fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3354 ]

[ SECRET POST #3354 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3354 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Yu-Gi-Oh]

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09. [ warning for homophobia / transphobia / misogyny take your pick, people seem to be divided on this one ]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 009 secrets from Secret Submission Post #479.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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The secret is also forgetting that at the time Sam was getting high with Ruby, who treated him like the second coming of Lucifer, Dean was suffering from PTSD from literal Hell, and having everyone around him tell him that his feelings didn't matter because he wasn't a person, he was just a tool to be used. That before he decided to "get clean" Sam not only killed an innocent woman and freed Lucifer, but also tried to kill Dean himself.

And that while everyone forgave Sam and gave him as much support as they could given the writers' knowledge of how to support an addict (before they magically decided that having Sam suffer from consequences was not cool), Dean never got the same. And that to this day, no one has cared about Dean's very obvious PTSD.

Yup. All of this. Dean clearly had PTSD and probably some form of depression as well and he never got any help. That's kind of the story of Supernatural really. Dean takes care of Sam. John tells Dean to take care of Sam. Bobby tries to take care of both of them as much as he can. But Dean never really gets the help he needs. No one ever really protects Dean.

Dean drinks so that he's functional enough to take care of Sam, and then Sam turns around and bitches to Dean about how he's drinking too much.

Also true. Or Sam bitches about Dean's sexual life, which is Dean's other coping mechanism (along with drinking and humor).

I have THEORIES about why Dean uses sex as a coping mechanism; it's a socially-acceptable way for a man to seek affection, and physical touch.

That's really interesting. John certainly wasn't very physically affectionate. I like that theory.

Oooh! That's interesting. Also, it fits with the canon that Dean's sexual tastes are really damn vanilla. Even his "kinky" dreams are super generic and lame.

Comment caveat #1: I preferred Dean, right from S1. Sam had his moments, but Dean had my heart from the beginning.

Comment caveat #2: I stopped watching SPN years ago. I couldn't even get through S5. ("Apocalypse? WHAT APOCALYPSE. WE ARE GETTING RENEWED FOREVER.")

Actual comment: It sort of catches me by surprise these days, but it still infuriates me when people utterly ignore both Dean's own significant problems and the awful things Sam did to him in order to get angry at him for not properly supporting his poor baby brother. The comments above are 1000% right - you don't owe anyone forgiveness for hurting you, especially not when it's demanded and expected as their due. Neither brother behaved perfectly, fair enough, but to blame Dean for having trouble coping with Sam's problems? Jesus, people. And you're complaining about his lack of sympathy??

(BONUS: One of the things that finally made me quit the show was a conversation between Dean and Bobby late in S5. I watched the episode with Death - one of the only late S5 episodes I did watch, entirely because of Death - and the way Bobby tears into Dean at the end of that episode had me shrieking curses at the screen. No one appreciates how Sam never had a normal life? No one understands how much he's given up? No one understands how hard it's been for Sam? While he's talking to Dean, who spent his whole childhood raising Sam amidst the supernatural clusterfuck of his own shattered life? And half the conversation was a voiceover laid over a slo-mo montage of Sam being self-sacrificing and heroic in the background, IIRC. ARGH.)

Oh, yeah! That wonderful piece of "why don't you let your brother be the big damn hero by agreeing to be possesed by Lucifer, right after you got the shit beat out of you last episode for wanting to end up the apocalypse with less bloodshed by agreeing to be possesed by Michael?"

I kept watching, even now when the whole "let's ignore Dean" has gotten so bad that Sam just basically destroyed creation because he didn't listen to Dean, but THAT was about when I stopped caring about Sam and his Mary Sue-like issues.

OOh, yes, I forgot that. Saying yes to Michael who was clearly the least bad of the two was an awful thing. Saying yes to Lucifer was a great idea. Of course it worked out. But there was no way they could have known that.

UGH. Everything about that was just so awful. (Not to mention oddly partisan for Bobby, but that's another issue entirely.) The hypocrisy was frustrating as all get out.

