happy wincest wednesday to you and yours!! if you had to point to one single canon scene that exemplifies why wincest is so powerful and engaging and worth thinking about as much as we all clearly think about it, which scene would you pick?
okay so of course i could take the easy route and point to any scene in the first 3-4 seasons, because i have at least one moment in every episode from that era. HOWEVER. there is one that i believe trumps them all, and that moment is [pause for drumroll]
i don’t think this will be a controversial choice 😅 still, there’s a reason that this scene is at the top of a lot of people’s lists, and that’s because of what a great job it does to bring together a ton of threads from the previous episodes and lay them all plain, while also giving us one of dean’s Iconic Moments of Vulnerability™️ AND being a great example of how to write conflicting character motivations between two people who love each other. sam and dean are both heartbroken in this scene, but they’re both sticking to what they want.
one thing i find really interesting about it is how sam, the optimist, starts talking about “getting back to real life” to cheer dean up, as a way to get them both battle-ready and distract them from the possibility of dying in the next few hours. what’s always really drawn me to sam and dean is the way that their intrinsic motivations get in the way of them having a smooth relationship-- that conflict is catnip to me, and it’s something we get a TON of in season one. sam brings up what comes next because he’s genuinely trying to calm dean, but in doing so he brings up his worst nightmare because he doesn’t know!!! he doesn’t know!!! we don’t even explicitly know that sam leaving for stanford was dean’s worst night of his life until dark side of the moon, although he makes it pretty obvious in this scene. then we have dean revealing the only thing he wants for himself, which is having his family together. (and i find it really interesting how sam’s silhouette cleaves the sentence in half, placing “you, and me” separately from “and dad.”) you can see on sam’s face how much he wants dean to let himself have one thing when he asks him what it is, but dean’s only wish here is sam’s worst nightmare-- to be trapped in this life forever, stuck following john’s orders, and seeing them die violent and bloody.
i also love how this scene carries on sam’s theme of committing himself to dean while still chafing against him (”you’re my brother, and i’d die for you, but some things i need to keep to myself.” “dean, that guy was probably gonna die anyway.” “i’d do anything for you, but things will never be the way they were before.”) it’s laying the groundwork for the next [checks calendar] LITERALLY 14 SEASONS. this theme just keeps coming up, and every time it does it comes in a different form. it’s so clear even just from this scene how much sam would do for dean and how little he can conceive of a life together-- flash forward to season nine and you have sam who can only conceive of a life with dean and can’t handle the things they’ll do for each other. mmmmm.
THEN we have sam’s face after dean’s done flaying himself open, and that mix of love and pity and misery is fodder for thousands of fics. the way dean’s eye twitches right before he says “could be.” the weird undercurrent of desperation that shouldn’t be present in a conversation between two brothers about living with their father forever. the way dean can’t even look at sam while he’s explaining himself. sam’s rock solid response, knowing what it will do to dean and knowing it needs to be said. U G H
fantastic. 10/10. i wish i had been on livejournal the night this episode dropped. i hope everyone involved got a million dollars for this.
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