It's me again. Shal.

You've reached my secret-ish blog.

This is my random / vent journal. It's where I keep my thought experiments and RB chains n' conversations with other unhinged SPN dorks. Because some of this is ornery and some are outdated opinions, I occasionally turn reblogs off.

Here, you'll find my shoot-from-the-hip stuff: unusual, not-always-fit-for-public opinions, personal trauma dumps, and random thoughts. Just because I write about it here doesn't mean it's my primary belief, only that I'm playing with the idea. My safe, more plucky blog is here: @shallowseeker.

This blog is undergoing major cleanup and deletions, so uh. Hang tight, I guess? It's been a whacky year. Some key points about this blog:

i wanted to see emma and andrea team up in purgatory getting their revenges

sometimes i think about the contrast between andrea and cas

both are “too far gone”

and in the same episode we get such a stark contrast! benny preserves deans happiness; dean does not preserve benny’s

comparing benny saving cas to dean killing andrea is stark and even bleak

(no time maybe for discussion w/benny but it was a fatal blow to andrea; there was no disablement or consideration for knock out blows, certainly no rational convo with her, or emotional appeal for second chances/how to beat addiction etc etc; so very telling)

i mean, benny was doing plenty of flagrant dismissal-and-dehumanization-and-escalation all on his own, but!

just a flash of teeth and bam

dean chose the coldest, most permanent solution; the hunter’s choice

is it any wonder benny wanted to stay in purgatory? his unfinished business now resides there

I deleted the Grammarly, and everything works so much better now. I think ... it was more trouble than it was worth.

In the end I used it on two chapters total and it was a veritable nightmare siiigh... I think it was that it kept trying to use the AI tools they put in it and it would make suggestions with repeats. It also messed up the comments the sweet beta reader gave to me, copying some of them INTO the body area and it was just...

Never again.

So, on the subject of Sam being neurodivergent…

If he often struggles to read people and agonizes over moral relativism, I think his season 8 behavior makes perfect sense in some ways…

(Especially when you add in the fight-or-flight seesaw. His wall got terribly broken and repaired; and then he lost both Dean and Cas, and he didn’t just not look for them. He was afraid of looking for them. Sam is the man most afraid of grief. Limbo was preferable to grieving them if they’d turned out to be truly dead. Thus, the resulting deserting his post / utter nervous breakdown).

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Anyway, Re: Sam’s neurodivergence. Sam, and especially later-seasons Sam, doesn’t seem to operate on gut feeling as comfortably as he does by-the-book type of structures.

And while it hurts a bit to realize it, Sam could be mostly mirroring the assistance Dean and Bobby gave to him in early seasons.

After all, Sam also had a monstrous ally who earned trust and offered assistance over a period of years. An ally who even saved Dean’s life on occasion! It’s not a jump to assume Sam’s mind has created a snapshot of this instance to use in real life the way we use our experiences like a training simulation.

Post-deserting his post, Sam’s horrified by his own weakness and flakiness. So, charitably, we can assume he tries to overcorrect his support. And when he’s “looking out for his brother,” part of him is referring to this neurodivergent “checklisting of items” he’s stored in his head.

In this instance, being wary of self-interested-but-caring-outsiders was modeled by Dean and Bobby!

The Ruby scenario is now a pattern in Sam’s head, embedded like a board of blackout bingo terms.

And Sam is a little bit right in that, that no matter how “arms-length” Dean keeps his partnership, no matter how “controlling the means of communication and controlling the flow of blood donation” Dean crafts it to be, it poses real risk to Dean, which is underlined boldly in text, regardless of the stress-testing Sam engineers.

(But crucially, Sam is also a lot in the wrong, too.)

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I think this “flight simulation” style of thinking happens in season 10, too.

Dean “at least Sam will die human then” Winchester and Bobby (and Cas) undertook extreme lockdown techniques to get Sam through the “withdrawal” phase of his affliction in a 4-5.

And it was successful! (Drug withdrawal is no joke, but it’s not torture for the sake of torture, or social rejection for the sake of social rejection. I personally feel like rushing to pin it as a crude stand-in for conversion therapy is uncharitable and way off.)

Point is, Sam’s got a pre-existing template for the Demon Dean purification scenario. It’s what was done to him.

His family recognized when it was “the affliction talking” to get Sam to a place of health. Sam knows Dean loves him, loves singing, loves his car…

And lo— when all is said and done, Sam is right about this. Sam’s hypocritical cruelty and evil pragmatism to save his loved ones aside, Sam is right that Dean doesn’t want to lose himself in a numbing world of black-and-white, Purgatory-style numbness and fatalism.

