awed-frog:
grey2510:
dorkilysoulless:
dustydreamsanddirtyscars:
12×15 “Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell”
Silent Storytelling Galore: When Expressions Say Much More Than Words
This is a face of utter defeat. A face of complete disillusion and seeing things exactly for what they are: freaking sad. Dean has been shown done with lieing a multitude of times this season, but this moment like no others before drive home, just how done Dean is with them. I don’t think he was truly surprised when Sam told him where he got the phone calls and jobs from at the end of the episode. It was more like a sad: “I thought so.” Dean isn’t on board. He’ll never be on board. His entire body language screams that. And that’ll pose issues further down the line. Will Dean become the next “rogue hunter” the BritMoL may think they need to deal with? I personally hope that come whatever the narrative will focus on how Dean cannot “be tamed” or “controlled” – because that’s in the end what the BritMoL want, utter and complete control over them – he is the ultimate symbol for free will after all.
I’ve been thinking about this over the past couple of days.
- Dean’s face in 12×14 when Ketch drags Pierce away. He’s the sole Winchester dissenter – Sam and Mary approve of the BMoL doing whatever it is to “rogue hunters" – but Dean is silent. Swallows. Visibly uncomfortable. Looks away when Mick arrives.
- Sam brings out the technobabble and faux high culture thing when he’s hiding something or lying. Dean knows this, and we’ve even seen him call Sam on it earlier this season when Sam was like, “blah, blah, podcast,” and Dean revealed that, no, blah, blah, Vince Vincente, Sam, why do you even listen to this?
So yeah, Dean knew something was up. I even think he suspected. Now he’s got confirmation, and….well, what do you even do with that?
Sam brings out the technobabble and faux high culture thing when he’s hiding something or lying. Dean knows this, and we’ve even seen him call Sam on it earlier this season when Sam was like, “blah, blah, podcast,” and Dean revealed that, no, blah, blah, Vince Vincente, Sam, why do you even listen to this?
Can we just talk for a minute about how utterly depressing that is? First, that Sam genuinely thinks that technobabble and faux high culture works to distract Dean, and second, that Dean might call out Sam on the lie/BS or just disprove it, but he never calls out Sam for assuming he’s dumb or doesn’t care/know about intellectual or cultured things. Because those are the roles they play. Sure, Dean gets mock indignant sometimes when he has to remind people that he reads, and sure, Sam’ll tell Dean that he’s not a dummy on occasion… but do either of them really believe that, 100%? Or is there still that bone-deep sliver of assumptions…
Just… these two.
My impression is that, growing up, being smarter than Dean was all Sam could count on. We know that at some point he became eager to be a hunter – he’d always felt escluded from this world his dad and Dean were part of, and some part of him probably thought (despite Sully’s advice) that if he could just fit in that, he wouldn’t feel so isolated and out of place all the time. But we also know this didn’t work all that well. We know Sam wasn’t good at taking orders, that he and John fought constantly, to the point where Sam, once so keen to follow in his brother’s footsteps and kill monsters, abandoned the life the very first chance he got. So, well – homeless kid stuck in motels with an ex-soldier father and a better-looking brother, a failure at the family business – what did he have going for himself? One thing: he was school-smart, and his teachers saw this and encouraged him to cultivate his academic talent. And my headcanon is that Dean, who, in any case, was bored with half the subjects, was always trying too hard to project that alpha male, bad boy image he needed to avoid bullying over his ‘prettiness’, and was convinced he’d never get out, anyway, because hunting was his future – his destiny and his curse – started to actively put himself down even more so that Sam could have the win. You see parents doing this all the time, after all – Look at how smart you are, Mommy couldn’t have done this, You’ll be the first in the family to go to college – whether these things are true or not, it’s a good idea (and selfless parenting, which is always endearing but becomes remarkable when executed by a 15-year-old boy) to point out how difficult school work can be, and how clever a child is for keeping up with it and understanding what’s going on. Essays and algebra and foreign languages and physics – parents are often put in this position where half the time they genuinely don’t understand what’s going on, and the other half, they lie and exaggerate their own ignorance so their child will feel some sense of control in a world where, inevitably, they’re not as good as their parents at anything else.
