i saw a post on here a while ago which was like "i think it's more interesting if john wasn't just abusive. like if sometimes he was nice and fun. took them to movies and stuff. it's more complex. it's more real."
but the thing is - that's still abuse. in fact, the abuse is all of it. it's abandoning them for weeks alone in motels, it's taking them to wrestling matches, it's making them call him sir, it's taking dean fishing, it's teaching them to hustle pool for money, it's sharing a beer with pre-teen dean, it's angrily throwing away food dean cooked, it's stealing them a christmas wreath made out of beer cans, it's teaching a six-grader to make a sawed-off shotgun, it's teaching dean how to fix up the car, it's leaving dean in a boys home for stealing bread and peanut butter.
i'm worried about the way fandom sometimes loses the fact that, of course, john was sometimes fun, sometimes kind, sometimes present. very few people are wholly one way all the time. and it's clear from the ways dean talks about john (and the way john talks) that one of the main ways john's abuse worked was hope. hope that things would get better. yes, that once they found what killed mary, they could go back to having a life. but also on a smaller scale, don't you think each time john came home dean hoped he wouldn't leave again? don't you think each time john sent dean away, john said if dean did better it wouldn't happen again. don't you think that there were moments rolling down some two lane with the windows down and the radio on and them all singing along and dean hoped it could feel like that forever?
abuse really rarely is tonally consistent.
john winchester is a fascinating, complex, sometimes even sympathetic character. i don't think he had evil intentions. i think he wanted things to be better for his kids than he felt like he could make them. i hate him with my whole soul. and there is no argument based on canon that can reasonably conclude he was anything but abusive.
