#brotherly or shippy or queer platonically im just

[crispyjenkins]

buir i ask ur opinions on one sam winchester (i am entirely neutral on him, go off)

oh goodness, you know not what can of worms you have opened

basically, i think as early as the second season, the showrunners and writers like. didn't realise they had shifted the entire show to be about dean. like they just kept trying to make sam the focus, but then giving all the actually interesting plots to dean, and then being like "oh shit we've made dean more interesting again, we have to try and make it about sam again". like. hell. purgatory. his near death situations in seasons 4-9 (that’s about where i stopped watching), just about everything bad that happened about dean HAD to happen to sam later, in order to like try and keep him as the main character, but it just cheapened just about every plotline and made the show repetitive as fuck.

here’s abouts where i say i genuinely liked jared padaleki's performance of him, especially post soulless-sam, the writers just. kept trying to shove him into a protagonist role while also continuously writing him out of one.

now, sam as a character can eat my GODDAMN ass. maybe it’s just ’cause i have good relationships with my siblings, even the one i don’t talk to much cause he moved out years ago and i'm autistic, but fucking hell the way he treats dean and how much he expects from him and how much of his trauma from their dad he projects on dean, like. unlike other characters i dislike but think were important like qui-gon, or a.d. janson, i think most of sam just wasn’t written well, so jared padaleki didn’t have enough to work with to make him a worthwhile character. what i mean is like, sam's trauma is never addressed narratively, and how much the shown pushes family and brotherly love made sam's gross behavior... somehow acceptable.

i can’t speak to anything after season 12-ish, like the only thing i know is the turbo-hell situation, but i sincerely doubt anything improved on this front.

in regards to benny, i forget the purgatory timeline a lil like how long they were together, but it was about a year i think? regardless, in the short time they knew each other, benny like.... was way more of a brother to dean than sam ever was, in a way that should have been intentional narratively from the writers and directors, but then the contrast is never even addressed in the show. like the same way sam's grossness to dean should have had a purpose narratively and continutively, it was just changed and flip-flopped to fit what story they were telling per episode.

i sort of stopped watching the show mainly because benny was killed off. that once again dean had to be the tragic hero the writers kept forgetting sam was supposed to be. like we were offered a taste of what brothers hunting together should be like, how good it could be, and then they killed him off ’cause the writers belatedly realised he was a better-built character than the one they had spent 8 seasons trying to convince the viewers was important or even likeable.