#kripke literally put both brothers on the same line narratively

[what-do-1000-swords-look-like]

14x20 Ending = Two Main Protagonists Confirmed

Was rewatching 14x20 for reasons and this scene stuck out to me again like it always does:

Here, we see Dean taking the Equalizer gun (still a stupid name, sorry not sorry) to kill Jack after Chuck presents the suggestion as only he can. In the end, Dean doesn't shoot Jack, he and Sam confront Chuck, they learn he's the ultimate bad guy, and he basically sets them up for the ultimate apocalypse. One last ride.

And here's where we see the setup for the two main protagonists/heroes...because they have been the main two protagonists/heroes for a while. Dean and Sam = yin and yang.

Dean is the one taking the shot at Jack/willing to sacrifice himself; Sam is the one Chuck mostly interacts with & he figures out what Chuck is really doing

Chuck mentions the whole "father and son" thing when it comes to Dean and Jack; Sam calls Chuck out on what he's really doing

Dean tells Chuck to go to Hell & Chuck kills Jack; Sam shoots Chuck & Chuck starts the apocalypse

Dean makes the choice not to shoot Jack; Sam makes the choice to shoot Chuck

Dean was willing to sacrifice himself to shoot Jack who they think is the villain and save the world from him; Sam was willing to sacrifice himself to shoot Chuck who is the real villain to save Jack

Yin and yang.

If there was only one main protagonist, that one brother would have been the one to choose to shoot Jack & sacrifice himself, Chuck would have had his focus on & the most interactions with, would've been the sole father in that dynamic with Jack (minus Cas), would have been the catalyst for Chuck killing Jack and starting the apocalypse, and would have been the one to choose to shoot Chuck & sacrifice himself. The other brother would have just been a bystander if that was the case.

Another way you can tell that there are two main protagonists is that they knocked Cas out (literally and both times) of these important scenes with the two Gods (Chuck and Jack who will replace him) and the brothers despite his being an angel, despite his relationship with Jack, even despite his relationship with both brothers and the family they've all settled into. He has some lines, sure, but notice how he is not able to be involved in the decision making or really active in the standoff with Chuck. Not to diminish Cas and his importance to the story or to Jack or even Sam and Dean, but here we see that he is clearly not the main protagonist of the story. Same with Jack even though he becomes the new God in the next season, and they pulled the ol' switcheroo in this episode between him and Chuck. They literally played the shell game with the audience by having Chuck show up the way he did so it could all lead up to this moment: the Winchester brothers telling Chuck to eff off and the resulting final conflict (they're not only fighting for their freedom and to reclaim their narrative/lives but also the final boss) that will eventually reach the climax and final standoff. So of course there would be no Mary, no Bobby, no John, no Jody, no Donna, no Claire, etc in this scene and Cas would be sidelined.

It was always about Sam and Dean.

The two main protagonists.

[septembersghost]

who said Dean can be removed from the show with minimal impact and how do I punish them? 😤

a deranged hater who for some reason thinks it's constructive to spend years on the internet tearing down and attacking an actor (and others) they don't know and who has never done them any harm, and his character by extension, under the guise of "knowledge of the industry" or something to give them a veneer of intellectualism and clout, when they actually understand absolutely nothing about storytelling, narrative intent, or how character development and the emotional center and foundation of a show is built. I won't link to it (although I'd like for a lot of us to be able to rebut it, it would be completely useless and they'd just call us names and block us anyway), but part of what they wrote in their diatribe was:

If you take Sam out of the show, it would destroy the premise, but if you remove Dean, the show will still be the same with minimal rewrites. Like have Bobby call Sam at Stanford that his father is missing. John sells his soul for Sam, Sam kills Lilith in revenge, leading to Lucifer rising, leading to Sam sacrificing himself into hell, and so on and on. Try it, other than season 10 if you take Dean entirely out of the story the plot wouldn’t be affected that much.

