#while fanon sam is like. noooo my brother is dragging me back into hunting against my WILL !!!!!!

[angelsdean]

It's funny for me that fanon Sam is, following his time at Stanford, thee greatest of ally and defensor of human rights, while canonically college turns him into a judgemental snob - frowning upon winning money as a hunter, saving the prisoners, etc, etc (snobbish s1 Sammy my beloved !!!) (PS: also his alternative self in Lebanon XD)

no literallly. sam wanted to fit in so hard at stanford he drank some of the snobby rich kid kool-aid. and like, dissecting that is infinitely more interesting to me than perfect liberal and allyTM fanon sam. like i wanna know what sam's problem is sjdkfdfk. s1 does a great job of creating this dichotomy, esp in the very early eps, where dean represents the hunting world, the fringes of society, the outcasts and Other, and sam is coming out of this perfect idealized world that was college, where he absorbed some of those snobby ideals, as a way to reject his family / lifestyle (tho mostly as a way to reject JOHN and john's ideas of what sam's life should be). But then we see sam throughout those early episodes making choices that actively lead him further down the road of hunting, choices that have him rejecting "normal society" and choosing this journey, this quest, taking up the mantle and following john's path.

(there are lot of examples and maybe i'll make a post abt them all one day but one that always stands out to me is in 1x06 Skin, where the conflict is about the isolation of hunting vs the desire for community and connection to the outside world. it seems like dean is pro-cut ties with the world, but why? well, we later learn in 1x13 he tried to let an outsider into his world and cassie rejected him for it. but sam, at the start of the ep, is trying to have the best of both worlds. he thinks he can keep his outsider friends while still hunting. then by the end of the ep, his friend now knows all about hunting and wants to stay in touch. and sam shuts her out and says she probs won't hear from him anytime soon. and it's just so bonkers to me !! but he's making that choice, he's choosing hunting and slowly rejecting and cutting ties to his idealized stanford life.)

and he wants it, is the thing. he's on a one track mind: find john, find the demon, kill it and avenge jess and mary.

this got long-winded but anyway, i think all that s1 snobbery is SO crucial to sam's journey, it's important we see it, it's important we see where he was coming from, how stanford had begun to change and shape him in different ways, how stanford was symbolic of this total opposite to hunting, it's the snobby rich who don't care about the people on the fringes, it's studying LAW while holding beliefs that all people in prison are not "innocent" and a ghost killing them off isn't the biggest deal. and then dean + the hunting lifestyle is meant to be the juxtaposition to that. he's living on the fringes of society, he's Other. That's why the shifter in Skin identifies with dean so much, aside from the queer metaphors. The shifter choosing fresh-off-of-ivy-league sam would not make for the same kind of parallel, as much as sam has his psychic kid stuff going on, that's only barely begun at this point. He doesn't yet think he's a freak for being psychic or the demon blood stuff, he doesn't even know abt any of that. But paralleling the shifter with dean highlighted the isolating, othering nature of hunting, in an episode where the "brother conflict" was isolation vs community. And through the shifter we learn that dean didn't Want to be a hunter either. He had dreams, wanted friends. And sam hears all of this, and still at the end of the episode chooses to reject his friend's offer to keep in touch. Taking another step away from the idealized stanford life and another step down the path of hunting + his revenge quest. And it's so goddamn interesting and delicious and fascinating to me !!!! fanon sam could never