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ghostcreaturetypething · 15 days ago

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Alright. So I am very new and naïve to the Supernatural fandom. But I am also autistic as hell, meaning I get very into things very quickly, and I’ll be damned if I spent all that time in A Level English lessons and doing endless revision for nothing, so listen up.

I am halfway through season 1, episode 12, Faith. Quick synopsis of the first few minutes, maybe quarter: Dean gets electrocuted and almost dies; he’s in the hospital, looking like hell, and Sam has just found out that the amount of electricity that Dean accidentally tazed himself with caused a heart attack that severely damaged Dean’s heart. Suffice to say, Dean did not just almost die: he is dying. Dean has weeks, tops, and he knows this. So when Sam comes into his room, distraught, Dean says,

“I know it’s not easy, but I’m gonna die. And you can’t stop it.”

And Sam says, “Watch me.”

Now. Now. By god do I have feelings about this.

For some quick context, I am an older sibling, and I see my relationship with my sister as being quite similar to that between the Winchester boys, give or take a few traits.

That said, I… Hm. To me, this short exchange holds an unbelievable amount of weight. Just to begin with —

“I know it’s not easy, but I’m gonna die. And you can’t stop it.”

The first phrase,“I know it’s not easy” is directed at Sam. Dean is in hospital, dying, in pain, and his first focus is to acknowledge that the situation is not easy for Sam. Because that is his baby brother, and even at this very early point in the series, we all know that he loves him an unbelievable amount. And, god, the way he says it — “I know it’s not easy.” It’s so matter-of-fact, and yet so gentle. It’s almost as though Dean is apologising for being at death’s door, almost like he only cares at all because of the effect he knows it is going to have on Sam. That — yeah. That makes me feel… things. But moving on swiftly:

“I’m gonna die.”

Stupidly casual. Not that we would expect anything less from Dean but, dude. Now is not the time to be using contractions. But more than being very casual and very typically Dean, it is very certain. More so even than a phrase like “I’m dying”, which describes a state of being but not a definite destination. “I am going to die” leaves no room for nuance or last minute rescues. This coupled with the “I know it’s not easy” implies that already, despite everything the boys have been through and overcome, Dean is resigned to his fate. He has given up. He believes he is going to die, and the only concession he has made to this not being an ideal situation is his acknowledgment of how difficult it must be for Sam. I mean. Fuck.

Now, the second phrase: “And you can’t stop it.” This. This is three things and all of them stab me directly in the heart. Firstly, I wanna talk about the fronted conjunction ‘And’. It’s unnecessary. Without it, the statement is gentler; less combative, and more of a way of saying to Sam, it’s okay. It’s not your fault. There’s nothing you can do, and we both have to be okay with that. But, BUT. With the addition of the “and”, Dean has made that statement into a challenge. A mock dismissal of anything Sam may or may not be able to do to save him. The two phrases now have the very typical structure of the way one would talk to a sibling: “I’m going out tonight and you can’t stop me.” “I know you don’t want to do that and I don’t care. Let’s go.” It’s PETTY. It’s unnecessary, and it makes it sound almost like Dean is… triumphant, in some way. Like he’s won, in his blunt laying out of what Sam can’t do.

“I know it’s not easy, but I’m gonna die. And you can’t stop it.”

It’s a juxtaposition of gentle and combative, the most sibling-relationship-coded combination known to humankind, and it just goes to show that, on a meta level, the writing for the interactions between these two is incredible. But going back to the second half; I said it was three things. This is the third: as well as being contradictorily resigned and strangely triumphant, this phrase is also proof that actually, Dean is decidedly neither of these things. “And you can’t stop it” is not a definitive condemnation of Sam’s ideas. It is a plea. For help. For Sam to save him. “I’m gonna die”, aren’t I? “You can’t stop it” can you? I’m fucked, right? Dean is scared. This is proven to us later when Sam says, “You know, this whole… ‘I laugh in the face of death’ thing? It’s crap, I can see right through it.” But here, here is his very first admission of it. And that realisation would be emotive enough, but it gets better. Or possibly worse. Because Sam really does see through Dean. He already knows he’s scared. And so, he… Well. In my opinion, as an older sibling… Sam’s response is… staggering.

He says, “Watch me.” He says fucking “watch me.” Are you fucking kidding??? Because hell, Sam is the younger one. He is and always will be Dean’s baby brother. There are four whole years between them. He very well could have taken Dean at his word. He could have accepted his brother’s fate alongside him, and then sat by his bedside and watched him die. But he doesn’t. Because, as Dean said to him over the phone in Scarecrow, Sam is his own person. Dean tells him, “you’ve always known what you want, and you go after it”, and he’s right. Sam is not just the baby brother. He is incredibly smart and incredibly driven and most importantly, he does not take orders. From his dad or from Dean. So he does not take Dean at his word. He does not believe him when Dean says that he is dying and there is nothing Sam can do. He lets Dean tell him that, and then he lifts his chin and he says, “watch me.” Watch me save you.

