one of my favorite ideas I’ve ever had that I really just need to write is an alternate reality documentary entitled Doggone set in a world where on Tuesday, June 3, 2003, at 4:52:31.83 GMT, all domestic dogs ceased to exist
the documentary itself would be set around 30 years later, so that people who remember dogs are approaching being middle aged or older; basically, it’d just be a series of interviews with older people about their memories of dogs interspersed with interviews with younger people who grew up in a dogless world. there’d also be a variety of interviews with people whose lives and careers intersect heavily with the disappearance of the dogs: an expert on the environmental impact, a handful of conspiracy theorists (the government did it, aliens did it, dogs are a collective memory of something that never actually existed), a cable executive who made the decision to permanently buy the television rights to the film All Dogs Go to Heaven and broadcast it on a new channel nonstop for 16 years, a dog breeder, a religious leader, and a 24-year-old who has just begun working on a PhD in Dog Studies despite never having seen a dog in real life ever
despite the absurdity of the premise, this wouldn’t be a comedy at all. thematically it would mostly deal with the way our culture records information, and how the rise in digital photography and video recording has made it so that our records of dogs existing in the event of such a catastrophe (or any other similar event) would be fundamentally completely different than they would’ve been a decade or two decades ago. even the fact that the time of the event is known to a tenth of a second is because a huge number of different CCTV cameras caught the event, and even though their frame rates aren’t that precise, it was possible to extrapolate the precise time by looking at how many hundredths of a second off of the start of each second each 30th frame of a number of cameras that were synced to atomic clocks were. on the other hand, most regular people in this world who had dogs don’t typically have more than one or two photos of those dogs, and maybe a couple minutes of video
the film would probably end with a longer sequence about a conglomerate of dozens of researchers at various universities and private facilities who have been trying to recreate dogs through selective breeding of their closest genetic relatives who are still around. naturally, of course, the “dogs” are under 24/7 video surveillance, and all this video is permanently archived online free for anyone to access, along with hundreds of thousands of hours of recordings of actual dogs donated to the public domain after the event
Okay, sorry, but I have like five different abandoned drafts sitting on my computer about this exact thing all written prior to seeing this gifset, and this gifset is perfect, and I am just going to have to give up on getting them Just Right because I want this out of my head (and out of my drafts folder).
So this is fascinating to me because what’s going here is basically that Henry had this idea of what his son was like when he was a kid, and he’s projected it forward in time to come up with an idea of what John would have been like as an adult if a bunch of bad shit hadn’t happened to him. (Supernatural bad shit like Mary being killed and mundane bad shit like being in the Vietnam War.) And I have a longstanding theory, based (historically) on not very much, that part of why John was an asshole to Sam in the particular way he was is that he saw himself in Sam. But not the part of himself he felt like he needed: not the terrifying hunter who knew five different ways to kill you with his bare hands and raised his kids as child soldiers. I think John would have seen Sam as being like him in the ways he’d decided were at best not very useful and at worst a liability: I think he would’ve seen a fairly bookish, introverted, curious kid who wanted to read and learn things and go to school and live a monster-free life, and it would have gotten under his skin in a way nothing Dean did could have because it looked a lot like what he was trying to kill in himself.
Because I don’t think John was like that at first. In the episodes where the boys go back in time and work with him and Mary, he seems out of his depth, if not actually frightened of what’s going on. The young John we see in those episodes is a much calmer, gentler man than the boys knew as their father. But he’s also really eager to prove himself, and I can imagine that need to seem competent and unflappable kind of crowding out everything else about him. Refocusing it, at least. Because older John Winchester is studious and bookish and interested in/good at research, but it’s secondary, it’s not the most important thing about him. Or maybe I should say it’s important, but only when it’s in service to the Hunting Things part of the family business – seeking knowledge and trying to understand and catalog the world is not, on its own, a worthwhile activity for John. But I don’t think that’s because he wasn’t good at it, or didn’t have the impulse to read and research and learn about his world for its own sake. I think a series of fucked up things happened to him (starting, arguably, with his dad disappearing without warning or explanation when he was a kid) that taught him to devalue that part of himself, and so when he saw it in his son, instead of doing the well-adjusted-parent thing and encouraging Sam to pursue his skills and interests, he just saw a thing he’d spent a bunch of time trying not to be, and hated it.
…Not, in case it needs saying (it shouldn’t need saying, but I have no more faith on this particular point) that a complicated and difficult personal history excuses abuse. John’s a terrible dad. This is very clearly a show about fucked up family dynamics and cycles of violence and abuse (with occasional monster guest stars). But also, this is a show about fucked up family dynamics and cycles of violence that, right now, is actually talking about family dynamics and cycles of violence.
And the really ironic thing is, all those qualities John didn’t think Sam possessed are actually there, the ruthlessness and focus and the ability to pursue a goal to the end of the earth. Or else he never would have gotten a full ride to Stanford.
also, i see supernatural as a sort of progression in which dean starts out trying to emulate john really really hard….while Sam seems like the compassionate, curious, questioning one. and then it turns out that when Jess dies, Sam practically turns into John, while Dean is the voice of reason, the protective one, the voice of compassion – the one who is most like mary in trying to protect the family. you know, maybe that explains why John was such a dick to Dean – he saw so much of Mary in Dean, in his kindness and compassion, and he hated it because it hurt. wow, eureka. that explains a lot. imma gonna go cry now.
kototyph 
