peanutbutterandbananasandwichs - Tumblr blog

[peanutbutterandbananasandwichs]

Tried to do one single thing to my theme and found out it's basically broken now. So we're starting all over again. New theme, new me lol.

On the plus side I've also been forced to redo my tag archives which desperately needing doing and I'll probably take this opportunity to change some of my tags while I'm at it cause might as well go all in at this point.

New theme looks pretty though I think.

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much-deserved caption credit: alphamalesoul on IG

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J2 | DC 2024

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again it is crucial to look at how fandom overall talks abt dean’s abusive treatment of jack vs dean’s abusive treatment of sam in s4-s5 especially. it illuminates a lot of biases.

like the fans largely still make excuses for dean’s treatment of jack, but at the very least they’re capable of acknowledging that jack didn’t deserve to be treated like that. however instead of gritting their teeth and admitting that this was part of a much larger pattern of Dean Behavior that should’ve easily and uncontroversially gotten him labelled as an abusive character years ago, the majority directs their ire at the late-seasons writers and insists that this behavior was completely OOC for dean. maddening as always, especially for those of us who consider his portrayal rare and important for stories like this.

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Supernatural S7E04 Defending Your Life

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sickening (complimentary)

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people ask me "how the hell is [scene from animorphs] in a kid's series" and i cannot emphasize to them enough that animorphs does not forget for a single moment that it is a kid's series

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demon dean and normal dean are so different from eacg other haha

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Hey so this post just came up on my dash and its an interesting perspective for sure. I was wondering if youd feel inclined to share your thoughts on it but no pressure ofc feel free to ignore.

https://www.tumblr.com/zudilio/648738136098275328/the-thing-is-that-i-miss-the-early-seasons?source=share

Yeah, I saw it on my dash too and considered reblogging with comments, but it's three years old and the OP has said in other posts that they're a "Sam ignorer", so I figured they wouldn't be appreciative. Also, to a certain extent, "they should've given the plot points I don't like to the character I don't care about" is just a matter of taste, so there's not a ton to say about that part anyways.

As far as the "Sam is like John because at the start of the show he's driven by anger and his need for revenge" part, my thoughts on it are here, and @ardentpoop and @aliusfrater have excellent meta here as well.

Leaving aside the piece where I think the OP is wrong about Sam though, I do agree with them that Dean's character arc was mismanaged, and I sympathize with them and all the other Dean girls (gn) who got stuck with *waves vaguely at spn in general*. I agree with OP that Dean isn't an inherently angry person. I don't believe inherently angry people exist, but even beyond that, I don't think the intended reading of spn is that Dean's story is about anger. Gamble said at some point very early on that on the inside Dean is a frightened little boy who never had the chance to grow up, and I do think spn carries that thread through the seasons pretty well all the way to s15, where it attempts (with not-great success imo) to resolve it.

Unfortunately, I also think that spn's failure to resolve Dean's character arc satisfactorily was inevitable, and that the things that attract many fans like OP, who identify with Dean, are the same things that made resolving his issues impossible given the set-up. Just as Sam has a realistic case of poorly-controlled, chronic dissociative/classic PTSD (with psychosis during s7 and some CPTSD-like features) and doesn't have the resources to manage it beyond bare-bones survival, Dean has pretty realistic untreated, chronic CPTSD/BPD without the resources to even begin to manage it in a way that doesn't destroy his own life and the lives of the people around him. Dean's violence stems ultimately from his childhood environment, sure, but the person he is by the time we meet him in s1 has severe attachment issues, difficulty regulating his emotions, poor distress tolerance, black and white thinking in a job where black and white thinking results in victimizing people based on factors they have no control over, and most of all, no real concept of boundaries whatsoever. The cause was for sure his childhood, but the present of spn is just a very symptomatic adult. His mental health issues--and Sam's too--are the kinds of chronic illnesses that never go away and that people struggle with over their entire lifespans.

I don't want to be overly negative; many people with mental illnesses this severe do learn to manage them well and live full and happy lives (I am, within reasonable limits, one of them). But it's hard. And longstanding, deeply-rooted patterns of thoughts, beliefs, and behavior don't change without community resources, considerable effort, and for most people, years of trial and error. Spn's main premise is, for some wild reason, that the problems Sam and Dean encounter are metaphorically equivalent to real life problems normal people encounter all the time, but that in the spn world, all of the resources real world people have available to help them are impossible to access, except guns and torture. It's s13 before spn manages to get Sam and Dean into ONE SESSION of therapy with someone they can tell the truth to, and by then, we get this:

Dean is being a lot less unrealistic here than one might think, and yes, this picture will end badly in real life too.

Since the finale, a lot of fans have said things like "Dean deserved to go to therapy and get better" or "spn thinks if you have trauma, you should kill yourself about it", but deserving is fake. We in the real world live in a The Good Place universe. There's no fair calculus for who "deserves" anything. Everyone both deserves health and happiness and love and a comfortable life and also deserves nothing because there are other people who have nothing.

And unlike ours, the spn universe is not a The Good Place universe. It's worse. The writers of spn are and always have been profoundly ungenerous. The whole universe is built on victim-blaming and bullshit calculi of what crimes deserve what punishments and who should or shouldn't mete them out. In the spn universe, Dean is lucky. He had not one, but two BPD favorite persons, and he treated them both like shit, and they still both loved him and wanted to be with him and will be with him in the afterlife, presumably continuing to have the same intense, volatile relationships they've always semi-tolerated.

I like to pretend that maybe Sam, Dean and Cas can all read The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook on Heaven's version of archive.org and take it to heart, or that maybe Sam grew some boundaries in the years he lived without Dean that he can insist on hard enough and long enough for Dean to get a reparative relationship out of, and they can all after-live happily ever after. But the Dean that was alive during the 15 years of spn hadn't done that work yet, and the outcome he got was--if one subscribes to "deserving" as a concept--better than what he "deserved". If you hit your partner, you deserve to be left. If you hold a gun on them, you deserve for it to go off and kill them by mistake and you never see them again (although of course they don't deserve to die). It doesn't matter who the "angry" partner in the relationship is. Any sane person in this universe or the spn one should be angry a lot of the time, because both universes suck. Not to beat a dead horse with a flowchart but:

image source

The violence is the bastard. The emotions are not.

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yeah

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james marsters deliberately playing spike in a more sympathetic way to avoid his character being killed off after season 2 so he could keep his job is so funny. guy was literally scheming his way into job security by turning a throwaway villain into emo boy audience bait and it WORKED. gotta say i respect the grind

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Inviting him to the annual birthday PowerPoint party me and my brother have lol

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You guys are BULLYING ME

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s11e23, "Alpha and Omega" | s13e21, "Beat the Devil"

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Sent this picture to my parents and my dad said "your whole outfit makes you look like my great aunt"

Delighted, I strive always to give off great aunt energy hahaha.

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"sam was 23 he should have been in the club" incorrect he should have been maintaining his personal blogspot and meticulously organized mythology & americana folklore geocities page and getting into fights with people on niche proboards about their skinwalker lore

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How I post when a cool mutual follows me back