truly wtf

someone even had the audacity to reply in the comments that it's like if you remove Han from Star Wars, but still have Luke, the story is "less fun, but still the story," which is why I can't stand that comparison these days (and I love Luke and Han both btw), because it doesn't hold up to even the tiniest bit of scrutiny. it's an entirely different dynamic, entirely different archetypes, in an entirely different world. Kripke made that comment and it stuck in people's minds as fact, even though he made far more over the years about the vital importance of both characters and how fundamentally they shaped the story, and how Jensen and Jared themselves were a HUGE part of that because it was their chemistry onscreen and their bond that caused the writers to pivot from it being more monster-adventure-of-the-week to a character driven narrative centered on their relationship, and how that made the story better, and connected to audiences, and is its everlasting through-line.

I'm going to answer this in as unbiased a way as possible, because I could get deep into analysis and themes and symbolism and character definitions/resonance/emotionality here, but it isn't really the main point, and I don't want to come at this preferentially, I want to approach it as someone who cares deeply about the characters and their story in general. you have to have both of them. you can have a monster hunting story with young Dean without Sam, but it's not Supernatural. you...don't have the story with Sam without Dean because Sam would not have done a single thing he did without Dean! it's Dean who has to be the one to go ask for his help. it's Dean who's remained a hunter, it's Dean's world that Sam is enfolded back into. he doesn't come back for John! he doesn't choose to stay for John! even when he really embraces the life and is confident in that choice in later seasons, he still makes that decision to be with Dean! I don't know how this is hard to understand, but, he only leaves Stanford for DEAN. if Bobby (lol it's laughable! laughable they would make this comparison) called Sam at Stanford to say their father was missing, it has no meaning. the driving engine of everything is the bond between the brothers and the way they fundamentally shape and contrast one another. this person literally doesn't understand that a story can be about more than one character as a lead...? that characters actually flesh out and illuminate one another, that they require one another for a story to fit together? you have no story without Sam AND Dean. I put this in tags yesterday, but no one else would sacrifice their soul for Sam. no one else would've stood with Sam in Stull Cemetery and been able to reach through to him, where Sam could break out of Lucifer's control - he saves the world but it's BECAUSE he loves Dean! the examples are endless because the examples are literally the entire show.

"minimal rewrites" is an outright lie. actually I'm going to quote what Essie said to me yesterday when I ranted to her directly about this:

not to mention that no one else would’ve done a demon deal to save sam, and even if some side character had done that inexplicably, it would’ve been terrible writing because 1) it makes no sense that they’d do that 2) it’s not emotionally engaging to see your main get saved by some rando who then faces the consequences when we don’t even put a lot of emphasis on the emotional and physical aftermath of that decision and the consequences. like it would just be deus ex machina. in fact none of the plot, NONE OF IT!!!!!, works [in ANY way] without the twofold perspective of sam and dean, the opposing viewpoints and priorities and the conflicts

it's insulting to the show, it's insulting to the characters, and it's insulting to the audience to claim that the importance of the dynamic between the two of them didn't matter and wouldn't have affected the story if it didn't exist. it absolutely would have, as there would be no show without it. a story doesn't work without its heart and soul, and the mere concept that this blog was proposing excises it. madness luv

[jake-is-screaming-in-tune]

The Supernatural series finale has huge expectations to live up to, but can the ending outdo Sam and Dean's original season 5 conclusion?

With its fifteenth season, Supernatural was rapidly hurtling towards its final episode when real world events stepped in and put production on hold. The CW have confirmed Supernatural will finish as planned, but there's no confirmed time frame on those remaining episodes airing at present. It goes without saying that Supernatural's longevity is hugely impressive, and such a lengthy run isn't something the show's creator anticipated.

It's often said that Eric Krikpe had a 5-season plan for Supernatural, but that doesn't tell the full story. The man himself has confirmed that he never knew when Supernatural would be cancelled and always tried to early write season finales as a potential series closer. With that said, Kripke's time as showrunner spanned Supernatural's first 5 seasons and did tell an overarching satanic narrative that brought the main story to a natural close. Everything had been building towards Lucifer's arrival, but with Sam sacrificing himself, the devil was sent back to his cage in "Swan Song." The episode is still considered one of Supernatural's best and the upcoming season 15 finale faces a tall order in topping the ending of the Kripke era.

