conindiundrum

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mutuals this is us

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I’m going to say it. There are plenty of examples of Dean disregarding Sam’s autonomy to save him and that’s not fair but it is what it is. Unless your name is Sam Winchester you don’t get to hold it against him. We can of course acknowledge that it happens and bring it up in conversations about why Sam does the things he does but that’s a different thing.

However, having death put his souls back in his body is not one of those moments. Sam is the soul. The one in hell getting torn to shreds. SoullessSam is a body and while, yes, he has Sam’s memories, he doesn’t have any of the feelings, traumas, and emotions that came with them the first time.

Now pray tell, what exactly was Dean supposed to do?? Leave his baby brother in hell forever?

Yes they run the risk of the wall breaking but you’re telling me that’s worse than remembering all of it for all eternity while it’s still happening??? For real???

If Sam’s hug when he wakes up is anything to go by, or the entirety of the show after that point is anything to go by, Sam wanted out of hell and with his brother. End of story.

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There is something so soft™ about Sam's morning routine has him up earlier and able to make breakfast for him and Dean

I keep thinking about other days, like a post-hunt morning where Dean sleeps in, sore because getting thrown into walls is harder to handle than when he was in his 20s, and Sam brings him coffee and they sit on his bed watching morning cartoons

Where they both wake up at the same time because Miracle needs to go for a walk, and Dean pulls on a sweatshirt still in his pajamas and goes with Sam around the bunker

Or where Dean wakes up first because Sam the huge nerd stayed up half the night researching, and makes extra strong coffee and some extra pieces of Sam's veggie bacon for him

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hey this is your friendly reminder (or perhaps not so friendly reminder) to credit artists

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don't trust people who hate sam winchester.

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Sam loves Dean as much as Dean loves Sam: a meta

Much as I love reading good meta, I don’t often write meta. Thus please accept my apologies if this is mediocre, and let me start with a simple topic sentence:

Sam loves Dean as much as Dean loves Sam.

A little longer, now: Sam is even better at loving Dean than Dean is at loving Sam because of Dean’s profound and abiding love for Sam.

Confusing, right? But not really.

We all know how Dean lives and breathes SammySammySammywatchoutforSammy. It’s his defining mission, his ultimate purpose, or, as a therapist might say, his “core belief.” But sometimes I think that we allow adult!Dean too little autonomy. We assume that he can’t help himself: he’s locked into this single-minded focus, on loving and protecting the only family he has left.

That sells Dean short. (Hang in there, I promise I’ll get to Sam in a moment.)

Even people who have been forced into a certain way of life have choices. Even people who have been told who they are all their life have choices. Dean tells us, in Season 14, I’m good with who I am–and I, for one, believe him. Whether we follow canon all the way to 15x17, when Dean is finally brought back from the edge of his desire for revenge against Chuck by his love for Sam (the only thing that’s “real”), or whether we keep to season 1 when Dean said–that’s all we have…that’s all I have… and I want us to be a family again and as long as I’m around, nothing bad is gonna happen to you–Dean has always accepted his role as Sam’s big brother. Dean’s life is unabashedly Sam-centric. He’d change a lot of things, but in the end he’d change nothing, because he wouldn’t change that. 

Some fans get very het up about the codependent aspect of this. Others (in my opinion, rightly) defend it. There’s scads of meta on why the Winchester dynamic IS necessary for their mythic role in the narrative, and their human role in the narrative (more importantly), so I won’t write that meta now. All I’m saying is what I think you already know: Dean lives for Sam, his baby brother, and despite the grief, the growing pains, the occasional cruelty of desperate love, Dean said it all when he told Sam (and us), Don’t you ever think that there is anything, past or present that I would put in front of you.

So where does that leave Sam, and his love for Dean? Let’s start with that line I just quoted. Building on the above, Dean’s goal in life is to give Sam a life. He wants Sam to be happy. He wants him to be free. He also wants to keep him by his side forever, to control him for safety and comfort’s sake, and sometimes those instincts of a frightened-child-turned-traumatized-man win out. Dean isn’t perfect. Dean’s full of contradictions. But time and again he goes back to stone number one: what he can do for Sam. What he can offer Sam, by being the grunt, by standing in harm’s way. 

