12×03
Sam: Dean, I
know perfectly how Mom feels, because I’ve been there before myself!
Sam: *is shocked
and surprised when Mary decides to leave*
Dean: *is
sad, but not surprised*12×06
Sam: Mom, I
know perfectly how you feel, because I’ve been there before myself!
Sam: *is
shocked and surprised when Mary doesn’t deny harboring suicidal thoughts*
Dean: *is
not surprised*Besides,
what’s with this “I’ve been there myself” thing that Sam keeps repeating? Doesn’t
he remember that Dean’s been there too? Repeatedly?I’ve noticed this as well. Despite popular opinion, Sam is actually terrible at empathizing (I think possibly because he has a low EQ altogether). In order to cover for this Sam projects. He almost always says the same thing “I get it because this is just like me!” And then proceeds to angst over how HE feels about his own situation (even if their situation doesn’t really match). Either trying to prove something HE needs to believe, or make sure they end up the way HE wants to be.
{I’ve also noticed this in the way he fails to connect with most anyone unless he does this. He often remains aloof from people that he can’t easily project a vision of himself onto. Or he piggybacks off of Dean’s connection to them (For example, Jo, Cass, Garth, Charlie). }
The other person as a separate entity is rarely considered (think Matt from Bugs, Max from Nightmare. Ava or even Madison, most any person Sam tries to with). He has no real concept of their feelings or needs (and doesn’t seem concerned about genuinely finding out).
So yes, Sam is surprised, because he hasn’t truly considered how Mary REALLY feels and what that means. He’s thinking about how HE feels, which is a far less equivalency than he assumes. Similarly, no Sam hasn’t considered that Dean has been there, too. Sam has trouble seeing past his own nose, even when he’s trying to do so.
He did the same thing in 12.04 with stigmata!girl and in 12.05 with Hitler!girl.
He only “connected” because he supposedly shared a similar experience.
This is some interesting food for thought. I am usually very Dean-focused in my analyses of the show so I often end up overlooking Sam, but Sam is a really complex and fascinating character, too…
In my ever-unwritten meta about how the show parallels Sam’s relationship with the supernatural to Dean’s relationship with sexuality throughout the course of the entire story, it’s interesting to notice that Sam connects to people who have experienced something supernatural within themselves in some way, that feel tainted (Magda thought her powers made her evil, Ellie was freaked out by sharing Hitler’s blood, and so on), or who share experiences with family similar to his (as you mentioned, the kid from Bugs, and so on – look at Amy Pond, he made that thing so personal because he had projected himself on her). Dean, on the other hand, connects easily with women and queer men, or at least men who don’t conform to societal ideals of masculinity.
I wouldn’t be so harsh on judging Sam, because in general interpersonal interactions are based on mirror mechanisms; when you look at the other, you see the other as a mirror of yourself, there’s a whole mechanism of projecting and identifying in the other that people more well-versed than me in the topic can explain better than me. So we, in general, “use” the other person as a mirror, so to speak. A (meaningful) interpersonal interaction can be formed when we see ourselves in the other, in some way; that doesn’t necessarily mean that we don’t see the other as their own person. But yes, Sam does seem to have difficulties empathizing but he rather projects his experience on the other person and empathizes with that, so to speak – that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person, we’re talking emotional cognition (if that’s the word, I hope you get what I’m trying to say), not ethics.
At the end of the day Dean has higher interpersonal skills than Sam… and intrapersonal skills too, despite popular opinion. The fandom tends to see Dean as the one who represses all emotions and is clueless about everything emotional, while Sam is seen as the one who is all into talking feelings and stuff. But – at least this is how I see it – Dean has a high emotional intelligence. I find that this is Dean’s tragedy – he knows, he understands, but he doesn’t allow himself to. So he pretends he doesn’t know or understand. It’s meaningful that after all the time and experiences they’ve shared together, Sam has still big blanks in the understanding of this brother. This season’s theme seems to be ‘filling blanks’, so maybe we’re going to see a development here.
This is why I firmly believe that Soulless!Sam was realio, trulio SAM, just without most of his filters.
Because he was REALLY GOOD at faking the soul. Not perfect; I knew from about 6.02 that there was something really WRONG, but Dean didn’t see a lot of what the audience did, and it took him a lot longer to twig.
Oh, Soulless Sam is sooo interesting! Without his soul, Sam was extremely rational. He figured out that he wasn’t supposed to be like that; he figured out that he was supposed to act different; and he used the memories of his past to build up an act that would fool people into thinking he was still the same. He didn’t know he was missing his soul specifically, but he was aware that something had happened when he got out of hell that had made him different. And he figured out that it was best to pretend he was still the same. It was a rational decision – he could have gone to Bobby or Dean himself and explain the situation (“alright so I remember feeling things that I don’t feel right now, I believe something has happened that has changed me”) instead he evaluated pros and cons and deduced it was best to pretend he was feeling those things still. And he had to be clever in using memories of behaving in a way that he didn’t understand to figure out how to act to pretend he was the same. Of course Dean doesn’t really take extremely long to start being suspicious, by the time of the vampire accident he is convinced that something is wrong with Sam.