Many Supernatural fans maintain that the show suffered a drop in quality after Kripke's departure, but regardless of whether this is true, season 15 can deliver a more satisfying ending than season 5. In terms of bringing narrative closure, "Swan Song" wraps up the story Supernatural began with the death of Mary Winchester. The family had already taken down Azazel, and subsequently worked their way up to the top of the demon food chain with Lucifer, the villain behind the whole wicked plot. Aside from completing their quest for vengeance, Supernatural's season 5 finale also dealt with the importance of the Winchester brothers, revealing each brother to be an archangel vessel for the apocalypse.

While "Swan Song" certainly would've worked as a final chapter, some elements of the ending wouldn't be quite so satisfying. Firstly, there's no grand sense of legacy. The personal story of the Winchesters comes to an end and the brothers save the world without any sort of recognition from outside. Supernatural season 15 is heading towards a different conclusion. Over the past 10 seasons, the Winchester reputation and influence has grown exponentially, and the gang have made friends with angels, demons, humans and vampires during that time. Most importantly, Sam and Dean have been acting as surrogate parents to Jack, Lucifer's child. This hints towards a series finale with a far grander legacy for the Winchester brothers - saving the world and making it better.

Another element of "Swan Song" that wouldn't work as a very final episode is the fates of the Winchesters themselves, with Sam in hell and Dean surviving him. Whatever befalls the Winchester brothers, the same thing needs to happen to both. Even by Supernatural season 5, it was clear that one living brother would always go to hell and back (literally) in order to resurrect the other, inevitably leading to more problems down the line. Either Sam and Dean both live or they both die, otherwise Supernatural can never truly end. As for whether the Winchesters survive the end of Supernatural, surely the more conclusive ending would be that they don't. If the Winchesters are still alive when the final credits roll, viewers know the brothers will continue their hunting adventures and that's something fans want to see. Season 15 can improve on the original season 5 ending by having both Winchesters meet their demise, thereby drawing a firm, emotional line under their story.

[incarnateirony]

Diagnosing the problem with our show narrative

Alright, so here's a really, really touchy topic. I know our fandom is full of Sam/Dean/Cas stans, but I do implore you to break out of that mindset while reading this attempted breakdown of why there's a lot of dispute over various placements in the fandom in general, outside of individual microcosms of singular season/subarc issues people may have with a character presentation, versus overall systemic issues with character presence/trending/relevance/infighting about who's important or mishandled.

Let it be clear with a disclaimer that if at any point it sounds like I am putting "blame" on any particular character, that is not the point, and a request to put it in full context of the discussion before coming to a foregone conclusion. The same goes for any perceived slight to overall significance, as this ultimately comes down to general mishandlings and origins.

That said,

Let's start at the beginning, as we should. The show started from Sam's primary perspective, even if Dean brought the push/drive. They offset in directions of emotion versus action at any given point over the course of three seasons, standing on their own with the occasional insight. From the gate, Jared was first listed, first called, and MC with Dean as a strong co-star role. They were our Luke and Hans in the Star Wars layman talk of the Hero's Journey. Unfortunately, over time, this was not panning out on our ratings, we were verging on cancellation, and they started trying to expand even before Season 4.

In Season 3, the writer's strike made them truncate Bela's story, among others. The need for offsets for the characters was strong, trying to increase counterplay, rather than tiring the GA - outside of fandom bubbles of Sam!Girls and Dean!Girls or bibros standing the infallibility of their constant circle of depressive offset. It's easy to forget, fandom-side, that there's a GA - ESPECIALLY in the mid-2000s - that would never be engaged in the hard stanning of viewpoints. Until twitter and other mediums REALLY expanded to the general population, most talk was on livejournals, personally maintained website forums, and the like. And with a general audience to mind, and numbers slipping - and the Hero's Journey itself minded - they had to reach beyond.