When we begin the story, Sam has succeeded in the path Dean helped carve for him. I’m not taking all the credit from Sam here, and giving it Dean: merely pointing out that Dean stepped into traditional parental roles and helped send Sam into adulthood, even though that meant Sam leaving him. We know that the night Sam left for Stanford was one of the worst of Dean’s life, but even in mid-season 1, Dean tells Sam he’s proud of him. You always know what you want. You stand up to Dad. Hell, sometimes I wish I–

(this, of course, is beautifully echoed in the series finale itself)

Dean is telling Sam what so many parents tell their children: you have gone places I never could, accomplished goals I never could, grown in grace and understanding like I never could. At least, I like to think that’s what the best parents tell their children.

To Dean, Sam is always the one with more hope. More wholeness. More options. To Sam, Dean is stone number one. 

You asked how Sam loves Dean, and my answer is: just look. Look at how Sam goes out into the world young, stands up to their father, makes his own decisions, fights back against Dean’s own nihilistic narrative through their primary losses and setbacks. Dean gave Sam the safety to build a better worldview than Dean himself has, and Sam turns that right back around and tries to give it to Dean. 

What do you think my job is? You’re my big brother–there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. 

I can’t lose you.

You’re not a grunt, Dean, you’re a genius.

This is my life. I love it. But I can’t do it without my brother. I don’t want to do it without my brother.

I am going to save my brother. And then I’m going to kill you dead.

If you ever need to talk about anything with anybody, you got somebody right here next to you.

I believe in us.

This is just a small collection of Sam quotes showing his love for Dean. A small collection showing the persistent theme of Sam’s persistence. He knows that pushing chick-flick moments and emotional conversations can get jokes for a dime a dozen, and even the occasional punch thrown his way. He keeps at it anyway. When Sam knows Dean’s hurting, he wants to help. He’d do anything to help. He won’t sit around and see his brother turn into an embittered killer (season 2), go to hell for saving his life (season 3), take on the Trials (season 8), be irrevocably corrupted by the Mark of Cain (seasons 9-10), let him despair (seasons 11 and 13), let him sacrifice himself to an archangel’s grave (season 14), or let him lose his goodness to the whims of a vicious god (season 15). Sam fights for Dean with full use of his considerable gifts–intelligence, rationality, resourcefulness, and yes, the occasional blind rage. Sam looks to Dean, first as a leader, then as a judge, and finally as an equal. Sam has been looking up to Dean since he was four, yes, but over the course of the show he comes to look at Dean. With love, peace, understanding, humor, pain…whatever their inimitable connection requires.

The quotes I noted above also reveal Sam’s own conflicts rear up. Sam and Dean (again, in my opinion) are equally developed characters. Both have flaws and inconsistencies. Both have struggles inherent to their personalities and upbringings, distinct from those imposed on them by supernatural forces. 

Sam had a glimpse of a different life, once. He had the smarts, he had the drive, he had the sheer stubbornness to live a different life than John or Azazel or hell, even Lucifer had planned for him. But also in Sam–innate in Sam–is his core of goodness and compassion and the principle of doing right, which leads him back into the life and to soul-crushing sacrifice again and again.

Sam breaks and is broken. Sam suffers and ages and spends more time in hell than even Dean, who went to protect him.

But what keeps Sam going? Dean. Dean can’t live without Sam. We know that. The flip side is that Sam doesn’t want to live without Dean. Importantly, I think, he has more choice in the matter. Dean focused his whole childhood identity on giving Sam a life that meant he had choices, even if Dean didn’t know he was doing that. Sam can move through more crowds, more roles, more relationships. He has a better education, he has a more powerful ability to intellectually reason and detach. He would have made a great lawyer. Yet he casts all this aside out of sheer willpower, choosing instead to love Dean and live with Dean through the chaos of their lives, and to go near mad when Dean is gone. Consider Sam in season 4, Sam in season 10…Sam in season 8 trying to atone for the very choice that Dean (the best part of Dean) wanted him to make, even if the real muddle of Dean’s psyche couldn’t forgive him, for a time, for making it.

All of this leads us to the finale. 

