veneredirimmel:

veneredirimmel:

before i write up my notes for the last three episodes of season one, i needed to get this out of my mind. it is amazing how much Sam is coded as the typical toxic masculinity hero right from season one and this rewatch has really focused some of my thoughts on it. his story not just retraces all the steps of the typical toxic masculinity hero, included the fridging of a woman to send him on his quest, but also his fight to be recognized as the hero, his continuous d*ck measurament with john in all their fighting (sorry i know it’s not elegant, but that’s how his fighting with john comes across). and it’s interesting that the moment Sam sees and admits how similar he is to John (in Dead’s Man Blood) he starts defending John’s actions and endorsing John’s plans. once he finds that common ground with John, there is no need to rebel to him anymore and he doesn’t until the end of the season when he sides and trusts Dean that John is possessed (which is an act of faith).

throughout season one, sam’s motivations are about his grief for his dead girlfriend, who still even now remains no more than a burned body that has no personality and something of a propeller for Sam’s ‘hero journey’, his revenge for the demon who killed her, his fears that his demon’s given powers will make him go darkside.

every aspect of Sam’s journey is present already in season one complete with parallel to the other big toxic masculinity hero type of the show, John Winchester. those parallels are not just about the origin of their story, but also about how they fight, how they use arguments and bend facts to win them. Sam’s story develops mostly in the contrast with John, not born of abuse like with Dean (*), but from his need ‘to not be treated as a child’, which is a nice, humorous touch from Krpike who is writing in Sam a character that grows up.

by the end of the season, Sam’s hero journey steeped in toxic masculinity ends with a surprising moment of growth when he rejects the needs for revenge as worth more than anything else: by abandoning  the quest he was set on by the dead girlfriend in the pilot, he overcomes the  toxic masculinity he is exhibiting through out season one. 

personally, i don’t think i have liked Sam more than when he said that killing the demon didn’t come above everything. 

(*) i want to clarify that this doesn’t mean that Sam wasn’t also abused/neglected by John, but that his relationship with John is not about that, it is about his need to affirm his plans and ideas over John’s and by extention over Dean’s who he sees as a John’s substitute until the writers flip that on its head and show how much more similar Sam is to John. Sam doesn’t want to be treated like a child. it *is* a result of that abuse, but it’s differently coded in the season (and it also ties nicely with how Sam has never really said he was abused, as opposed to Dean who knows he was, who knows they both were).

#sam’s tropes do not subvert gender the way dean’s do#and it’s so bizarre to me when sam is thought of as someone who doesn’t even display signs of toxic masculinity because he is a soft™ boy#as if that’s even possible lmao pls fandom (via @powerbottomdean)

Is it possible that that’s the subvertion of the trope with Sam. he is presented as the nice soft boy tm, studious, sensitive, emphatetic, but the show vs tell is a completely different thing, included the soft voice tm he displays, the performative emphathy for the victims. Sam behaving like he thinks an emotionally mature person should behave all those arguments he uses to convince himself he is right, he is enlightened, he is better. what he does in the last two episodes of season one really solidifies it for me. especially when he says that Dean dragged him into the hunt for the demon when for the entire season he’d been the one advocating that the hunt for the demon came first, before random people in peril. so yeah, maybe there was a subvertion of tropes, but not in the way so many in fandom think it happened lol.