First, I'm going to talk S4 beyond the touch of Castiel: The Hero's Journey turned into the Double Journey Narrative in season 4. The Temptation of the Woman manifest as Ruby, and the Lover started as Anna. This advanced the ability of the brothers to weave more complex personal storylines, both between each other and knitting in elements from abroad, while giving them strong legging in an increasingly more challenging television landscape minding the 2008-09 industry crisis (which I've talked a million times on this blog.)

Now to Castiel: His initial role was the Herald who brings message of the threat from the empire, and depending on the version or rendition, becomes the early threat of the empire itself. Anna held the Hero's Journey of the Lover/Goddess/Leia, the distressing but powerful damsel that rebels against the empire, even if occasionally in jeopardy. But when McNiven didn't work on set, they were already working on trading out longevity of characters, essentially spackling their opposing stories into each other. Anna became the herald/threat, Castiel took on the long term magical helper.

This formula still held strong through S4-5, even if a bit awkward.

Temptress-Hero-Rogue-Lover

Here, have a few chart explanations of the monomyth covered in the Hero's Journey. (some are slightly varied due to exactly where they seed in some free floating elements, so I'm including several versions.)

So let's cut to the chase. Sam's freedom to live was different from Dean's at initiation, but they both had it respectively, in their own ways:

Sam received the call to adventure and hook by way of Dean, after trying to refuse the call. The mentor and white spirit had several varied manifestations in early seasons, and we know their road of trials. Over time he found his dark nature, and atoned with John, despite his harrowing and wondering. The point of the reversal and abyss for Sam kicked off Dean's arc to turn it into a double journey narrative.

Dean made a bargain for the then-ultimate-reward (bring back Sam), crossed into new rules - fell into the abyss -

Sam continued on (beyond the screen) having Dean's return refused of him and running in the dark night of the soul, with attempted sacrifice demanded of him.

Boot Dean's loop - resurrection and incorporation with quick call to adventure, meeting supernatural aid and going through trials while dealing with inner struggles; we met this in rapid time as he encountered his Goddess; Sam's handling had already had most atonement with the father done, but Dean's arc had him dealing instead with his Mother. "Finding love in the underworld" is just something I'm going to leave to sit. But moving on, the harrowing, new rules, refusal of the return and rebirth, rescue from without, his black moment - we start catching up with Sam in the double narrative.

Through this, the temptation of the woman through Ruby became Sam's ordeals and black moment in preparation for the true showdown. In fact, the showdown being built is that of Lucifer/Michael Sam/Dean, with support in the sidelines of dark/light in Ruby/Castiel.

Now, this brief hyper-compressed breakdown of our story run in mind (and admittedly some gloss over to not turn into its own novella,) we have to understand this storytelling balance we had going on.

The temptation of the woman ran its course, both Sam and Dean faced sacrifice (Sam falling to the cage, Dean almost committing to Michael, and showdown); in the end, Sam resurrects while Dean goes back to incorporating to the world, but before we get there. Boom, there went Ruby, who had been a huge driving force of Sam's end of the journey.

Castiel, on the other hand, survived. The "brothers in arms" lived on through them. And that was the final manifestation of a raw five year plan that Kripke admitted was only a few pages long at conception, but still had a rough body draft, spare for originally intending a dark ending for both instead of incorporation. They were greenlit for more, went with incorporation/resurrection and there we were: season 6.

No Ruby. Cas is popular, pull him back out, reactivate the call to adventure. But it failed to follow the same circle due to the chaos that was S 6-7. I can cover for weeks all the general failures that were in these seasons, most blatantly manifest in season 7. But the simple fact is - we basically went 2 years without a true overhanging structure, just seat-of-our-pants storytelling.

Now, you may wonder why I'm going into all of this discussing problems with our narrative.

From late season 5 through season 7, Castiel - no matter how strained his role was - continued on as an offset connection to Dean, if less integrated. No replacement for Ruby manifest.

