I literally cackled at how dumbshit this ask was holy fuck.
Anon, you say “no hate”, but I struggle to fathom how you can mean that, seeing as how your claim that you understand why we would be protective of Dean and think he deserves better is completely untrue. It has been stated crystal clear ad nauseum that it’s SAM’S INHUMANE TREATMENT OF DEAN that causes us to feel this way, and you come out of that saying you understand but omg wtf how could you ever think badly of Sam?
Just admit it, you didn’t read the blog, you just saw “Sam hate”, got your panties in a twist about how we could ever hate your perfect beautiful boi uwuuuu, and shot off this ask immediately.
Get back to me when you experience a family member doing all these things to you and have decided it’s perfectly okay and wtf why would anyone “let” these things affect their view of them:
They are your world, your only refuge from your abusive father, and who you have sacrificed their entire childhood for. Suddenly, they leave you with him, alone. They ignore all of your calls with no explanation, and never contact you again.
They start doing drugs while you are dealing with PTSD, and abandon you for a fix with their dealer every chance they get; lie about it constantly. By the way, they are buying their heroin from the same gang that kidnapped you for over half your life and gave you that PTSD to start with.
For some fucking reason, they decide their MS13 contact is more trustworthy than you.
They call you weak for having PTSD
(Which, incidentally, is their fault in the first place.)
You believe that you have one of the best bonds siblings can have, and assume that they value all of the costly sacrifices you made for them. You catch up with their friends and social media accounts, only to find out that they have never even mentioned you. You have never been important enough to reminisce about.
When you confront them with the idea that maybe it’s bad for them to be doing smack, they beat the shit out of you. Then, when you are lying on the floor nearly unconscious, they decide that they need to consolidate their power and dominate you so that you never question them ever again. They look into your eyes, and see nothing that stops them: They proceed to strangle you within an inch of death.
He tells you to eat shit for saying that you have trouble trusting him considering his MS13 allies. Commence emotional blackmail.
You go missing, and your mutual friend is kidnapped. Your brother fucks off to fuck some girl for an entire year instead of looking for you. You think that perhaps it’s reasonable for them to have believed you were dead already so maybe it’s okay, but then you find out they left the obviously alive friend for dead as well.
You spend the entire year in a literal warzone. Your brother is vociferously, self-righteously angry that you’re upset about being left there. He verbally browbeats you about it whenever it comes up. You are never allowed your emotions.
You became best friends with one of your war buddies. Instead of appreciating that your BFF had your back in his absence, your brother becomes jealous. None of your character witness matters; you are weak and dumb, remember? He has your BFF framed for murder and deported back to his horrible war-torn home country. This includes physical assault on your person.
You listen when, in a near-death haze, your brother decides that maybe the DNR order he had tattooed on his chest was a bad idea and agrees not to pull the plug.
Less than a year after abandoning you to a war zone, your brother disowns you for saving his life, even with his consent.
You admit all of your self-loathing, suicidal insecurities. Your brother confirms all of them with his silence.
Later, he admits that he didn’t actually want to die but disowned you anyway.
You were parentified by your father as a child. Being asked to parent another child that is not yours is a cruel continuation of your abuse, but your brother asks you anyway, seemingly with no understanding as to why you would object. When you refuse, they refer to you by the name of your abusive father.
Because of this, you later admit that you are thinking of suicide. Your brother doesn’t talk to you about it, advise therapy, or stop trying to rekindle your abuse. They have always made fun of you for your perceived promiscuity, and instead, they take you to a strip club. Instead of receiving emotional support or having your grievances responded to, you are treated like Neanderthal whose emotional ills are insubstantial and can be solved with directed bloodflow.
Imagine ALL OF THESE THINGS happening to you. All of them, courtesy of the exact same individual. Now tell me: Do you feel your brother is a totally good dude that should be forgiven and whom you should totally be associating with?
I’ll give you a hint: Almost all of them are reasons to cut contact by themselves.
Tell me– when has Dean ever done anything as bad as these things to Sam? To the same frequency as Sam? Unprovoked? Where is this equivalence you swear by?
None of this includes the malignant narcissism that colors all of Sam’s actions towards Dean, of course, and also none of the fucked up things Sam has done to people other than Dean.
And where the fuck is this “good character” you speak of? Are you just in love with the idea of a nerdy wubbie hunter boi, and haven’t payed any attention to his actual characterization for the last 11 seasons?
