#winchester family dynamic

[fallenangelblade]

mary winchester becomes a grandmother at age 30 when her sons, ages 38 and 34, adopt their dead 400 million-year-old best friend’s 22-year-old newborn son

[thepunkmuppet]

the lack of jack and claire interactions is genuinely such a travesty, and not just because 1, they’re both cas / tfw’s kids and 2, because i love them both dearly, but because THEY DIRECTLY PARALLEL SAM AND DEAN!!!

claire is driven by parental grief and revenge, she holds grudges, is stubborn and quick to anger, is queer and searches for purpose and drive through hunting, finding comfort in violence but also having self-destructive tendencies.

jack has powers literally no one else has, he’s important to lucifer, and angels and demons in general. he’s a kind and well-meaning person with the potential for great evil, and is misunderstood and mistreated because of what he is / what he can do.

he’s also young and naive, juxtaposed with claire who is also young and naive but has a lot of harrowing and character-building life experience. she’s a character often made into the daughter, or the younger sister - here, she could so easily be a big sister, the dean to jack’s sam, which would be a great way to develop her character and show her growing into adulthood.

i would’ve KILLED for a bottle episode of jack and claire going on their own journey in baby (or any car, but yk, for the vibes), perhaps to save the boys / cas, where these parallels were explored. maybe an almost play by play reenactment of the pilot, where they need to “find their dad” in a similar way. considering all the different characters they used to comment on sam and dean’s relationship, i could SO easily see this being a s13-14 episode, literally grieving the fact that it never happened because AAAH IT’S SO PERFECT

[thekingofspin]

you know it's bad when every day you're relating more and more to Dean Winchester

[lukas-dusk]

Jack : The floor's lava!

Castiel : *helping Dean onto the table*

Gabriel : *kicks Sam off the sofa*

Charlie : There are two types of boyfriends.

[velcroedshoe]

I just think John should’ve tried to kill Sam for the “greater good” of the world and to save Sam from what he’d become because he knew Dean couldn’t bring himself to do it

[peanutbutterandbananasandwichs]

A tale of two wrecked Impalas . . . .

2x01 vs 7x01

So, I want to talk about two superficially similar scenes that are actually very different in terms of what they say about Sam and Dean's relative agency and autonomy.

Let's start with how they are, on the surface, similar. Both scenes occur during season openers in which the Impala had been heavily damaged to the point of being almost beyond repair in the season finale of the proceeding season. In parallel with the Impala in both cases, one of the brothers has suffered some kind of life threatening situation. Both scenes feature a conversation between one of the boys and Bobby about the state of the car. In both cases, the state of the car is explicitly being used as a means of talking about the state of the other brother and a desire for them to recover. The scene in 2x01 is particularly interesting to me because it is one of the only times in which the Impala acts as a mirror/stand in for Dean. As is pretty well discussed on Samblr at this point, often throughout the series, the Impala serves as a mirror to Sam and to his place within The Roles (x, x). "Looks like Dean's taken care of this old beast. Seems like he's taken good care of you too." As Lucifer (as John) says, calling back to John's S1 line "I wouldn't have given you the damn thing if I thought you were going to ruin it." These lines reflect the idea of the Impala, and by implication, Sam being passed down from John to Dean as a possession. The possession aspect is amplified in these lines in particular to me because of the notable lack of female pronouns used in reference to it "the damn thing" "ruin it" "the old beast", all of these serve to strip Sam of his personhood, dehumanising him. Dean's place in the position of power within his and Sam's relationship is reflected here.