Season 8 hit, and Carver took a new threshold. As per my discussion "Regarding trivial arguing on leads," Carver changed up the formula by moving Castiel from Support Character to Secondary Lead (acquiring his own subarcs increasingly so, esp S9+), his own trials, and major structuring elements rather than strictly playing off of moments associated with the primary leads. But this was the beginning of a shift. At this point, not only does Sam no longer have his own support character in wing to continue to diversify his application in overhanging story arcs, but Dean's previous support character has taken on a respective story position as a secondary lead. As a result, Sam's ability to run powerful independent arcs has been greatly minimized. And, the more extreme Sam stans will hang me now, it essentially started drifting Sam back into the position of secondary lead rather than primary lead, especially by the time the Trials finished, which even then was highly limited to the perspective of Dean rather than broader application. Meantime, Castiel births into his own arcs, even human world adventures, growths, and insights, which have little-to-nothing to do with the Sam/Dean arcs beyond gearing him to rejoin with them - the literal quality of a secondary lead, and new to him in this era (unlike early application as a compliment/support without deep insight as to what was going on with him beyond when he was with Sam and Dean.) If you look at this chart, EVEN CASTIEL HAS HAD HIS OWN CYCLE OF THE HERO'S JOURNEY AS A MAIN CHARACTER NOW, which is why Edlund called him that.

Dean, on the other hand, not only had Sam AND Castiel as a strong offset, but continued being handed other support lines, such as Benny. And dark as it was, Mark of Cain was an independent story. Dean continued to pull ahead of the pack, while Castiel crawled forward, and Sam wasn't being gifted any new counterplay. Ruby gone for 2, 4, 6 years with no replacement. We can argue "Jared should be able to hold the screen all he wants!" But this isn't a show where you just stand there and Get Good Things For Standing There. He has been stripped of a LOT of his elements, partially due to fandom upsets in the interest of choking him off from anyone /but/ Dean. In result, as much as I am loathe to admit it, but it is just Real Talk: at current, and pretty much anywhere after S9, Sam has continuously diminished into a role of Secondary Lead rather than Primary Lead. And that sucks.

And though the extreme stans will SCREECH at me for saying that, the simple fact is: in the end, whether they realize it or not, they agree. The consistent cyclic upset about what focus Sam is/isn't getting is distinctly to do with this slide. Whether or not you want to admit that's what has happened, that is exactly what has happened, and clearly they AREN'T content with him Just Existing There And Occasionally Solutionizing (neither am I.) We are actually standing the same point. The extremists are just upset when I call a Spade a Spade, because they take it as an insult to Sam/Jared, and it’s NOT. It is literally addressing exactly where our problem is and why THEY even see a problem.

Then we hit the other side of the fence: Dean stans that aren't happy with Dean, mostly over his emotional handling or presentation. Few Dean stans argue about him not having /story/ presence, because that's kind of ridiculous, but in regards to his emotional handling, that's another thing entirely. Because this structure put Dean through the central wringer for S9-11 at least, and then slightly burden shared in 12 but still got the brunt of it at the end. As a result, Dean's stans take him as abused, mishandled, and there's really no win. Because he's pushed as a character to extremes, but when he acts in extremes, his own fans are then upset and feel he's being mishandled, acting too fiercely, or whatever we want to call it, while he's been literally bearing the story on his back for many, many seasons in a row and, by the time they started trying to share it off back to Sam - even without actual focus on Sam's independent arcs (still as a secondary lead in respective capacity, although S12 itself became hazy on leads in general with an UTTER FUSTERCLUCK of storytelling and how much timeshift even went Men of Letters side) - it was already too late and they just hammered it in with the final deathshot to Castiel.

So now, we're in season 13 with the following issues:

Dean is overworked, overtaxed, at wits end and rolling through waves of extremes after propping up story as a central totem for years

Sam needs more focus, but doesn't have the proper narrative symmetry to pull it off to the caliber he needs it as a primary lead, which leaves his fans forever upset about his application.