I’m babbling but yeah, I agree. If we consider Demon Dean a kind of “soulless Dean” it’s interesting to see the difference between them. Dean doesn’t want the cure just like Sam didn’t want his soul to be restored; neither of them wanted to go back to being the person they used to be. But Dean was still extremely emotional. And in that very period, Sam, while having his soul alright, acts with rationality over emotionality, something that even Dean as a demon deplores.
Ah, soulless Sam and demon Dean are extremely fascinating topics. Both of them are still them, just with some things removed, so to speak.
This is a truly fascinating discussion, and what it reveals about Sam is quite possibly the very reason why we sometimes feel like we don’t know Sam at all. Because he’s not open about himself, and he doesn’t connect to people and those people he connects with, he sees as mirrors of himself, so we learn nothing new about him.
I think maybe part of why Sam acts this way is because of the ‘teenager’ coding he’s still dragging after himself? After all, this difficulty in truly perceiving other people as separate from yourself and this conviction that, for good or for bad, your own problems and your own self are somehow the centre of the known universe is quite typical for younger characters (and a recognized psychological phenomenon IRL, too).
This is really interesting meta. It’s so different from how I see Sam. I’m definitely not saying any of it is wrong though- well-written characters can often support multiple interpretations- just that it’s a very different perspective from my own, and that makes it fascinating to me.
@awed-frog said– we sometimes feel like we don’t know Sam at all.
I remember the meta where you were talking about how we don’t even know what music Sam likes or what he studied in college (that was your meta, right? my memory is trash, so I could be misremembering.) That seems striking to me too. I wonder, pretending for a moment that Sam is a supporting character, rather than a protagonist, does that happen a lot on TV, or no? (I watch virtually no TV except SPN, so I don’t know) Would a generic protagonist’s love interest or close family relation usually have a well-developed set of known tastes and interests outside of the relationship with the protagonist? Because I always kinda assumed a big part of the reason Sam doesn’t get a lot of that is because the writers’ don’t actually treat him as a protagonist, even though he putatively is one.
But it could also be done (partly or totally) on purpose, because Sam (imo) lives very internally and is private with his actual self. So like, Dean has the bro-dude facade that he displays, and then barely covered by that veneer is another layer that he is actually (imo) quite forthcoming in allowing people access to. But I see Sam as using his much more robust facade to actually, seriously hide himself. Dean wants you to see through to the real him; Sam doesn’t. Or at least that’s how they strike me. So the lack of external cues to Sam’s character could maybe be related to that too.
Despite that though, I feel like I know Sam so well in terms of character, that he’s so transparent to me, that it’s almost embarrassing. And I have to admit that it’s largely for the reason you guys are talking about as a character trait of his- that I feel like I know him because he’s like me.
And so I’m wondering (if anybody wants to answer), do y’all feel like you are more like Dean or more like Sam? ‘Cause I’m throwing around a hypothesis that the thing that makes one or the other of them seem easier to read is how personally relatable they are? I like both Dean and Sam very much, and parts of each of them remind me of myself. But of the two, Sam reminds me of myself in ways that are I guess closer to my core personality traits? And he’s also my favorite. And I wonder if that’s a coincidence, or just my massively shitty boundaries, lol, or if it’s a pattern.
(More under the cut. Because so very long. *is terminally unable to shut up*.)
I think one of the things SPN has been reasonably good at over several seasons and showrunners is showing the gradual affect of years of isolation and trauma on both character’s ability to connect with others.
At the beginning of the series Dean picked up more women, got more phone numbers, enjoyed the company of others more. By 12.06 he is pretty uncomfortable at a house full of people drinking and having a good time. When he realizes that every time someone says ‘wendigo’ they all drink, he says uncomfortably that he doesn’t know the rules. I miss the Dean that would have raised a bottle and shouted, ‘Wendigo!’
Sam is not a party guy but he had a circle of good friends at Stanford. Unlike Dean who never left the life (except for the year with Lisa) Sam did form close friendships with people in college as we saw in Skin. Sam’s isolation before (Imaginary Friends) and after (Charlie, Garth, etc) seems to reflect his feelings of shame and his way of forming relationships (more slowly than Dean) than an inability to recognize other’s feelings.
Sam is surprised by Mary’s suicidal feelings but Dean I haven’t seen a clear indication whether Dean separates his own fear of abandonment from an understanding of Mary’s sense of estrangement. There are a lot of in canon moments that indicate he is caught by surprise by the idea that Mary has any feelings of estrangement–which does not indicate empathy.
I think they’re both so traumatized they function amazingly well but they both have these huge blind spots.
I really don’t think we can blame the supposed lack of empathy on Sam’s personality considering he has untreated PTSD. As does Dean and Cas. So it really seems unfair to judge them by the same compass as mentally healthy people.
Unfortunately, Sam has shown lack of empathy since season 1, long before he had any experience that could count as cause for PTSD. Also, narratively speaking, he doesn’t have PTSD as the series constantly gives him miracle cures for anything that could create consequences. He himself has said that he doesn’t remember hell, that he doesn’t feel guilty for what he did in seasons 1-5, that he was cleansed from all that happened before season 8, and so on.
So he IS mentally healthy according to the series, and that is why people judge him as such. (Also, no matter how many people said that the season 8 snafu of not looking for Dean was due to PTSD, the showrunners and Jared said it was “the mature thing to do” and that he was sound of mind. So no, no excusing his lack of empathy there either)
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