Whilst the scene in 7x07 does use female pronouns (and that they are female pronouns is important) for the Impala, it still tacity treats Sam as an extension of the Impala (an extension of Dean) - "we'll glue him back together too" - both the Impala and Sam are objects, with the illusion of personhood, but who ultimately belong to Dean. The scene demonstrates Dean's sense of entitlement and ownership over Sam's agency, his body, his autonomy. "No matter what shape he's in. . ." It doesn't matter what is done to Sam as long as "Sammy" is preserved in some form. By contrast, the scene in 2x01 begins with "[Dean] is gonna wanna fix this" - immediately, this embodies the agency with Dean, if the Impala in this scene is acting as a mirror to Dean then it is saying that the ultimate agency over his own body here belongs to Dean. "If there's only one working part, that's enough" whilst, again, similar sounding to "No matter what shape he's in", I think does have fundamental underlying differences in intension and tone. Sam's line, especially in combination with the first line, suggests that he will look for a working piece, and if he can find it they can help to rebuild the Impala (Dean) around it, and ultimately, Dean will be the one to conduct the final repair. Despite the comparison to the object of the Imapala, I find Sam's approach here to be humanising of Dean. "Working" is I think, especially relevant here when drawing a comparison to 7x01. Dean's line doesn't care whether the parts of Sam they "glue back together" are "working" or not, and there is certainly no indication here that Sam would be involved in the process. Dean will shove parts of Sam back together whether he likes it or not. The 2x01 scene also reflects the relative balance of power in their relationship, Sam as neither the intention, or the power to claim ownership of the Impala and by proxy Dean, the way Dean does over the Impala and Sam in 7x01.

Ultimately, whilst these scenes may appear similar, they are profoundly affected by the relative positions of power Sam and Dean inhabit within the bounds of The Roles, and the effect this has on their relative agencies.

[silver-stake-through-the-heart]

Spn 9x07 – Bad boys

Spn 14x12 – Prophet and Loss

On one hand, Sam hates not knowing everything about other people's (Dean's) life and thinks he's entitled to it...

On the other hand, he doesn't want to touch the truth about Dean's (lack of) childhood and his difficult relationship to John with a ten-foot pole.

Sam, when Dean implies he and John (but mainly John, let's be honest) lied to him: How DARED you not telling me the truth??!!!!

Sam, when Dean wants to talk about it unprompted: Let's not go there. I don't want to hear about it. Let bygone be bygone. EYE had a hard past. Matter closed.

Also Dean disappeared two months after a hunt and he didn't question it? 😭 (Not at that moment obviously, he was a kid, but as a grown-up man he should be wondering... seeing things don't add up...)

(@deangirlswiftieism I was wrong about young!Sam thinking Dean had fun. It's adult!Sam, after talking with Sonny.)

[lambmotifz]

the show literally screams in your face that sam is an omega because both john and dean are desperate to force him into submission, he’s passed from john to dean and dean treats/sees him as his possession

[jerksbitch]

spn rewatch 3.05

deans face and the awkward moment of silence after sam tells dean "because you said so? well you're not dad!" ... yea

[aliusfrater]

similar cinematographic choices to portray the same imagery with insanely different circumstantial contexts

[luxurystark-jackson]

season 13 is like. this is jack. his real mom is dead and his real dad is satan but that’s okay! because he’s not in this universe anymore.

anyways this is his new dad that doesn’t want him around (so like a real dad) and that guy’s brother who’s kinda like his new mom. oh and then the dead angel comes back to life and now he has two moms, which is an upgrade from no moms. the angel is gay for his dad. and that is just his life.

[soullessjack]

see whenever i think about the dynamic of tfw2.0 as a Weird Family (think Addams meets the Sawyers if you would) i think specifically about how sam dean and cas react/respond to jack going off and doin things — attempted strangling, telekinetic torture-murder & double cannibalism, to name a few. of course they aren’t going to respond to it like normal people but it still, to me anyways, sets this sort of precedent for their dynamic.

I mean when they found out jack had been eating raw human hearts (and cas even witnessed footage of him ripping it out of a guys chest mind you) it felt more like they just found out their kid smokes weed and he’s desperately trying to convince them it was for anxiety and not just recreational drug use lmao. dean did the angel equivalent of spraying water at him for nearly strangling someone else and attacking cas to boot.

you can see where my “sam banned mortal kombat in the bunker because jack keeps trying to do fatalities on hunts while dean does the narrator voice” post came from

[rwby-encrusted-blog]

Cardin: Dumbass!

Jaune: Numbskull!