These upset fans then refuse to recognize the significance of an elevated other lead, Castiel (S8-9+) and Castiel fans are on the defensive always worried about Castiel's increasing application. These upset fans take offense and blameshift onto the character that continues to improve general engagement and diversification rather than looking for a manageable solution to extend it the other direction.

Most of this infighting gets us nowhere beyond just personally recognizing we ourselves are upset about One Specific Thing and not realizing that a lot of this has one element that traces back 8~ seasons:

Sam needs counterplay.

In the end, everyone feels like they're getting boned. Sam fans feel he isn't getting enough story, but Dean fans feel like Sam's getting all the emotional/social, even if Sam's social isn't the kind to feed into story, leaving both unattended. Cas fans are lured with the position of a secondary lead, but aren't gifted full screen time, and Sam fans (SOME, not all) direct Sam's slide to the upgrade of this. Dean fans tend to be more inclusive (again not all) of Cas because he IS one of the social/emotional engagements being given to help the character, whether romantic or otherwise. In the end, we get the extreme wing of Sam fans sniping at the defensive wing of Cas fans in a blameshift that is NO ONE IN THE FANDOM'S FAULT, over a problem that's very real, but not actually sourced from Another Character Existing, but more the Lack Of Another. Giving Sam a primary engagement character can give him story expansion that pulls excessive load from Dean and opens the engagement opportunities and social function, much like we saw out of Dean between getting Cas back and realizing Mary was alive - the relief allowed better handling of Dean's social front, but this was temporary, and again, we fall to stressed characters, but no expansion for Sam. This is an independent problem from Cas having less screen time, which most of his fandom just recognizes is A Thing and Will Always Be A Thing, but are left on the defensive from other fans that feel the character is somehow to blame while simultaneously trying to undermine significance, which is just pretty absurd; but when you're standing favorites, sometimes we get tunnelvision. This turns into misdirected frustration. Sam lacks story, Dean lacks social/emotive, Cas lacks screen time. Get frustrated at everyone, but nobody listen across the lanes... when we have one easy solution: Give Sam more counterplay.

That's why I was so initially happy about Jack, even if it seemed forced/rushed. Sam>Dean>Cas>Jack>Sam>Dean>Cas>Jack, and while Sam took on mentoring and reflecting on his own history, they ended up pulling that actual counterplay away from us. I can only hope in the end they pass that pillar back to Sam to make him be able to take charge of this end of the storyline, attach to Jack in counterplay AND see it through to finalizing the death of Lucifer, but I can't bank on that.

There's really no One Showrunner responsible for the lack of Sam's counterplay. Gamble didn't fix it. Carver didn't fix it. Dabb didn't fix it. The fandom sure as hell didn't help with insisting on only Sam and Dean relying on each other, which just can't reasonably be manifest and just pitfalls us into reverse and crashes.

I literally feel like 99% of hurt feelings, resentment, issues with character placement, issues with character exhaustion, would LITERALLY be a nonissue if we had fixed this for Sam many moons ago. We'd have an entirely different dynamic now and TBF, most of the plot arcs we remember between S6->now would probably be obsolete and totally different, but this overstressed fandom wouldn't be arguing the same circle jerks about the same broken things.

And this is just incredibly frustrating because the question now is: is it too late? We're talking about 1-2+ more seasons now. Can we pan this out? Can we give him something? Can we fix this without people cacking themselves?

But literally... there. There's my diagnosis of MOST problems in our structure all spun off of one advent: Ruby Died in S5 And Was Never Replaced.

God, I sound like a wife stan now. I neither particularly love, nor do I dislike, Gen. Even if a similar role was given to someone else, that would have been okay. But we've never gotten that.

We just... need to fix narrative symmetry because as it stands, we basically have Dean as the extensively overstrained lead and Sam and Cas both as secondary leads, whereas with the right offset of SIMPLE COUNTERPLAY Sam could resolidify his story pillaring and be up there with Dean again instead of petty circlejerk arguments to just offset them and the fountain of "hey guys so get this" which is kind of frustrating.