You said you wish Sam had said I love you back to Dean in the finale. I argue that he did. He made his love perfectly clear to Dean in that moment by holding his hand, by looking in his eyes. He said, you can go now, when all he wanted was for Dean to stay. 

The best part of Dean wanted Sam to have happiness and freedom. At the end of his life, Dean was finally able to communicate that without fear or reservation. 

But the bittersweet brilliance of that moment is that Sam–the Stanford boy who went to hell and back, who saved the world, brought down one god and raised another–no longer wanted any kind of happiness or freedom that didn’t include the one person who’d been by his side all along. Dean was giving his blessing for a path that didn’t beckon Sam anymore. And yet: Sam said yes to it out of the love for Dean. Sam went out of that barn, out of the bunker, out of that day and that year and that decade and into the next and the next, out of love for Dean. Sam loved Dean by living. He loved Dean by raising another Winchester. He loved Dean by holding all their contradictions, flaws, and heroisms in his heart (in their car), until he’d done what he set out to do many times over. 

Then he met Dean on a mended bridge, dressed in old clothes that said: I was happiest at the beginning. I was happiest when we could be brothers again. I took my time getting here anyway, because I know that was what you wanted. I took my time so that we could be happiest now.

If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.

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saw this video of a little boy running to his grandma, his little legs started going really fast before he even hit the ground and I am choosing to believe that is little Sam running to Dean after school gets out and Dean sat in class all day just thinkin about Sammy

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Guess I’m making this now???

I have this idea for a fic I probably won’t write but anyway, Sam’s been at college for a month and Dean shows up, moves into his tiny apartment with him because of some argument he had with John. He wont talk about it with Sam which is frustrating, on top of that Dean starts talking about leaving hunting behind forever in a sort of wistful way, and that freaks him out even more. They have chaotic arguments and work things out and address Dean siding with John that night because I like to hurt. It would essentially be the boys taking on hunts while Sam goes to school and they heal a lot until I ignite it all in flames and ruin their peace

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I walk with my arms folded behind my back like a movie villain. Alas the derpy, frog like quality of my expression sells me out for that which I truly am, some form of undiagnosed.

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y’all ever read a fanfic that you cannot believe an author just wrote for free?? what an honor it is to read a piece of someone’s soul they shared out of nothing but love for a piece of media. what a privilege it is to be allowed their talent because you share an interest!!

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I made this for the community

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might start posting these memes like i do on TikTok 🧐 gotta be more active on here fr

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Wonderful things happening in the tags here

I can’t believe I have to say this but if you ship wincest please for the love of all that is holy unfollow me STAT

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I don’t understand people who try to assign blame for the falling out Sam and Dean had over college. First of all both of them were babies. Secondly, John caused and instigated all of that. Third, why the hell does one of them have to be in the wrong?? I don’t get it.

Sam wanted out, he wanted a different life, and that’s okay. It’s also okay that Dean was hurt by that, that he didn’t understand Sam was getting away from John and his own internal conflict and not him. On deans end he doesn’t think he’s worth much without being a hunter. Sam knows different but that doesn’t mean Dean would listen. (They’d also never talk about it, the idjits.) Sam thought Dean being on their dad’s side in all of this means he feels the same. Stay here or don’t ever come back. That is absolutely not what Dean thought.

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Scammers on this app are too damn comfortable. Like why the hell do they wanna make you do all the work what is this?

“Inbox me directly if you’re available for commission.”

YOU INBOX ME YOU LAZY FUCK

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음..

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This right here 👆

Sam didn’t choose Ruby over Dean he chose death over living in a world where Dean hated him.

Dean was supposed to think Sam chose Ruby over him because that’s central to their conflict in season five. Dean believes this because he has incomplete information.

Dean doesn’t know about the voicemail.

Dean doesn’t know Sam thought he would die killing Lilith.

Dean didn’t understand that Sam thinking he was weak wasn’t derogatory but rather the fear that his love for Sam would get him killed again.

None of this is to say Sam was completely altruistic but when the hell is anyone ever?

The show did take some measures to make us believe Sam was going down a truly dark path but you’re not actually supposed to think that at the end. Kripke even joked about it through Chuck; “I thought it would make you unsympathetic.”

In short, stop being mean to my baby Sam.