#WHEW. spike im sorry that was a lot. i had a lot of fun with this tho. thank u

[twochildreninamoteldemo]

Hi Maven!! Same q to everyone this week: what are your top 3 wincest episodes, and why?

ok im gonna cheat and do this in 2 ways hehe

a) top 3 sam/dean episodes

3. A Very Supernatural Christmas: has the samulet (their engagement ring, obviously!), you can palpably feel the isolation, the neglect, it's very two-children-in-a-motel-esque. and of course, the final scene, where i think, if there was any point in the series aside from the barn scene in which they would have said "i love you," it would have been there. the deep long stare, the watery eyes, the fact that they both know dean will be gone within the year, and then... "do you feel like watching the game?" ahhhhhhh drives me nuts

2. Swan Song: their love literally!!!!! saves the world, i mean come on. it has the whole wincest montage that you could literally set a richard siken poem to, or a taylor swift song to (look i know those are vastly different things but. bear with me), and it would just feel right. dean finally lets sam do things on his own. he lives because sam tells him to. sam manages to revoke his possession consent because of how much he's in love with dean, even as his fist is smashing dean's face into a pulp. ok i have to stop or i'm going to start crying in this goddamn airport.

Playthings: obviously. gothic horror episode of all time. picture-perfect family in the outside, secret sibling hidden upstairs. the way sam and dean's codependency is paired with that of the grandmother and her ghostly sister. the face-stroking. the almost kiss. god i swear it always looks like they're gonna kiss. sam writhing on the bed. dean staring at him like that. the subtext was about to bust through the screen, what with the acting and the way the plot and the meta-plot fit together perfectly. catherine tosenberger said it much better than i can, go read her article in TWC about wincest if you haven't!

b) top 3 family-horror-what-the-incestuous-freudian-fuck-is-going-on-here episodes

2. Devil's Trap: azazel uses john's body in a sexual manner against both sam and dean--primarily the latter but sam gets it, too. it's a chilling scene and really cements that this is what spn is about: never being able to escape the family. sam learns partly of azazel's plot, dean gets his daddy issues flayed onto him, and all through the eyes of the father. it's so well done.

3. Skin: imo the most damning thing the shifter says is, "i will be sorry to lose this skin. your brother's got a lot of great qualities. you should appreciate him more than you do." uh...what? the way he ties up sam and plans on torturing him also aligns with the shifter's pattern of turning into the husband and beating up the wife. another HMM moment actually comes from dean himself, when he tells sam that none of his friends will ever understand him and that dean's the only one who can...it's very isolating, kind of abuser tactics, and just. whew. this was episode SIX!!

In the Beginning: come on you knew i was gonna say this. aside from the obvious moments of "mom is a babe" (and remember, dean invokes sam into this moment as well..."sammy, wherever you are..."), samuel!azazel leaning over dean and smelling him, and samuel!azazel kissing mary--passionately returned(?), may i add, the plot itself sets up the winchester family as this enclosed, inbred unit. mary's kiss with her possessed father seal's sam's fate as part of azazel's army. the sexuality she shares with her father makes her son's blood diseased and cursed. the family line is tainted by incest. her kiss is what allows sam and dean to grow up that way, to become so codependent, what allows the moments of avsc, swan song, and playthings to happen! in the beginning. this begins the cycle of selling and saving souls--mary for john, john for dean, dean for sam. it's literally THEE spn episode, perhaps even more than playthings. even though sam's barely in it, his fate hangs over the whole episode, and this is full house of wincest at its finest.