And it is an act of unimaginable love.

Furthermore, it is, yet again, the most sibling-coded way he could have gone about it. Like Dean before him, he is pushing back. He is challenging his brother. He is disagreeing, he is being stupidly contrary, but it isn’t actually against Dean, like it might be normally. It is for him. And, like, fuck. Sam sees that Dean is scared, and he tells him not to worry in a way that is not only incredibly familiar to Dean due to the fact that it follows the pattern of their normal conversations, but is also incredibly confident. “Watch me.” Like there’s no possible way he’s going to fail at this. Because he knows Dean needs to hear it, but also because Sam cannot imagine a world in which he fails. In which Dean actually dies. And he’s going to make sure he never has to. But then. But then. Sam calls his dad. And it is a perfect fucking parallel to when Dean calls their dad in Home — except it isn’t. Both brothers call their dad when they are faced with their worst fear. Dean’s? It could be argued that it’s having to face whatever is in his childhood home, whatever it is that killed his mum. But the first thing he says to explain to his dad what’s going on is, “I’m with Sam” before following it up with “we’re in Lawrence and there’s something in our old house.” Dean is scared of his old house, there’s no doubt about it. But I would argue that his worst fear is something happening to Sam. And Sam’s is the same. But Sam’s attitude towards his fear is very different. When Dean, the daddy’s boy out of the two, calls his father, he is crying. He says he knows he’s left messages before but “I don’t know what to do”. He asks his dad to “get here”, because “I need your help.” Faced with his worst fear, he asks his dad for help — as he should, by the way — because he has spent his life under his dad’s rules and mentorship, he’s never left home, never lived alone, and even at twenty six he trusts his dad to keep Sam safe more than he trusts himself. Now Sam, Sam’s phone call is very different. He’s crying too, for obvious reasons, and at the beginning he mirrors Dean in other ways too, acknowledging that his father probably won’t even receive his message before saying his brother’s name — “It’s Dean” — and laying out the problem. But then he takes on a very different tone. Because Sam decidedly does not ask his father for help. He simply tells him what’s happening before saying, “don’t worry, because I’m gonna do whatever it takes to get him better.” I. Not you, or we. I, as in, just Sam. Because Sam is the independent one. He is the one who always pushed back against his father, he is the one who went off to university and has been living alone for years by the time Dean comes to find him. He knows he can take care of himself, and he trusts that he can take care of Dean, too. In this way, Sam is actually more mature or grown up than Dean, despite being the younger, and I think he knows it. Furthermore, I think Dean knows it. He knows that in this area, his baby brother is ahead of him, and I would argue that his phone call to Sam in Scarecrow is proof of that. I believe that it was this knowledge that allowed him to, even incredibly indirectly, ask Sam for help.

For those of you reading who do not have younger siblings, you should know that that is not something older siblings tend to do. Ask our younger ones for help. I can only ever speak for myself of course, but this is definitely something I have noticed outside of my own family.

But Dean asks Sam for help. Because he trusts him. Because he knows what Sam is capable of, and that he is capable of this. Therefore, as well as being a plea, Dean’s “And you can’t stop it” is also a fragile admission of hope, proving that he is not nearly as resigned to his fate as he would have Sam believe. Which brings us to the NEXT point:

Later, when Dean stumbles into Sam’s hotel room, looking like he already has one foot in the fricking grave, Sam tells him his plan to save him, and Dean says, grumpy as ever: “You’re not gonna let me die in peace are you?” And Sam smiles and says, “I’m not gonna let you die, period.”

I mean COME ON. Yet again we have Dean pretending to be stoic, yet feeling the tiny hesitant flicker of hope that his little brother is lighting for him, and Sam, said little brother, being so damn confident that he can save Dean’s life it’s almost cocky. And then, to add to that, we have the word “let”. “Let me die”, “let you die”. A word not typically associated with things that are outside of one’s control. And a word which Dean uses first, despite his alleged resignation. As thought it’s a choice. And Sam agrees. “I’m not gonna let you die, period.” And then he doesn’t. That crazy motherfucker actually pulls it off, snatching his big brother from the jaws of death seemingly with never more than a second’s doubt that he could.

Are you fucking kidding me???

Anyway, I have to stop now, abruptly, before I either lose it completely over this or before it becomes a full blown essay but IN CONCLUSION: The Winchester’s have probably the best, most realistically written sibling relationship I have ever come across in media, and I love them, and they are fucking insane. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

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