Dean says on multiple occasions just how much he hated becoming “that thing.” He verbalizes that the mark and demonness are an assault on his free will; and he’d rather die before becoming it again.

Of the mark, Dean calls Crowley out for lying and pulling a Metatron on Dean to further Crowley’s own goals. And of the mark, Dean says, after blacking out and losing control a la Godstiel-a-political-convection: “Fellas, this thing’s gotta go.”

Sam knows Dean, and because he knows Dean, he recognizes that the demonness was not a secret true self any more that the suicidal ideation brought on by Sam’s trials was Sam’s secret dream…

And once again, Sam’s actually a little bit right about Crowley; we just tend to politely look away from it. (Draining humans as late as season 9; killing queer suburbanites in s11 to make a hasty phone call etc etc)

That Sam is a little bit right about some details makes parsing his moral relativism even more difficult for him, I think.

EDIT:

(He’s also probably confused by when his emotions irrationally drive him in certain scenarios, like when he makes a connection with a “freak” that’s so strong that he overlooks “rules.” He ties himself in knots rationalizing, perhaps. We all do. It’s horrifying how irrational we are, really.)

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In his middling-Sam days, when the scenario doesn’t play out according to the checklist/scenario stored in his head, Sam tries to counter-balance the equation so it’s forced to fit.

I.E: “I was wrong, so therefore Dean is also wrong because enough of these checklisted conditions look the same. No? I’ll just have to hit fast-forward on a few things and prove it to him then!”

Obviously there’s a lot more than the above at play. There’s of human emotions, baggage, pettiness, pride etc etc in the mix. But every single person’s got that, too. Being a human is complicated.

But I do think Sam’s dissociative manner of coping is nifty! The neurodivergent scarecrow/brain/head choice is fun to consider in the context of the above, no?

There's this horrible little line of (SPN) Loki's that I really like.

Because I feel like much on SPN stands in opposition to The Road and the Beat Movement's (Chuck-coded) joyful nihilism. Too often the older you get, the more that Beat poets start to read like a frat bro's pseudo ramblings of faux-intellectualism with pretty, pretty words. It's very Chuck, though. And it's this contrast that I do like.

But yeah. Too often, the characters don't even think about helping people. Beat heroes often white-collar college elites, taking their gap years to gallivant on a road that others have built, pretending they're making waves and unveiling profound frontiers. The safety of asphalt looks fancy when you’ve never cut your own trail. They're crying for freedom and rebellion for the sake of freedom and rebellion. Counter-culture for the sake of counter-culture.

(I understand it intellecutally, but I don't much like the Beat movement, okay? Don't ask.)

Anyhoo, Dean Winchester is the opposite of everything The Road stands for if you care. (Two homeless kids who grew up on the road couldn't be more different than gap-year gallivanting, okay?)

In a sense, I take characters like Chuck (And Zachariah', with his trumped-up sketch of a folksy-hippie Endverse!Cas) as trying to force-fit SPN characters into the molds of “Beat” characters, to stamp onto them their romanticized boyhood navel-gazing, their pseudo-philosophies.

And the SPN characters just... don't fit.

And what I like about Loki's line to Gabriel is that it calls this romanticized idea out:

So I can't stand most accents, and SPN has horrible, horrible southern accents that perhaps unfairly grate on my nerves, from robotic cajun attempts to outright Foghorn Leghorn. And tbh, even their NOLA ones have a touch of Kay Ivey, and it's grating to my ears.

I don't really expect any actors to be able to pop these out or to have any real musicality/cadence, but one thing I noticed today while watching on mute...

...none of them move their mouths enough.

Like, no really.

Everything is so tight around the corners of their lips, so tight-jawed.

I think maybe actors should use their eyes, not sure their ears when practicing an accent? Our lips snarl up, our jaws wag. Open your throats.

Like if I talk in my normal accent, but purse my lips and tighten the corners of my mouth, it sounds nearly as terrible as some of their attempts.

Idk, I think I'm onto something.

“Shal. Your Amazon wishlist is full of textbooks and weird nonfiction hardbacks.”

i KNOW. they’re expensive, so buy me one. The Evil creator is $60…i want it.

Honestly ppl can think what they like, but the below is why I think i’m sliding so far into Samwena. It’s SO. FUN.

