#an undeposed usurper making a mockery of the throne he's occupying

[welkinalauda]

The Great Meta Scavenger Hunt: Round 5 - IT WAS ALL A DREAM?!

[ridiculously belated entry d/t bad time management, and rl dystopianism. but mostly bad time management. I’d say ‘here, hold my tea’ but it’s gone cold and ugly and it’d be better to just dump it out. er. 

Here, dump my tea.]

Everything after Sam jumps into the cage in Swan Song is Sam dreaming in the cage.

The show starts with Sam trying very hard to escape his itinerant laborer roots, climbing the ladder, reaching to grasp the law-school rung... and Dean, like a crab in a bucket, grabbing Sam by the leg and dragging him back down into the scrum.

Over the first five seasons, though, the Winchesters discover that they are of the bloodlines of angelic vessels. Archangelic vessels. Specially prophesied archangelic vessels. Their very existence was specially ordained of God. And that re-casts the Winchester childhood from ordinary impoverishment into the preamble to a fairy tale. Gotta start off a poor man’s foster-child if you’re going to end up a prince.

(Dean was always onto that - far as he was concerned, the Winchesters were always special, superheroes, knights-errant defending the defenseless from peril. When John & Dean ‘protected’ tiny Sam from the supernatural, they prevented tiny Sam from developing the feeling that he was that kind of special.)

Sam dives into the cage and into this dream.

Almost the first thing his subconscious does is up the ante on this inherited nobility bit. His grandfather (and namesake) wasn’t just some hunter. His grandfather was hunting royalty. The Samuel Campbell Sam makes in his dream is a resurrected Warrior King. (And eligible for the Mayflower Society, which is super-hilarious.) But Sam never did like hunting. He can’t reconcile himself - his whole self - to the society of warrior kings. When he’s with the dreamed-up Campbells, Sam is a soulless robot going through the motions. The hunter clan, the family he’s supposed to want, proves weak and corrupt. They fall away one by one.

Sam re-integrates his dream-self into a tattered sort of whole.

Next Sam’s subconscious conjures up Henry Winchester. This newly-fabricated grandfather tells the boys that they are legacies of a secret knowledge-collecting society. Sam and Dean are the heirs to this time-traveling Philosopher King, and he sets them on the quest which leads them to their ancestral Bat Cave/ castle/ Hunter Barbie Dreamhouse. Sam finally gets a permanent room of his own with a lock on the door, plus an attached library, garage, dungeon, etc. Those philosopher kings had every material thing Sam and Dean could wish for. (Plus! a near-total lack of living MoL, so they can’t disappoint or betray the way the Campbells did.)

Class is complicated. It’s a tangled mess of money and status markers and (sometimes, some places) who your parents were.

Sam wanted a life better than homelessness and poverty, so he spent his childhood and youth working to make a leap to the bourgeoisie. On the cusp of adulthood, Sam is informed that he’s not meant for the bourgeoisie - not because he’s not good enough for the middle class, but because he’s too good. His blood has destined him for yet-higher things. As a pawn, but still. Higher things.

In his afterlife, he’s dreamed himself into a scion of three different strains of hereditary nobility. He and his brother unite in their persons warrior kings, philosopher kings, and divine right. They fight and win against gods, primordial monsters, forces of nature, all comers. They walk the earth helping people and have a secure home to return to. This dream of Sam’s has turned himself and Dean into kings under the hill. At the end of season 11, God himself gives the world into Sam and Dean’s keeping.

So it makes sense, Sam telling Mary he didn’t want out of the life. He and Dean are the princes of the damn universe. No further class-climbing is necessary, or even possible.