At the beginning of the series, Sam defies hunter norms by befriending a vampire and letting her go free. In Season 8A, he tells his brother’s vampire BFF with demonstrated trustworthiness and vegetarianism to eat shit and die, and makes sure it happens. In Season 8B, he bitches Dean out for killing his murderous Kitsune GF. In Season 12, Sam literally teams up with his torturers because of how badly he wants to eradicate all monsters from the face of the earth. In Season 13, he tells Dean to eat shit and die for not wanting to raise the literal spawn of Satan. Where is the consistency? Who the fuck even is this Sam guy?
Every time Sam does something wrong, he either refuses to take responsibility, solely blames Dean instead, or shifts it onto Dean as well even when he acted alone, suddenly turning “my” responsibility into “ours”. (Drinking demon blood, trusting Ruby, losing Dean’s trust, trusting the BMOL, releasing Lucifer a second time, releasing the Darkness against Dean’s orders, ETC ETC ETC). Even when Dean was literally dead at the time, Sam could not stop himself from shifting blame onto him. Sam cannot have heroic redemption arcs because he is never allowed to admit he did anything wrong in the first place. The teeth have been removed from all of Sam’s mytharcs because of this.
His mytharc is supposed to be that he has an evil nature to fight, but when he acts on this evilness (murdering the nurse for her blood etc) neither we nor anyone around him are allowed to acknowledge that they are evil actions. We are literally expected to pretend everything is fine. We are never allowed to enjoy the antihero storyline. As someone that reads ‘hero turned into evil creature (especially a vampire so he gets to eat people)’ fiction almost compulsively, this show’s failure to attract me to Sam’s arc is a colossal failure that cannot be overstated.
Ironically, Dean makes a better antihero through his experiences as Alistair’s pupil, which is just fucking amazing since none of it was his desire or his fault, so he doesn’t even technically qualify as an antihero. Why? Because Dean takes responsibility for his actions, and next to that, has a legitimately virtuous persona to contrast. Sam is just a shade of pure, uniform gray. None of his actions are allowed to crystallize nor do they contrast with each other, so we are never surprised by anything he does.
This show has been going for 13 fucking seasons and Sam still hasn’t come to terms with his psychic kid/vessel status, to the point where he’s constantly trusting monsters and shit not for their own virtues (remember how creepy his treatment of Jack was?) but for the desperate, uncomfortable, insecure belief that if he can prove they’re fine then he’s fine too. It ends in failure every fucking time but he just won’t stop projecting. (Benny didn’t count though because he was similar to Dean, not Sam, so his weird projection didn’t work so Sam’s supposed desire to redeem monsters magically disappeared.) It’s fucking tiring, where the fuck is his character development?
Why was he not allowed to learn anything from sacrificing himself to the Cage? NONE of his character changed after he came back. He still repeated the same patterns of emotional blackmail and gross irresponsibility over and over again.
His entire Cage storyline was a pathetic cribbing of Dean’s Hell storyline. How compelling lol
And we cannot forget these loveable character traits:
Pathetic manbaby that doesn’t iron his own clothes or cook his own meals
Makes disgusting pissfaces every other time his brother exhibits happiness, even and especially when he knows Dean is suicidal
Shows disgust for the hunting profession; leaves the heroic pursuits we watch this show to see at every opportunity available; only hunts when he has a personal stake in matters (revenge) and consistently acts as a foil for altruistically-hunting Dean (Folsom Prison Blues for ex., when he argues that inmates should just get fucked by ghosts)
He’s a grown man and his bitchiness is literally a character trait that is so huge that canon has given it lipservice
Sticks his filthy hands into Dean’s grieving processes constantly like some kind of creepy voyeur
Demonstrated knowledge of John’s abuse of Dean, but blames Dean for his beaten-in urge to parent Sam anyway and acts baffled and pissy at Dean’s low self-esteem.
Grown man that acts like an angsty teenager with all this “Get away from me Dean you’re not my real Dad” bullshit but then blames Dean for his independent actions anyway
So, let’s recap. Sam is supposed to be an antihero, but we’re not allowed to treat him like one and he refuses to acknowledge let alone own it, so that arc is gone. Sam makes world-ending mistakes, but he doesn’t take responsibility so he doesn’t have heroic redemption arcs either. Sam barely tolerates the hunting profession and often finds reasons to abandon victims, so he’s shitcanned his own conventional hero arc as well. Sam is not black, or gray, or white. So seriously, who is this dude and why am I supposed to care about him?
Feel free to add more lads, I could go on all day tbh
origamiaround
janainaart
theartofmadeline
areudirty
dededos
