#samwena adjacent

[shallowseeker]

My Bloody Valentine shows us that Sam is starved for blood/vitality/POWER, Cas craves “the strange flesh”/meat/SEX, and Dean, ofc, is all about LOVE.

Blood, especially in Christian terms, is vitality—a stand-in for the forbidden consumption of God’s power.

Beef may be a clean animal, but the episode foregrounds meat as desire: the opening scene with the couple tearing into each other underlines the meat/sex consumption that Cas embodies.

And then there’s Dean and LOVE. He explicitly rejects the Cupid’s (rightly suspicious) account of his parents’ story. More than that, Cupids themselves are framed as random, glib facilitators—even outside Heaven’s “important” matches, they cheapen feelings into machinery. Dean refuses that. He needs to believe in LOVE, and it is LOVE he craves to fill the emptiness.

[shallowseeker]

Sam’s “destiny” was to be “king of the rats/riffraff”…and he didn’t really want that.

I don’t exactly have textual support for this but I suspect that Sam would have more readily embraced a Heavenly destiny, because it represents rising above his class background. Whereas Hell represents thriving in a place that is literally beneath him. (Well, it wouldn’t have been him per se…that was a bait and switch trick where he would have been “boy-king” in body only—a sham class rank built to entice his ego into said trap with the lure of false power. But the overall point stands!)

Don’t get me wrong; I support his rejection of Hell. In-text, it’s healthy to reject the nihilism and disinhibited-loss-of-free-will that Hell can tend to represent.

This is more a thought about how he originally associates it in his brain, I think. It’s an interesting thought! And now I’m thinking about how Rowena and Crowley view Hell as rising above…