Cardin: Really? That the Best you got! Is Little Arcy-Warky Scared to Say some Big Boy Words?

Jaune: I'm gonna shove your mace where the sun don't shine, you idiot!

~~~~~

Mama Arc: *Throws Car* WHAT'S "ABOVE ALL ELSE; DO NO HARM" MEAN TO YOU, BITCH!

Mama Winchester: *Dodges, Loads a Rocket into a launcher* Only applies to 'people' Darling~ NOW STAND STILL SO I CAN SHOOT YOU!

~~~~~

Papa Winchester: I just feel like I don't really have a connection to him, you know? He just ... says these things about Faunus, and I don't know where he got it from.

Papa Arc: It's hard. We make mistakes, there when we shouldn't be and we aren't around when we should be. I'm guessin' you've tried talkin' to him already?

Papa Winchester: Of course. He always said I don't understand, which isn't wrong, but him not trying to explain it doesn't help.

Papa Arc: Well Cardin's Young. He'll grow, and all you can do is be there to try and help him. Hubris will be his enemy, and He'll come around, and if he doesn't ... Well. I dunno that He'd deserve to be called your son.

[evie-doesnt-write]

SamMary the least popular Winchester Family dynamic on AO3, you people will never see heaven

[tothewheel]

real men don't flinch or bleed in public, oh, i think i'm a real man.

[peanutbutterandbananasandwichs]

Sam and Dean are always withholding information from and lying to each other, constantly. That’s literally the plot of the show every season.

There are important differences between the types of "lying and withholding information" (I'm going to use the word lying primarily here going forward for simplicity but it is referring to several different types of behaviours and is not being used intrinsically as a value judgement) Dean vs Sam does, and these are fundamentally tied to their positions within their abuse dynamic (and more broadly within their roles within the larger Winchester family abuse dynamic).

Lies abusers tell, and their motivations for doing so are distinct from the types of lies told by abuse victims in an effort to manage their situation and avoid conflict (within the abuse dynamic this isn't to say that abuse victims cannot lie more generally).

Dean does sometimes tell some of the same types of defensive "lies" as abuse victims, and this shouldn't be surprising as Dean is a victim of childhood abuse. ("I'm fine" for instance, something they both frequently say when they clearly are not, and something that whilst not exactly healthy for themselves is a defence mechanism and not - generally speaking - fundamentally a harmful action to the other).

The clearest distinction between Dean's abusive lying and Sam's defensive lying: Dean lies and withholds information about Sam from Sam. Sam withholds information primarily about himself from Dean.

Dean lying to Sam about Sam or things that have happened to him, or things that Dean has done to him is a frequent and repeated pattern. Instances include, but are not limited to: lying about Sam's resurrection in "All Hell Breaks Loose", not telling Sam when he finds out about Azazel feeding Sam the demon blood as a child ("Metamorphosis"), lying about Sam having been soulless and of course the big one, lying for months on end about the Gadreel possession, both in order to obtain the 'yes' needed for possession in the first place and then in for the subsequent time during which Sam was unknowingly possessed. Dean's lies allow him to maintain a position of power and control over Sam and Sam's body.

By contrast when Sam withholds information about himself he's usually seeking to maintain control over his own self, his body, his personhood, and his agency. And to avoid negative reactions from Dean that often lead to him being hit, shouted at, or otherwise punished.

The most stark example of this contrast for me is the situation regarding the demon blood administered by Azazel.

Sam finds out about this in "All Hell Breaks Loose", he chooses not to tell Dean, this is well within Sam's rights, this is an issue that affects Sam and Sam's body and nobody else, he is under absolutely no obligation to tell Dean and he has every reason to believe, given Dean's reaction to previous examples of Sam's "otherness" that telling Dean would not have elicited a positive or supportive response.

Dean finds out about the demon blood in "In the Beginning", he proceeds to keep this from Sam and it is only brought up because Sam accidentally reveals that he already knew, its pretty clear that Dean had no immediate intention of telling Sam himself. This was not Dean's right, he has no right whatsoever to withhold information about Sam and Sam's body from him.