I watched Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes's Hounds Of Baskerville and it was great!!! So I, of course, made fanart ❤️ (I took, as always, a bunch of creative liberties while drawing them)
While I don’t doubt that Dean truly believes Sam is better than him, I think what he does here is actually a practiced (perhaps subconsciously) move that he’s learned to use a long time ago, probably while John was still alive and in charge. Because when working with someone as stubborn as John, and later Sam, this might sometimes be the only thing to convince them to do what Dean needs them to do.
It’s the classic “give someone a big ego boost to make them more susceptible to the one thing I need from them” move – in this case, tell Sam he’s the best at everything except pool, so that Sam agrees to let Dean be the one who plays the dangerous game that may end up costing him his life.
Dean did the exact same thing back in season 8’s Trial and Error, where he gave Sam that speech about how Sam’s always been “the brains of this operation” and Dean’s nothing but a grunt, expendable and with no future, to convince Sam to let Dean do the Trials. (And yes, it ended up with Sam doing the thing in both instances I mention here, but that was due to external circumstances.)
Let me also elaborate some further thoughts here about John’s situation and abuse, because it is complicated, and it’s not cut-and-dried.
The fact that John was terrified, the fact that John was traumatized, the fact that his wife was murdered by mysterious supernatural forces, the fact that John must have been terrified of losing all he had left, his two small children, and wanted to keep them safe, doesn’t change that he emotionally abused and verbally abused and neglected them.
It also doesn’t change that despite his terror of losing Sam and Dean, despite his great love for them, he put his vengeance obsession to get the thing that killed Mary--who, canon tells us, was a Heaven-arranged love story that took any inherent attraction and intensified it, because it suited their endgame design. It certainly throws the John/Mary love story into question, especially given their marital problems, but all kinds of marriages have problems. It seems like they loved each other regardless of cupid manipulations. However, John’s sheer obsession with getting the YED for murdering Mary doesn’t really fit with the argument “but he wanted to protect his children!” I am failing to see how they were safer on the road. I am failing to see how they were safer being trained into the life at such young ages. Yes, John wanted to prepare them for what he knew was out there, so they could protect themselves. A lot of the things we see depicted in how John went about that weren’t necessary to achieve that goal. He pushed Dean way too hard too early, putting a sawed off shotgun in his hands. Giving him absolutely no room whatsoever to be a kid or have his own needs, from a very young age, and I am not seeing how that part was necessary in order to prepare Dean on the rudimentary basics of defense against the supernatural. It’s been stated in canon, it’s been shown on screen.
There are all kinds of ways people react to trauma. There are all kinds of choices John could have made, within the parameters of he couldn’t exactly just pretend he knew nothing and get on with his life while knowing the monsters were out there. John’s single-minded tunnel visioned mission wasn’t just about protecting his children. It was obsessive and he never let go of his grief and it caused a ripple of harm to others. I used to ship John/Mary during the earlier days of SPN but I think over time our perspective and perceptions can change and now I don’t. I can’t get past this now.
This isn’t about making excuses or condemning him. It’s about the effect of that abuse on Sam and Dean and not denying that the abuse existed, that it’s canon, that it was spelled out as canon on screen before canon spend over a decade revealing secondhand even more canon to fill out the character and show us the actual extent of what Sam and Dean’s upbringing was like. It’s about not stripping that essential layer out of canon and out of these characters. Like it or not, it’s an essential, painful layer.
There are other choices he could have made. We have even in-show examples of parents who know that monsters are real and live with it and don’t tear their kids’ lives apart as a result. We have other characters as examples. Jody Mill’s entire life was torn to shreds by the supernatural but she didn’t abandon her job and her home and a sense of stability. She was deeply traumatized. Years later, she took in a bunch of young women and gave them a home and stability while they learned how to hunt. It doesn’t all have to be rootlessness and uncertainty and turning a child into a parent for his baby brother, and having him have to become the support for his own parent.
One of the biggest themes on SPN is the choices we make define us, not trauma, not the bad thing that happens, but how we respond what we do next. S14 has a thumpingly loud theme about trying to be better parents than your parents were. It’s not about mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone. What John did wasn’t a mistake. The thing about mistakes is recognizing they are mistakes and then trying to do better. John was so tunnel visioned for so long, John was tunnel visioned when Dean was 4, he was tunnel visioned when Dean was 26. When his son was dying he wasn’t there. When Dean was a small child John taught him he had no value and no worth except to be a blunt little instrument and watch after his baby brother. He taught Dean he wasn’t allowed to have wants and needs.
The initial traumatic event itself isn’t the explanation for why John was how he was. I don’t know if SPN will ever give us a fuller portrait. What kind of trauma pre-existed already that made him absolutely snap the way he did. It’s not that he snapped. Anyone would in that horrific situation. It’s the way he snapped. It’s the choices he made regarding his children, day to day. There are hundreds of little choices each day he made. The supernatural ripping his life to shreds isn’t the explanation for how he chose to treat his kids.
