuse to question Eileen’s feelings for Sam, rather than just questioning which of her actions are “real.” If Eileen hadn’t specifically been brought back for a “romance plot” with Sam, I don’t know if she would’ve doubted her feelings for him, either. They did have a history of friendship, at the very least, before Chuck’s incredibly specific plan for her unfolded in s15. We WANT good things for Sam, we want him to be happy, to find someone to love and be loved by in the way he really deserves, and has wanted for a very long time, but heck I can’t stop hearing Charlie’s voice in 8.20 here:

Sorry you have zero luck with the ladies

I need for any relationship that Sam chooses for himself to defy that statement, not to be burdened by Chuck’s incessant campaign of destroying Sam’s love life  over and over again for his own personal entertainment. He uses Sam’s hope as a weapon against him, just like we saw in 15.09. Two of Sam’s biggest character arcs for the entire series have involved his perception/understanding of reality, and hope vs hopelessness. That is, what gives Sam hope, and what strips it from him. It’s been a key metric for him in every season, and it directly affects the choices he’s willing to make, and possibly more importantly, what he’s personally willing to sacrifice.

At this moment, I’m watching Jus In Bello, and this is... exactly the plot of this entire episode. This is Sam’t plot through all of Kripke Era, throughout Chuck’s original apocalypse arc. This was Ruby’s entire purpose in the narrative: romance Sam to manipulate him into Doing The Thing. In 3.12, it’s framed around Sam’s hope vs hopelessness against the army of demons surrounding them. It’s framed as “not having a choice,” and then working together to “find another way.” Only for Ruby to show up at the end of the episode after they think they’ve succeeded, to inform them that because of their choice, everyone they’d been trying to save was now dead. And it was STILL a manipulation on a bigger level of the narrative that won’t be proven out until the end of s4 and Ruby’s Grand Reveal moment as Lucifer rises.

THIS IS A BIG ISSUE FOR SAM, and dismissing it all for the sake of smushing his face together with Eileen’s is... at the very least, a wee bit problematic. 

Obviously, Ruby was conscious of this deception from the start. She was planted with the knowledge of what she had to accomplish, and willingly participated in Sam’s manipulation. Eileen... wasn’t complicit in ANY of the manipulation, at least not consciously. I’m not attempting to frame Eileen as evil here, but just as much a victim of Chuck’s plotting as Sam was.

If Eileen didn’t feel this way herself, if she didn’t directly question and doubt her own feelings for Sam, she wouldn’t have left. She left for HERSELF. I can’t even imagine being in her position here, you know? Saved from the torment of Hell, given a tiny bit of hope for the future (still with the question of whether her soul was still doomed to Hell when she eventually died again, or whether she got a clean slate and could enter Heaven eventually, LITERALLY ALSO BECAUSE OF CHUCK). Only to discover that her second chance had been provided by Chuck because he cavalierly intended to use her AGAIN, not for her own sake, but to drive Sam’s “plot.” Romance-loss-manpain-angst-hopelessness-”Butch and Sundance” lather rinse repeat. That’s Chuck’s plot, and in leaving, whether she sees that bigger picture or not, Eileen has chosen not to participate in it. Not to let herself be used by that plot.

Eileen had her agency stolen from her by Chuck’s BMoL storyline, and she spent three years in Hell because of it. At this point in the story, leaving to regain that lost agency was the best thing she could’ve done FOR HERSELF. And Sam, of all people, who had his agency stolen from him when he was 6 months old and fed demon blood, can understand that.

If Sam and Eileen are meant to be, they BOTH need to come to that decision for reasons other than “Chuck wants to hurt us with each other for plot reasons.” And as important as Eileen as a character is for representation, she’s also elevated herself to another important level in the narrative: She chose HERSELF. She chose her own life and freedom. She chose to walk out of the story and refused to be used by it.

If Eileen comes back to the story again, it will truly be because she CHOSE it for herself. Her entire life up to 11.11 had been the same sort of “revenge narrative” that the Winchesters had endured. She got her win, and then was faced with the question (posed to her by Sam) of what she was going to do next. When we next see her, in 12.17, we see that she has apparently continued her life as a hunter. She’s drawn into helping with an “all hands on deck” situation, in finding Dagon and Kelly Kline, and then her involvement in that hunt directly leads to her death in the most awful and ableist way possible-- literally hunted down by Chuck’s “big bad threat” of the season, to drive Sam and Dean into Chuck’s ever-narrowing maze of choices leading up to their confrontation with Lucifer in 12.23 (and Cas’s death by Lucifer’s hand, and everything that followed... including Dean’s formal complaint of a prayer to Chuck himself in 13.01. I mean, given Chuck’s favored story, he must’ve been wringing his hands with glee at Dean’s hopeless suffering in early s13, you know?). 

I need to go back to Sam’s experiences with the BMoL himself. In Sam’s ongoing, lifelong issues that I’ve been tagging as “Sam vs Reality” for years now, the weapon of torture that Toni Bevell used to manipulate Sam... was specifically a fake/drug-and-torture induced romance plot. After 12.02 aired, please recall the abject horror of the entire fandom over the rape by deception plotline between Sam and Toni-- after spending the entire hellatus wondering if Toni was being set up with a “love at first stab” redemption arc in much the same way Cas had in s4. For folks that hadn’t been in the fandom during the post-s11 hellatus, this seemed to be a serious potential, until 12.02 burned that notion to the ground. Eileen’s suspicious return to the narrative in s15 rang alarm bells in my head for this exact reason.

I need people to understand why I feel so viscerally uncomfortable with Sam and Eileen’s relationship as it stands in s15. Everyone has the absolute right to find their relationship cute, or truly romantic, or to hope that they are endgame together. But I also think I have the absolute right to feel wary of it, considering all of this ^^. 

Plus, to me, all of this *IS* the interesting character stuff we’ve all been here for all these years. We’re all giddily engaging with Dean’s long-standing issues with anger, abandonment, fear, self-worth, and identity coming to fruition in s15. Even the most die-hard destiel shippers haven’t ignored the deep underlying character arcs of both Dean AND Cas as their relationship is finally being defined, clarified, and hopefully resolved in the narrative. Do we not owe at LEAST that much to Sam, and his character’s underlying issues? Because I think that’s what the narrative is pushing us to examine here.

And as you said, I also see it as a potential relationship. Yes, one with a LOT of potential based on their chemistry. As things stand after 15.09, there’s every reason to think that Eileen could come back, could accept the offer Sam made with that kiss. I saw it as him laying a potential foundation, his way of saying “maybe it wasn’t real up to this point, but we could choose it if that’s what you wanted, too.” I also see it as up to Eileen herself if she can lay that baggage down and begin building a relationship based on mutual choice, understanding, respect, affection, and potentially love and romance. If Eileen is Sam’s endgame love interest, to me it would necessitate their choice to give a future together a shot. It would be a beautiful new beginning in life, for both of them, rather than the culmination of more than a decade of emotional relationship issues that Dean and Cas are facing, you know? There is a difference, and equating the relationships on a surface level is fine, but the presumption that we’re supposed to just accept that the two relationships are equal in terms of underlying emotional context is... at least a little disturbing to me, because ^^^^^^.

Heck, I think I’ve officially emotionally wrung myself out typing about all of this again, but I appreciate having the space to actually work through my own feelings about all of this, too.