I'm going to get hate from other Sam stans for saying this, because hOW daARE but in the end, it's literally about how this needs to be fixed FOR Sam (and everybody else) instead of just being on the constant defensive of "HOW DARE SOMEONE ELSE GET POPULAR! AWAY WITH THEE!" - I prefer to diagnose where the problem is and FIX it.

So that's my take.

[elizabethrobertajones]

"God appointed him (Dean) to look after the Earth and said he was the best guy for the job." Doesn't Sam fit in there, too? God said : Earth will be fine. It's got you. And Sam.

Yeeeah, I know, and I almost put that but I thought that would require a tangent which there was no place for in there. So you get a full-length tangent for asking about something I unfortunately already had a whole list of mental bullet points on, so buckle up XD

Essentially it boils down to my “dean is the centre of the universe” theory which of course has the flipside that I really do not subscribe to “the winchesters are the centre of the universe” because I feel like the cosmic order goes absolutely out of its way to pander to Dean, and Sam is an afterthought. Read into that as much unexpected bitter Sam girl-ing as you like as the other side of the coin of this being one of those ultimate Dean girl theories, it does happen over here sometimes :P 

6x09 and 9x11 both place a magical weight on being the older brother, but it’s also a curse in a different way that it singles him out. The burden in season 5 is on him not saying yes to Michael while since at least season 2 Sam’s been saying stuff that thematically puts him on the side of letting Destiny happen and fighting it from the inside - as he eventually did with Lucifer - Dean’s always wanted to flip the whole thing over and reject it outright. So his season 1-5 stuff and 9-11 stuff were both about fighting a immense cosmic pressure and rejecting it, emphatically, and ending a seemingly fated and unstoppable thing just by sheer force of will. At this point Dean’s ability to dig in his heels and shape the course of the world around his stubborness is literally equivalent to god-like power. He can MAKE it about Sam, like in 5x22, but it’s coming from him.

Sam obviously gets much more screwed over by being “and Sam” in the season 9-11 arc rather than the 1-5 arc which was properly tailored to them with Michael and Lucifer, because the new template is Cain and Abel. The whole point of that is Abel’s dead, so as a mirror, there’s nothing left to swing at, which is why I think even some meta writers on our side when we were speculating season 10 contemplated Sam as Dean’s Colette (platonically, as the one who would fill the same sort of role) just because there needed to be something to compare him to and there wasn’t even a dramatic re-enactment to look at aside from Cas’s stock movie footage in 6x20 :P In season 11 we got Sam thinking he was talking to God but it was actually Lucifer which belatedly used something out of the parallel, but it wasn’t a whole lot and of course was like 35 episodes since Cain said that, and meanwhile the Destiel parallel to Colette had been there the whole time.

In Chuck and Amara, both of them got paralleled to Dean, Amara as his dark mirror (in 10x05, Marie promises in the second act Dean becomes a woman) and Chuck literally just mimicking him as if Dean’s pull is so strong it absorbed God into it when God couldn’t push the other way and get Dean to treat him with any awe or respect. (Meanwhile: Sam asked him why planets were round or whatever.) Can’t remember now what they were exactly but Sam did get some parallels to Amara - mostly being the angry sibling in the face of a rather absolute brother, where Amara seemed to have a younger sibling dynamic if only for “create” has to come before “destroy” and I think if I remember correctly without going to look, in the 11x23 resolution her dialogue was more obviously mimicking Sam issues and Chuck’s were Dean issues, depending on which version of the Carver era bro drama you saw it as (I thiiink I saw it as a resolution to 8x23′s dirty laundry airing that spiralled into Gadreel then to the Mark etc). Honestly I think Amara’s anger goes either way, especially since she and Dean clicked so well over season 9-10, and especially when she was fuelling demon!Dean’s rage against Sam and everything he says in 10x03, you can see her anger behind it once you know she’s there too, as the rationale they came up with for why the Mark makes its bearer so determined to kill their sibling. (It took another season and a half but there’s finally enough retcon to make the “how demons work” errors in 10x03 make sense because you can just blame it all on her :P)