Also I need to reread sacred executioner by mccabe again as I think about Sam’s reactions to his caste.

Anon, one note for you: YES I agree that Sam’s disordered eating style shows that he wants to be healthy, and nothing’s wrong with being healthy!

But that too intersects with class. Get a major illness and you find out real quick that higher classes seem to get more prestige-driven, state-of-the-art care…

…while mental illness and physical illness are immediately viewed with suspicion, esp if you’re lower class.

“Maybe the problem is you. If you just ate right and exercised like us—you’d be healthy.”

Or worse, “Well, if it’s not you, then what’s your family line look like. Any imbeciles? Should we calculate a consanguinity coefficient? Low score, wow am I surprised! No, it probably has nothing to do with 3M dumping chemicals that pollute the groundwater…

“You got black heritage? Choctaw heritage? Maybe we should give you family counseling to make sure you don’t have kids. And actually would you like to donate your body to research?”

So. Yeah, if Sam struggles with mental health… he might toe the line with the whole Clean Eating (TM) and Exercising for Health rather than Control. It’s a terrible balancing act.

I can’t tell you how many rich folks I’ve met that are blessed with health, and they get a cold or something and take vitamin C for three days only to pat themselves on the back for their Wellness Routine. “Look how great I am! I’m healthy due to hard work!”

They will dead-faced compare their stubbed toe to your arthritis and there’s also my fave:

“Have you tried yOgA?”

What I like about Sam, is he doesn’t seem have a complex about his perceived “femininity.” No matter how much Dean teases him, it never seems to hit. It doesn’t seem to be a sore spot. (“Maybe he thinks you’re compensating, Dean.)

Sam is bothered by not feeling STRONG/powerful, but that seems a little more targeted/nuanced than gender styling/performance. Sam seems to move through the world of “mad men” masculinity with some ease compared to Dean, who even in early seasons is shown to be a bit of a Tryhard.

Sam seems to me to be more bothered by being a “low-caste” “untouchable.” (Aside///In religions studies, sacred executioners were sometimes incredibly shrouded/outcast in old religions, which is fascinating.)

I think too of Uriel’s mud monkeys comments. Ketch and Hess in s12 calling hunters stupid soldiers/DOGS. Rowena’s Rageddy-Anne/FILTH. Her “dirty little body” (because she was poor). He seems very connected to these high-powered ideas of purity/higher class… stuff that swirls with ideas of polluted blood/half-breed.

i just… I personally feel he doesn’t feel the need to compensate so much about gender and sex, and that’s illuminating, especially in the era/culture he’s growing up in. Sam wants to BE strong to be strong, he wants to be elite. He actually seems to want to be perceived/ come off as gentler than he really is. (I.E. his preference for nondescript vehicles…)

I perceive him as wanting to be seen as more high-class, united in theme with ambition-characters like Crowley and Rowena, but not as idealistic in his snootiness as someone like Henry.

So that’s just where I place more weight/analysis. Sam doesn’t hate hunting. In fact, he kinda seems to love it more than other characters do. What he hates if that it puts him in the less posh, respected class.

I think I’ve said this before but lower classes get stuck with terms like dirty/filthy/primitive animals and tye classist charge of sexual deviancy/incest… (hi, zachariah! This backfired with Adam btw, because Zachariah overestimated Adam’s valuation of class and his love for his struggling, single-parent mom. BTW, Adam seems way more aware of things his caretaker-mom gave up to raise him… just way more emotional intelligence.)

///

Anyhoo, the lower classes tend to turn around and hurl insults at the higher classes about effeminate/wussy/soft to combat the fact that the higher classes are technically more successful/masculine/potent. (We see that with Gwen Campbell, when faced with Dean’s cushy life she’s probably actually jealous of.)

These gender-performance barbs ultimately come from a place of weakness, because performing a crass gender stereotype doesn’t cost lower classes as much to perform. You can “other” the higher classes on a budget that way! (Paraphrasing Wally from s12: “Maybe I can’t own a suit like yours, Mick Davies, but you got soft hands, you pussy…”)

BTW: Mick Davies and Sam got along like a house on fire. I doubt Mick’d have gotten on that well with more blue collar peeps like Eileen, Dean, Cas*, Mary…

Of note, the demons in the show also trade in innuendo… because they’re coming from a low place trying desperately to punch up at figures that aren’t even very moved by the insults (we see this when Crowley tries to insult Cas or Lucifer).