ratherastory | Scheduling woes, and pseudo-meta

[insert gnashing of teeth, pulling of hair, rending of clothes]

I stupidly agreed to a shift change, and now I'm going to MISS SUPERNATURAL!

WOE!

I am The Stupid.

Well, maybe if work is quiet they'll let me watch it then (I'm a dispatcher, we can keep the TV on if the lines aren't busy). If worse comes to worst, I'll just have to wait until I can download it at home. But still. Woe!

I have a meta post rattling around in my head about why Sam Winchester hasn't been given a fair shake as a character in the four and a half seasons of SPN that I've seen. See, while I love Dean with much love, part of me wants to love Sam more, because Sam is... well, Sam is me. Sam is the person that we could all become if we're not careful: utterly human and flawed and given to despair. Dean is the hero of the piece, the guy who takes the fall for his brother. Dean is the messiah figure, the one who bleeds (so prettily!) for the sins of mankind.

The problem is that unlike Dean, Sam has never properly been explored as a character: he's a plot device, poor bunny. Ever notice how we never EVER focus on his backstory? We get a lot about Dean, about his relationship with his father, and even with his mother. All the Dean-focused episodes are about fleshing out his character. All the Sam-focused episodes end up being about the plot.

The audience doesn't know Sam Winchester. Not as a human being. We don't know what he was like as a child, other than kind of sulky and spoiled (with the one exception of "After School Special," in which he doesn't come off all that well, if you ask me). We don't know what his life was like at Stanford: the only glimpse we get of that past life is a Dean-centric episode ("Skin"). We have no idea how he treated his girlfriend (Was he romantic? Distant? Clingy? Possessive?), or what, if anything, he talked about with his friends.

Sam's emotions have always been either a result of the plot or a way to propel the plot forward. Sam's grief and rage made him leave the safety of Stanford in the pilot. His guilt over Jess' death keeps him going during the first season. In the second season it's his grief/rage/guilt over his father's death. Third verse, same as the first for the third season, with an added sprinkling of desperation to try and break Dean's deal. Need I even bring up fourth season? And the fifth season too, obviously.

There's a reason Dean doesn't recognize his brother right away in 5.12: no one really knows who Sam Winchester is. There is no baseline for us to figure out if he's acting out of character. We ALL know that Dean isn't acting like the Dean we knew from the first season. He's hurting and frightened and desperate, and we know this because we had a baseline against which to compare him. Not so with Sam, whose inner life has been kept a mystery from the very start. Sam, whose brain is constantly filled with visions and doubt and second-guesses and who constantly gets jerked around and manipulated by everyone with whom he comes into contact (even Dean, and especially Dean).

Anyway, this post isn't meant to be that meta post. Part of me wants to sit down and write this out as a proper essay. Why Sam Winchester isn't a hero and why he ought to be. I haven't written a proper essay in a very long time. It would be an interesting exercise.

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That's just it. We know just enough about Sam to have a vested interest in what happens to him, but that's about it. Sam makes me really, really angry, especially in Season 4. Ever notice how we're never given insight into why he makes his choices?

There's a lot of tell-and-don't-show when it comes to Sam: he tries to explain himself (and it always backfires because he doesn't understand it himself, so how could he explain it?), but we're never shown how he feels. With Dean it's just the opposite: he wears his heart on his sleeve even when he doesn't talk, so we can tell he's hurting.

We have yet to find out WHY Sam said "yes" in that terrible alternate future. It's a huge deal: what could POSSIBLY make Sam say yes to the DEVIL? But he did. Are we supposed to guess? Are we supposed to think it doesn't matter because now it'll never happen?

That "yes" is possibly the single worst word in the history of the show, and it was never uttered on screen. I want to know why Sam agreed, and I'm not sure we'll ever get our answer.

But you're going to write the five years that never happened, right? So YOU'LL tell us what happened while giving us awesome and previously unknown insight into Sam and his life. RIGHT?

That's the plan, yes. ;)

Yes! *pumps fist in joy*

Thanks for sharing! Completely agree with the emotional focus of the show being more often on Dean than on Sam (how could anyone argue against that) and the part about Sam's reactions and how they're almost always presented as means for further advancing the plot - I've never thought about it like that, but now that you point it out, it's an interesting observation. Question about this particular comment I am replying to, though... Do you personally feel it was hard to understand or guess Sam's motivations/inner life in Season 4 or was that part of your argument in support of the case that the writers have made it very difficult for the audience in general to sympathise with Sam in Season 4?

(It would be interesting to hear the opinion anyone else has on this as well, actually. Personally, I don't really recall this sense of "why are you doing this, Sam?" a lot of people seemed to be experiencing during Season 4. Where I'm getting with this is that while I agree Sam's character hasn't been given the same kind of emotional backstory Dean's character has, I personally felt our lack of knowledge about Sam's certain emotional dimensions wasn't an obstacle in understanding him or his emotions in Season 4.

And just for the record, I'm bi-bro, as well. No blind character defending :)

Pretty much. It's not hard to understand, but I feel very strongly that we weren't given an opportunity to empathize with Sam, which is very important in my world. I can easily empathize with Dean, and I'd like to be able to do so with Sam without having to work as hard for it.

Sam so often seems to come across as a spoiled, petulant brat whose demands are completely unreasonable, which is patently not true. He's not the same person as Dean, his wants and needs are different, and I really wish that someone on that show would validate him for once, rather than having Dean be the favoured brother all the time (ever notice how Sam is always the black sheep, no matter who they talk to? Ellen, Bobby, Pamela, Jo... all of them).

we weren't given an opportunity to empathize with Sam,

That is an issue, I agree. It isn't even that difficult to empathise with Sam, if we relate to him through our personal experiences of having screwed up (like you said in the beginning, Sam is much more "us" than Dean is), but a lot of that understanding for him comes from interpretation rather than direct evidence.

A little of column A and a little of column B. Objectively I was able to understand that Sam's motivations were clear: he was devastated at losing his brother (and more importantly, being unable to be the one to save him when he was the direct cause of his death and subsequent damnation), and sought to regain some measure of control in his life. That left him open to manipulation, and the metaphor of drugs giving one an artificial feeling of power and control was pretty obvious.

That being said, I never ever got that feeling from watching Sam. I never felt that I got a true insight into his emotional state. It felt rather as though I was simply being told that he was alone and desperate and afraid.

I guess the difference lies in the portrayal. Instead of giving us a character-based episode in "I Know What You Did Last Summer," which would have been perfect to show us Sam alone and afraid and desperate, we instead got an episode that was All About Plot. What little there was about Sam's emotional state got hijacked by OMG-you-slept-with-Ruby, and the rest was All About Anna.

There was a throwaway scene of Sam getting wasted, once (and again, it got taken over by Ruby and her exposition about her time with Lilith). There was nothing to show just how terrible it must have been for him, nothing to show how close to the edge of self-destruction he really must have been.

In short, it wasn't hard to guess at Sam's motivations, but I really would have liked to feel it viscerally, the way the Show provides ample opportunities with Dean.

Heh. "When Sam falls in the forest, does he still say ow when the plot is not around to hear him?" (I'll be here all week :p) Your arguments have me half-convinced now Sam only ever comes to life when in close proximity to the plot, like a motion-activated mechanical doll. But yeah, I get what you mean - rationally, it's not difficult to understand Sam's motivations, but in contrast to Dean's openness, it's pretty easy to feel emotionally distanced to him.

Scheduling woes, and pseudo-meta

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