So, well. Mostly, what annoys me or breaks my heart, depending on how it’s expressed, is not that Dean keeps doing this, on and off (habits are hard to break, and God knows Sam still needs a win, even today), but that Sam seems so oblivious? That he hasn’t figured it out? That he genuinely thinks his brother is this dummy, this uncurious, uneducated person, and the sure-fire way to get him to look away is to start talking about history and literature and podcasts and whatever – that he still doesn’t realize that for Dean, pushing Sam towards libraries when they hunt – sure, it may be true that Sam’s more at home there, that it takes him half the time to dig up stuff, but this division of tasks was also, again, a way to boost Sam’s self-confidence and keep him busy when he started hunting again – a way for Dean to say, See? I can’t do this without you, because you’re so much better than me, so much smarter, so –
(The truth is, of course, that Dean can do that, and did do that: we know he’d been hunting alone for months, if not longer, when he finally gave up and went to back to find Sam.)
Seriously – they both need to put more effort into fixing this thing between them, because, come on.
@awed-frog @grey2510 @dorkilysoulless
I completely agree with all this.
I also was thinking about when Dean tells Sam to look after Baby this episode and insinuates he can’t drive properly etc…
Ok it’s a set up for the fact that Baby does indeed get damaged BUT it kind of feels to me like Dean trying to hark back to a time when he and Sam were younger and he did use to genuinely tell Sam this?
For me he’s nostalgic, thinking back to a time when Sammy was just his little brother (/child), they were on the same side and importantly Sam wasn’t lying to him (cos we’ve established it’s pretty sure he knows by this point).
This also then also kinda makes it even worse that Baby does get damaged – metaphorically showing that they CANT go back…. he has to face that that Sammys grown up and making his own choices.
BUT for me this is pain allowing Dean to move forwards and is part of his whole season arc of emotional growth. Given that Cas and Mary are also making their own choices it’s clearly a big point of his story this season (although Cas interestingly is the only one who hasn’t yet outright lied about it, it’ll be interesting to see but I’m imagining he will tell Dean in the end which will be an interesting comparison).
Letting his facade down, letting Sam, Mary and Cas be their own people and make their own choices separately to him and meanwhile for him to figure out who DEAN IS, not who he thinks he SHOULD be. Letting go of preconceptions, nearly 40 years of idealisation and posturing not just towards himself but towards Sam, Mary and Cas is a big part of that.
So yeah these two moments, one where clearly he knows Sam is lying and acting like a parent hearing a child’s confession when they already know, plus his moment of denial here trying to pretend like they’re young and on the same side again…. it’s heartbreaking but hopefully will lead to good emotional growth once he’s faced facts and really looked inwards at himself, which he seems to be doing more and more this season….
Im also interested i think like awed-frog it sounds like, to see if Sam is surprised by Dean when he lets this facade down? 12×11 was weird to me because Sam seemed so surprised at all the real!Dean stuff that came out – but coupled with this terrible lying and a few other things over the years I think yeah, Sam is actually very much under performing!Dean’s spell – maybe because he WANTS it to be true as it’s too confusing/heartbreaking to think your parent is hiding from themselves? How many people really think of their parents as ‘real people’ in this sense, Im thinking of how many people are so surprised when their parents come out of the closet or get a divorce, because we often just think of them as a parent, as who they project because it’s EASY and they’re a constant, so we think of them as so solid….
But then on the other hand he said himself that Dean is super smart in season 8, not a grunt etc…. idk maybe it’s the different writers that can’t get a grip of whether Sam sees behind the facade or not.
which is why I still fluctuate between shipper!Sam and oblivious!Sam because sometimes he seems he couldn’t be more aware (12×12) but others he just totally hadn’t got a clue who the real Dean is…
Yes yes yes to all of this with a heaping side dish full of just how much Sam, who does love his brother, may be avoiding the issue subconsciously in order to not have to reprocess whole chunks of their mutual past if he accepts real!Dean and not Guise!Dean as his brother’s authentic self/personality.
To someone whose personal relationship with history is as painful as it is for both Winchester brothers it is more than possible to fall into a mindset of not looking back and re evaluating even when confronted with proof you have colored or inaccurate memories… Because how could opening that hissing chest full of vipers know as yesterday possibly be worth what small treasure trove of truth that MAY be waiting at the bottom.
People as a rule tend to resist change in all forms because in represents instability and instability is scary. We tend to avoid changing our minds, opinions lives etc until it becomes more painful to stay where we are in actuality or even just metaphorically than it is to finally get up and leave. And that’s as true for our perceptions and memories as it is for the lives still ahead of us…
kototyph 