The Dymanics of Dean, Cas, Sam and Jack and why it doesn’t work for me.
There was so much over the top melodrama it made soap opera writers cringe. Nothing felt organic or connected to what Team Free Will’s relationship with Jack is really like.
I can buy they care about Jack, but why out of no where do they see him as a son? I could buy Cas, maybe and or Sam and Dean seeing Jack as a little brother but “son” just feels so far out of left field. None of them really had that close a relationship with Jack.
Sam- I know the show likes to pretend it didn’t happen, but I have a pretty good memory and I remember Sam using Jack for his own purposes. He wanted to save Mary. Him initally helping, Jack wasn’t for Jack’s sake. He had an agenda. He apologized and maybe he started to actually care about Jack, but then we had an ep Jack wasn’t even in and the very next Jack took off because he killed the security guard. They had just caught up with him when he got trapped into the AU. This is when Sam started to get depressed last season and decided that everything was hopeless. Dean had to put aside his own feelings of depression to push Sam through this period. So its not like Sam was super duper gung ho to get to the AU to rescue Jack. When they finally did get to the AU he was killed. Jack was happy to see him, but its not like they really had meaningful interactions. Jack spent most of his time with Lucifer. Then this season Sam was away from the bunker most of the time, and when he was there he was too busy being chief and giving homework assignements, montioring body cam footage and check ins. So where and when did Sam actually come to view Jack as a son or really have any kind of meaningful bonding moments.
Cas- Again, the show wants to ignore the darker aspects of Jack that they introduced in s12. Jack brainwashed Cas. He refused to let Kelly make a choice. Cas was dead for the first 5 episodes. His one episode back was spent mostly with Dean. Then he was kidnapped and Jack went to the AU. After Dean was taken by Michael, Cas’s time was spent searching for Dean. I can see Cas being protective becasue of the promise he made Kelly, but until the show address the brain washing, its hard to know if Cas did that of his own free will. The show can ignore it all it wants. That doesn’t mean I have too. Cas had one meaningfu moment with Jack, assuring he was still important even without powers.
Dean- He had the most complex relationship with Jack of all. He, at first, saw Jack as a possible threat. And rightfully so because in a well written show that truly was exploring nature/nurture, his darkside should have been acknowledged. He saw Jack as responsbile for his mother and Cas. Is that fair to Jack, no, but grief is messy and Deans’ reaction was realistic for someone in his posistion. After Jack proved himself, Dean admitted he was wrong and apologized to Jack. Then two episodes later, Jack is gone. They catch up with him long enough for Jack to disappear. Dean’s focus in the AU was not letting Lucifer influence Jack. Then he was gone. He came back and spent most of the time in this room. He went on one hunt with Jack, then took him out for a bit to help him live. That could be a basis but over night?
Jack- His early relationship with both Sam and Dean was antagonstic. Sam was manipulative, and Dean was out right hostile and Cas was MIA. Things started to improve when Jack took off and then he got stuck in the AU. When he came back, other Sam and Dean really didnt’ have time for him, and in the one scene with Cas, he coldily declared, Dean doesn’t matter and didnt’ want to even attempt to save Dean. So where and when did he come to see any of Jack, Sam or Cas as his dads?
Sam and Dean have only ever been willing to make deals to bring back each other. Not Cas, not Mary, not John, not Bobby, not Charlie, not Ellen, not Jo, not Kevin, not Eileen or anyone they cared about. What makes Jack so special? No member of team free will had any real close relationship with Jack if we go by what’s been show on screen rathan then the tell. So why is Sam saying that not trying is like losing Jack all over again. They never tried to bring back any other member of their family?
Jack is a walking, talking definition of a Mary Sue.
All of this SO. MUCH!
Even though it seems like majority of the fandom is eating out of Jack’s hand, there is a part of the fandom that doesn’t care about him and then the part that outright doesn’t like him. For some reason Dabb (& co) can’t accept that. But they are not able to write an interesting new character, so what they do instead is they try to manipulate us in to liking Jack. So no matter who of the TFW is your favourite, now you “have to” like Jack, because your fave is his “daddy”. What they don’t seem to realise is that they’re making it WORSE! For all the reasons you mention, there is no reason for us to think of Jack as their son, so it all FEELS exactly like what it is, manipulation.
Let’s all take a moment and thank biology that our internal organs don’t itch.
Fun fact: digestion is actually really painful but your brain just tells you it’s fine the same way it tells you not to bite off your fingure even though you can
that’s… frustrating
Hey quick question why the FUCK doesn’t it do that for menstrual cramps
you have a brain, you are capable of critical thinking, you can sift through the material and keep what is edifying for you and discard what isn’t
flaws don’t necessarily make material worthless
all right i queued this last night because i was already posting a lot and didn’t want to flood anyone’s dash but you guys i need to talk about this more.
like, okay. i grew up REALLY STRICT christian. like. every piece of media i consumed underwent a fine-toothed comb by my parents to be sure there wasn’t anything “sinful” in it. I got into a tearful, screaming fight with my mother over whether I was allowed to watch a piece of educational children’s material on PBS because one of the characters said “damn” once.
