hoenn girl

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The one true parallel.

surprise.

7.02 / 13.12

Merlin? He believes I’ve changed. And he’s right. Soon he will see exactly how much.

The problem here isn’t that Dean is frustrated by the circumstances constantly getting thrown at them. I don’t blame him for that; in the Winchesters’ circumstances, I’d be frustrated, too. More than. But that’s not the issue I’m having. My issue is that, in expressing his desire for their circumstances to be better, he makes other people’s emotional suffering about him. Sam may be struggling with the traumatic fallout of Cas breaking his wall and uncovering his Hell memories? Wow, that must be scary for Dean. Mary might be struggling to find her place in the world after a confusing resurrection? Wow, that’s really inconvenient for Dean’s happiness.

It’s not that he’s not allowed to have feelings about Sam and Mary’s emotional trauma. He is. That’s a natural human reaction, and in fact, it’s good for you to care to care about the suffering of the people around you and want them to be okay. But in making the suffering of the people around him about him, he inadvertently makes Sam feel like such a burden that he decides not to talk about his hallucinations, and dehumanizes both Sam and Mary. And yeah, Sam was spot on in that last gif. Mary isn’t a “thing,” and neither is he. It’s not just when Sam is addicted to demon blood that Dean dehumanizes him (though that was awful too.) Dean sees Sam’s struggles as a burden on himself rather than on Sam, and that is dehumanization. Dean sees Mary’s struggles as the barrier between him and happiness, and that is dehumanization.  And for Sam, who is the primary and most obvious victim of Dean’s dehumanization, to say, not in quite so many words, “no, she’s not a thing, she’s a person, and we gotta treat her like one” is incredibly powerful.

Jake & Amy + Chandler & Monica - parallels

Pendragon siblings being done with their father

heck I’m rewatching s12 (12.03 right now), and just… everything about Mary in early s12– from the awkward family dinner party at the end of 12.02 to her dealing with the ghost of the little boy in 12.03 to her absolute terror of the “mutilated baby doll,” it all screams how she’s so deep in guilt and depression that she’s essentially dissociated when it comes to Sam specifically.

She begins to bond with Adult Dean pretty quickly because she knows him, or at least a few of his core personality traits from when he was a child. But all she knows of Sam is pinned to that creepy, befouled doll. He’s not really a person to her, and she’s terrified of allowing him to become a person in her mind, because if he does, she’ll have to apply that guilt, that horror of what her selfish choice did to her little baby that never even had a chance to be normal despite getting ten years of that sort of normal life for herself– she’ll have to take all of that and apply it to this man who is her son but who she never got to know anything about before his life was tainted by her ten years before he was even born.

You know how Dean always goes on about how he’s cursed, that he’s poison? Well, multiply that by ten and that’s how Mary feels about all of this.

What a thing to wake up to…

P . A . I . N .

I just want to address fandom myself for a second. I’ve seen some wonderful pieces written about Dean and Mary in the AU vs Sam and Dean in Purgatory (shout out @semirahrose) and how fandom has reacted to them, but I need to put in my two cents. Which will honestly just be a large middle finger to the NEVER ENDING hypocrisy fans of Dean will go to to absolve him of any shit he deals while lambasting Sam for taking too deep a breath. 

13.04:

8.01

Not only is this another case of goal-post-shifting from Dean (oh the classics just never get old with this guy), but this is a CLEAR contradiction for how Dean would want this situation to be handled if it were him in Mary’s position. How do we know? Because he LITERALLY says so, he spends an entire season punishing Sam for believing him to be dead, DESPITE the fact Sam watched his brother EXPLODE. 

But my beef with the in-universe stuff is obvious and could have probably gone unstated (especially since I’ve fought the Purgatory battle for years). What I want to break down is the line-by-line fan reaction to each of these situations and how some fans STILL hold onto the very unfair POV that Sam was a bad brother for believing Dean was dead while coddling Dean this season for insisting Mary is dead. (From what I understand of 13.04, Dean’s POV on Mary is resolved by the end of the ep which is great, but that doesn’t address how unfair fandom still is towards Sam even now, 13 seasons in.)

Dean insists Mary is dead and gives legitimate reasons why he’d believe that, her heart was ripped, etc. However, in s8 when Sam explains he, too, thought Dean was dead and had a legitimate reason to believe that (because he saw Dean go up in a Leviathan explosion), Dean fans scoffed as if seeing your brother explode is somehow not a good enough reason to believe and accept he’s dead. Not only that, I’ve seen arguments that state even if Sam thought Dean was dead, he should have done something to ressurect him despite their agreement to never do that again. Meanwhile, this season, we get people of course falling all over themselves to be understanding of Dean’s bullheadedness in insisting Mary is dead and that they should promptly move on from any other possibility. 

It’s just another example of fandom only allowing Dean to be the one to feel his feelings while only allowing Sam to do so when his feelings expressly cater to Dean’s feelings. God forbid Sam have his own. The hypocrisy is still lost on these fans if they can honestly stand by supporting Dean’s position on Mary with understanding while still demonizing Sam’s position in s8 for pretty much believing the exact same thing of Dean as Dean is now believing of Mary. 

So as always, I’m back to sound off and roll my eyes. 

Like father, like son (◠‿◠✿)