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:
LOKI: Face it, old friend, you're a joke. You're a failure. You live for pleasure. You stand for nothing. And in the end, that's exactly what you'll die for.