I can see a kind of line of dominoes from the start of the show and the way they set up the dynamic where it gradually puts Dean more and more in the spotlight, especially when Sam’s ~out of commission~ as a reliable POV character in season 4 & 6, and just small choices along the way (since Kripke era mind you. Early Kripke era) which end up with Dean holding the emotional spotlight, and a cosmic power to shape events that Sam doesn’t really have. At which point the “and Sam” in 11x23 as the culmination of all this, seems laughably token to the dynamic, both in-world and to the fans, like, you can’t JUST make it all about Dean, and at the end of the day it will always default back to Sam n Dean against the world, cue musical number from 10x05… But somewhere between season 6 and 11, Sam became an accessory to Dean on the cosmic level, because of these unfortunate elements of the way their earlier rounds on the merry-go-round went. So Dean walks in to confront Chuck and Amara alone, and Sam gets the Mark of Cain for 3 seconds without us even seeing the conversation where he decided to do it. And it was pretty obvious Chuck was using him since the whole point was he was avoiding dealing with things properly and Sam’s personal development made him so easy to manipulate Chuck probably barely felt bad about doing it, especially when he’s probably got a messed up sense of what people do for him out of faith. (And Sam’s the one who has a line back in 9x22 about people doing messed up things in the name of faith >.>)

Anyway, cosmically, Sam spent all of season 9, 10 and 11 left out and on the side as an “and Sam” who at best wasn’t falling foul of Dean’s shot at the mytharc and getting fratricided for his trouble of sticking it out with Dean… Chuck’s “and Sam” considering the location and circumstances of that conversation where Sam was off watching Crowley eat beer nuts in the bar at the end of the world, honestly sets off a latent bitter Sam girl feeling I didn’t even know I had until the end of season 11, and this is probably why I spend 99% of the time all snuggly and warm in my Dean girl cocoon where I feel the narrative has basically never done him wrong in such a way as Sam crawled through Carver era and emerged a strange sad empty moose in season 12. 

I mean I honestly do not see these complaints now in season 12 in the same way because I’m trying to figure out what the hell they even rebuild of Sam from and figure 12x04, 5 and 6 did a brilliant job with him, all things considered. And he HAS been more emotionally present and involved in stuff or at least a spotlight is being shone intentionally on him mediating and withdrawing even when you’d think he really should have more to say and Dean’s doing all the shouting for him. Which basically means that at least they are now intentionally making Sam like this, whereas I honestly can’t tell in Carver era if they were shooting for one thing and got another, because once this season really began pointing it out, I started seeing earlier stuff in a much different light and retroactively got a lot more concerned about Sam, like the Sam girls had been for ages but I hadn’t listened. >.>

(And as a side note, I think this is why Eileen hurts so much that I’m still equal parts pissed off for the representation issue AND hook line and sinker for the Sam man pain and I see a lot of the fandom outcry between ourselves rather than Angry Open Letter Time involves Sam’s feelings too, with most of the coda fics I’ve reblogged so far angrily proving she’s fine and immediately flinging her at Sam, and my response to the episode was to go plan ahead huge chunks of the Saileen stuff in the long fic I’m working on too. He’s been so sad and empty I honestly think Dean’s reaction in 11x04 to Sam hooking up was understated because he was trying to play it cool :P Now I can’t help thinking all the progress Sam made is directly linked to how many youtube ASL classes he took >.>)

tl;dr, the way Sam’s been sort of moved to the edge of things a lot lately, I think tracks all the way back to the way he interacts with the mytharc on a cosmic level, and the “and Sam” line now genuinely bothers me on Sam’s behalf that God treated him as an afterthought to Dean, but when I’ve got my Dean girl hat on, it’s easier to treat Sam the same as that then write all this, which means I’m part of the problem aaaaah :P