(I’m still not sure they did. In retrospect, I think my purity-focused mother misheard something and, having her suspicions confirmed that you couldn’t trust any “secular” source not to be sinful, reacted accordingly.)
(Pay attention, that parenthetical was also relevant.)
Do you know what my teenage rebellion was? Listening to the oldies station in the car when I had my driver’s license and could go places on my own. That was my big fuck-you to my parents: listening to the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel and the Fifth Dimension when they couldn’t tell me how I shouldn’t be listening to them because the creators of that music were drug-addled, free-loving atheists whose own disregard for God and religion might just infect my impressionable spirit. Like I was gonna listen to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and go do LSD and become an atheist. This was my teenage rebellion in the year 1999.
I’m 35 now. And all right so I became agnostic. But I didn’t become a drug addicted prostitute because I loved listening to psychedelic rock music as a teenager. (And you know what? Even if I had become a drug addicted prostitute, I’d still have worth as a human being, so dissect that one.) And it wasn’t even the psychedelic rock music that turned me agnostic: It was Christianity itself. But that’s another story altogether.
My point here is: Y’all are on here acting like my goddamn parents, “don’t watch this” and “don’t listen to that” because this character does XYZ problematic thing and this author said ABC ignorant thing two years ago at a con when they were put on the spot in an interview. If you watch this movie where a teenager falls in love with someone five years older than them, you’re going to become a pedophile! If you read this book by an author who once used an outdated term for someone in the trans community, then you’re a transphobe!
Y’all need to sit the fuck down and stop acting like nobody ever taught you to think for yourself, because I know damn well that you’re capable of critical thought and you don’t need your media chewed up and spit into your mouth like a baby bird. And I’m an adult and I sure the hell don’t, so stop telling me I’m going to choke because I’m consuming something complicated, complex, and not already pre-morally-dissected for me.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
And also like,, the yearning for purity is so much more harmful than all the stuff it tries to “protect” you from. I fell into a purity trap just over a year ago (this was when the stuff with JKR and cmbyn was kicking off) and became convinced that the reason I’d had a mental breakdown was because I was consuming “bad” or “evil” media. So I had a clear out, and among the things I threw out were:
BBC Sherlock box set
All my Harry Potter books (painstakingly collected from charity shops and second-hand booksales over five years)
The Casual Vacancy, also by JKR
Roman Polanski’s Macbeth
Supernatural box sets up to S7, again collected over a few years from our local second hand Video and Game shop.
And various other books/DVDs/albums that had negative associations. Like, I even chucked out half of my U2 collection bc someone said that Bono was problematic. (in retrospect, I don’t even know why Bono is meant to be problematic and like… Idgaf. I like the Edge’s guitar and backup vocals and the lyrics, they make me happy so whatever).
So then I was miserable. Absolutely, down-in-the-dumps kind of miserable because I’d let what other people believed make me feel guilty for enjoying stuff. As if the media I enjoyed reflected on my worth as a person. As if I was incapable of forming my own opinions. As if anyone in my immediate life actually cared whether or not I watched Mel Gibson run around waggling a sword as Hamlet. So much that made me happy got cleansed out of my life for literally,,, no gain. It achieved nothing. It didn’t stop the bad things, it didn’t make me a better person and it definitely didn’t improve my experience of life. If anything, bending to purity culture made everything worse.
Because that’s the point: without seeing the gritty, hard problems that are a part of life, we don’t actually learn to use the brains in our heads. We just,, stagnate. And it sucks, it’s miserable, it doesn’t make the world better. Mistakes and problems lead to growth—as a society, as people—but purity results in a stifling, controlling atmosphere where nobody ever learns or changes. Gods only know a world like that would collapse a lot fuckinh quicker than the mess we’ve got now.
The idea that media must be cleansed and all people must be pure is utter bollocks and if you’re upset by that, get off my blog. Thank.
Reading the second comment gave me an out of body experience
A… polygraph party?… a $99 polygraph machine that you for sure know how to use correctly.. for sure. I’d tell my husband to blame me, collect the $100 and we’d go out on a nice date to celebrate cutting ties with such a horrible woman.
People on Tumblr: Ban and de-platform people I dislike. Ban and de-platform the content I hate. Freedom of Speech doesn’t apply to corporations. I need my safe space. The social media sites should cater to my personal tastes and everyone who doesn’t agree is a Nazi.
Tumblr: Bans all adult content.
People on Tumblr: No. Why did you that? How can you ban things I create and consume. You can’t do this to me. Protect freedom of speech.
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