*squints* You wanna talk about Dean, uh???? You wanna talk about Dean?? …sure :D
Sully exposes Sam’s perception of his family as a “JohnandDean” entity he is placed in an opposite position to. @darkrose-9, whom tumblr won’t let me tag because we can’t have nice things, mentions how Sam’s heavens memories are about moments in which he’s separated from John and Dean - I think it’s totally on point. Both episodes, one explicitly, one implicitly, show how Sam kind of considered John and Dean as a fairly homogeneous package in the perspective of ‘being in’ or ‘out’. Which, well, it was kind of true - Dean would have never left John, but it took Sam a long while to understand why. In Dark Side of the Moon we see that Sam has always been oblivious to the fact that his disappearances have caused enormous pain to Dean. Only when they’re in heaven and Dean openly puts his side of the story in front of Sam’s face, Sam realizes. If he’d tried to put himself in Dean’s shoes, it would have been obvious that John would have been furious with Dean, but Sam didn’t think of seeing the fact from Dean’s perspective at all. He was escaping from the JohnandDean entity and didn’t consider that Dean was his own person separated from John, he assumed they were a compact front. Like most children think of their parents as a unit.
Just My Imagination gives us further insight in Sam’s pre-show perception of his family. Dean and John get kind of blurred together. Heck, it takes Sam a long time to start separating Dean and John, in a way - look at the first seasons and how Sam looks down to Dean for being mindlessly obedient to John.
We’ve been talking a lot about how Sam perceives Dean as a parent - in fact, I believe that Sam perceives Dean in the way a son whose mother is abused by his father, while he doesn’t get abused as much (or in the same way anyway) by his father as his mother does; so the child sees his mother being docile and obedient towards her husband, and he doesn’t understand why but assumes that it’s because his mother is weak and doesn’t have a mind of her own.
Dark Side of the Moon in interesting on that front too - when Sam sees Dean’s heaven memories, with Dean performing emotional labor that shouldn’t be the responsibility of a child, it clicks to Sam that Dean just always desperately tried to keep the family together because circumstances made that into Dean’s responsibility. But I think that - while Sam obviously has never consciously thought of Dean as a mother figure - it’s still hard for him to move Dean from a ‘John’s wife’ position to a ‘John’s child’ position in his mind, because Dean occupies a ‘parent’ position for him.
Basically, Sam spent years considering or trying to escape from John and Dean where John and Dean were his parents, the abusive father and the pathetically weak mother that will just parrot anything her husband says.
Of course it’s not Sam’s fault that Sam formed this kind of perception in his head because Sam was a child, nor it’s Dean’s fault because Dean was also a child… child abuse takes many forms and causing both kids to form toxic perceptions of their family dynamics is one of them.
With Mary back, things are interesting, because there’s a… competition between her and Dean. Dean is the person who as acted as Sam’s mother, now their actual mother shows up and Sam picks her over Dean?? (I’m talking about Dean’s perception here, and not even fully conscious) When Dean told Mary that he was never a child, there are layers implicit there - not only Dean wasn’t allowed to be a child because he had to shoot monsters, but he had to be her. He had to be Mary in the Mary-less family unit. Dean didn’t lose his childhood because John taught him to use guns and stuff, Dean lost his childhood because he had to be Sam’s caregiver and even had to provide emotional labor towards John (making him feel better when he came home devastated from hunts, and of course navigating through John’s moods). Heck, Dean even provided emotional labor for Mary before she died…
Both Sam and Mary, especially Mary because Sam has had chances to understand it partially, need to be smacked in the face with the reality of Dean’s life under John. Otherwise they’ll perceive Dean as acting childishly or selfishly, like Mary has recently accused him of, and like Sam has a long history of.
Omg I digressed XD I have a lot of feels, okay
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