#this is partly why i think he picked ruby in s4

[ladylightning]

i love how supernatural presents sam as the emotionally intelligent one and then for 15 seasons sam uses that emotional intelligence to avoid being emotionally vulnerable or open with literally anyone who isn’t his brother. the only reason he can’t pull that shit with his brother (and lord does he try over and over and over) is purely because they spend every waking moment together and sam is just not that good of a liar

[mittensmorgul]

what do you think is the in-universe/fandom/writers perspective of sam, and how do you think they vary? I was thinking about how i usually hear he is the responsible/intelligent one, which i dont think works really well, especially in later seasons and i dont know if that is the way the rest of the characters view him. And I also started thinking about how theres this general believe (1)

that the writers have over time, forgot sam's personality/way of thinking, which explains why we know more about dean, that we do sam. I don't know if this makes sense lol :p I guess I just think that even though there are different interpretations of the characters in the show, since sam is a lot more private than dean, its easier to read dean (2)

Hiya... this is a weird question, but I will do my best to answer. I... don’t think they really vary how they write Sam. I mean, some episodes deal more specifically with him and his point of view and internal drama than others, but I do agree that we are shown less of that side of Sam then we are of Dean. But I also don’t think this is a new thing.

Dean has almost always been our “audience point of view” character. Or at the very least our “audience emotional touchstone” character. With a few exceptions, like a good chunk of the time he was saddled with the Mark of Cain. But aside from that, yeah... he’s the one we most often see the story through.

Going all the way back to s1, things ~happen to Sam~ and Dean reacts. I think they may have originally been shooting for more of a balance, and maybe did even originally intend Sam to be the audience POV character. After all, he was being pulled back into this underworld of sorts of supernatural monsters and demons and stuff. We-the-audience could’ve so easily had our entry into their world through Sam’s eyes, being pulled from normal citizen into the hunter world through Sam’s adjustment to it all. But it never really worked for me. Sam’s pov was Traumatized™ from the end of the pilot episode, while Dean was already grounded in that world, accepting of it and ready to keep living the hunter life. It proved to be a far more stable pov and emotional engagement to the narrative, you know? Sam kept wanting to run away. Kinda hard to feel attached to the narrative through that sort of emotional standpoint, you know? *I* didn’t want to run away...

But then stuff KEPT happening to Sam-- the weird powers that terrified him, the loss of his connection to the normal world that put him off balance just as much, the realization that there might never be an end to the hunting... which put that burden on Dean as a character to keep pushing forward, and that’s the through-line for the audience to cling to emotionally.

Sam’s fighting against the demon blood powers, Dean keeps him grounded and supports him. John tells Dean that he either has to save Sam or else kill him, and we-the-audience are supposed to suspect there’s something Dark about Sam that we should be at the very least wary of, but Dean sticks by him swearing to save him no matter what. Sam’s kidnapped and killed, and Dean finally does save him, buy trading his own soul for Sam’s. In s4, Sam *is* hiding dark secrets, working behind Dean’s back with Ruby, basically succumbing to drug addiction while Dean tries to protect him from all that.

Sam’s soulless, Dean finds a way to save his soul. Sam’s halluciferating, Dean finds a way to save him again. Dean’s in Purgatory, and Sam hit a dog-- not even trying to do the whole saving thing... again, making it hard to put a pin on how we’re supposed to interact with the guy who keeps wanting to run away from his own story while we’re supposed to be engaging with it.

Sam takes on the trials, Dean supports him through it. Sam’s possessed by an angel, and unaware of the fact, so Dean is our window into that entire mess.

Then the Mark of Cain happens, and Sam goes off the dang rails trying to save Dean from himself... which is the only flip in this script, really, aside from Sam trying to save Dean from Michael now in s14.

The thing with s10 is that I personally had a really hard time trusting Sam’s assessment of Dean’s mental state, simply because he’s never really had a bead on it before. The show attempting to force us to see the emotional beats through Sam’s eyes just... didn’t fly for me. It was a disconnect. I’m much happier with the situation now in s14, because I actually *do* feel like I get Sam’s pov now. At least, more than I ever did back in s10.

I think the notion that Sam is “the responsible/intelligent one” is a fandom oversimplification. Like... I said above, Sam was always the one trying to run away from his own life. I mean, that’s not exactly “responsible” behavior. As for intelligence, there’s lots of different types of intelligence, and Dean is just as “intelligent” as Sam is, but in different ways. They think differently. Heck, I wrote a lot about this back during s11, but the tl;dr of all of it was that they are different people with different emotional coping styles. Sam might be great at research and getting people to open up to him and thinking through problems in a linear, logical fashion, but that doesn’t make him “smarter” than Dean. Dean’s more intuitive, and relies a lot more on his own understanding of the world to make logical leaps to solutions. I also think, for a vast number of reasons not least of which is the fact that Dean had essentially been a “parental” figure to Sam his whole life while Sam had unwittingly fallen into a “child” role because of that, that Dean is the more emotionally intuitive and Sam’s not even been fully aware of just how emotionally demanding he’s been of Dean while not offering Dean the same sort of emotional consideration in return. Because kids just don’t do that for their parents (or they definitely shouldn’t, despite Dean’s heaven memory of doing that for Mary in 5.16, but that’s another post entirely).

Sam understands the world through the lens of his own experience. He assumes that everyone else feels and reacts as he would in those circumstances. Dean, however, understands people. But he’s got a couple of huge blind spots when it comes to Sam, just like we-the-audience do. Not through any fault of his own, but because of how he was parentified and how his entire life to a certain point had been devoted to the cause of protecting Sam.

This is partly why I was THRILLED to hear Sam opening up to Rowena in 13.12. What a fantastic episode. Not only did Sam successfully take on the emotional burden of the narrative with aplomb while Dean was compromised, but he actually had an honest emotional chat with Rowena about trauma he admitted to having kept secret for almost EIGHT YEARS. 

I mean, he did pretty good in 12.11, too, when Dean was losing his memories. He became the “hand-holder” for the audience quite nicely in that episode too, even if some of his shortcomings were put on display. But it took him another YEAR after that to really begin to open up about his actual feelings, you know? Rather than clinging to Dean because he needed him (which is a theme that goes way back, long before his talk with Charlie in 10.18 even about how he’d resigned himself to this life, but only as long as Dean was in it with him), it took him rebelling and “picking a side” in s12 for him to really begin to figure out HIMSELF, instead of just what he is as an adjunct to Dean.

GROWTH!

And now he’s responsibly taking on leadership roles and learning about what Dean went through all those years taking care of him through helping to guide Jack through his own life. So I don’t think it’s so much that the writers have “forgotten” who Sam is, but they’re finally letting him grow up in a lot of ways, like they’ve shown us Dean getting to grow into his own person as well. And I think it’s spectacular.

I’ve written a bunch about the differences in Sam and Dean as characters, and a lot of it is tagged “sam sympathizes and dean empathizes”, and a lot of the parentification of Dean stuff is in the “performing dean” tag-- which also deals with this disconnect of how Sam sees Dean through this hazy lens of performance that was often structured specifically to hide Dean’s personal emotional turmoil beneath a Strong Mask for Sam’s benefit-- but as I’m getting into s11 now on my blog retagging project, there’s probably gonna be more stuff falling into that tag, with the perspective of hindsight. :P