deadendtracks:

Recently rewatched Hunted, and I think you could write about 20000 words on that confrontation between Sam and Dean, but here’s a relevant excerpt from a longer meta:

John’s parentification of Dean further isolates Dean from Sam by a kind of forced teaming with John, which makes Sam in turn feel isolated from his brother and father, who he perceives as a unit bound by secrets he wasn’t privy to. The results, seen in season two in an extreme form even for their family, drives a wedge between the brothers at a time when they need each other, just as it did during their childhood. Dean’s been unable to properly mourn John’s death because of this secret, the very secret that guaranteed he had no way to share his feelings with Sam even when Sam has encouraged him to do so.

One of the textbook results of parentification can be anger and resentment towards the parentified child from siblings, and I think this scene in 2.10, Hunted, illustrates the whole dynamic well. While I won’t get too far into Sam’s POV here, typically the parentified child is seen by siblings as complicit with the parent. Because the parentified child, especially in cases that involve emotional parentification, have been made privy to the concerns of the parent in ways the other siblings have not, and tend to internalize the POV of the parent before they have a chance to develop their own perspectives, the siblings often see the parentified child as allying with the parent in a way that doesn’t accurately reflect the parentified child’s actual experience. What the siblings (and often the parentified child) aren’t aware of is that the parentified child was never given a choice over this dynamic. The dynamic ruptures the possibility for true alliance between the siblings with one another against the parent. The parentified child is as isolated as the non-parentified siblings, but in a different way. Often anger that should be targeted at the parent is instead directed at the parentified child as the parent-surrogate, because the parent isn’t available and the parentified child serves as the “face” of an authority they don’t actually possess, for dynamics they don’t fully understand or have any control over.

I think we see examples of how John’s parentification of Dean impacted Sam and Dean’s relationship through the series, but this scene in Hunted in particular drives home the no-win situation for the parentified child. Dean’s left with the choice between betraying his father by breaking his promise or betraying his brother by keeping it. And at this point in the series, Dean has just begun questioning his upbringing and has yet to question his Save Sammy role and how it functions. So here we’re confronted by the wider effects of parentification on Sam and Dean, reverberating even after John’s death.