OMG AGREED. Entirely. I was leery as soon as the series started showing signs of "Sam is so special, it's all about Sam" way back in S1. Hilariously enough, that was one of the reasons I liked S4 as much as I did - it gave us a few signs that the balance of importance might shift to something more equal between the brothers. BUT NO. Dean can do no right, and generally doesn't really matter, unless it's directly in the context of how something about Dean is affecting Sam. S5 was pretty much the final straw for me when it came to Sam and the writers going LOOKIT HOW SPECIAL HE IS OMG. (I was so bitterly, bitterly disappointed. The first half of S5 had a couple of my favourite episodes in the whole series. I still can't believe it went to such crap in the back half.)

SA

Also, I am half-tempted and half-terrified to ask about the "Sam just basically destroyed creation because he didn't listen to Dean" thing. On the one hand, good to know that I was right for getting out ages ago. On the other hand...no, really?

Long story shortish? Because DEan asked an angel to try and save Sam's life after s8's bout of "Super Jesus Sammy", Sam agreed to be possesed by an angel and blamed Dean, disowning him as a brother. Due to the depression of this, and Kevin (SPN's only asian character)'s death, Dean went and got the Mark of Cain, asort of super demon mark, in order to kill an ARch Demon that had been freed in season 8 but Sam had completely forgot they were supposed to kill. Said mark turned DEan into a demon when Dean got killed, but Sam cured him because he couldn't live without his brother (Seriously) but the Mark was still "influencing" Dean to be evil and... kill a gang of child rapists that were at the time trying to kill Dean, and kill a group of nazi-like frankenstein doctors who had killed Charlie (Spn's lone lesbian character, and second longest surviving female character). So Sam got convinced that Dean was losing control and becoming evil and made a deal with Crowley and Crowley's mom to use a spell from the Book of the Dead to get rid of the Mark despite Dean and Death telling him that if he did, then the Primal Darkness (that had been locked out by God when he created the world) would be freed.
Sam didn't listen, emotionally blackmailed Dean into killing Death (yeah, it's as stupid as it sounds) and... never called Crowley and Rowena to stop the spell. So... Darkness got freed.

And then Sam got convinced that God was speaking directly to him so he went and made a second deal with Rowena to go to Lucifer's cage which predictably ended with Lucifer being free again (only now possesing Cas. I know, it makes even less sense)

And that is why I sometimes envy people who stopped watching SPN in seasn 5 despite being unable to stop myself because Jensen Ackles is so damn gorgeous.

At this point, my continuing to watch is about 25% habit and 75% Jensen Ackles.

AYRT

I... Wow. Just...wow. Thanks for the recap and for confirming that noping out in S5 was absolutely the right thing to do.

I will grant you that Jensen Ackles is improbably gorgeous, but I do actually own S1-S5 on DVD, so I'll just rewatch them when I need a fix. I mean. I don't think that even trying to watch S6+ on mute would make any of that bullshittery palatable.

Yeah, but Jensen Ackles just keeps getting hotter.

(If current trends continue, Season 17 will be when they give up on plot completely and nobody will notice because Jensen will be Just. That. Pretty.)

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2016-03-11 07:26 (UTC) - Expand

This is me. I watched season 6 and the first episode of season 7. It was so awful I gave up and wished I hadn't watched 6. Whenever I need a Jensen fix I can just rewatch 1-5.

And then Sam got convinced that God was speaking directly to him so he went and made a second deal with Rowena to go to Lucifer's cage which predictably ended with Lucifer being free again (only now possesing Cas. I know, it makes even less sense)

Thanks for the recap, I am several season behind. My question: so Sam went to Lucifer's cage, but was there even a spare ling of dialogue related to poor Adam (who is also still in a cage somewhere, correct)?

Dean asked Death to get him out when he retrieved Sam's soul, Death said Dean could have to choose, Dean chose to get Sam's soul out.

Though from what I heard, one of TPTB said that when Castiel molotoved him, that his body was destroyed and Adam got to go to heaven, just like Jimmy did when Cas died the first time.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2016-03-11 16:10 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

luxshine - 2016-03-11 21:07 (UTC) - Expand

I wonder if part of the writers' issue with everyone's PTSD had to do with the sheer scale of the fuck-uppedness they created.

It was awful enough that Dean spent months in hell...then all of a sudden, nope, time moves differently there so it was more like forty years! And then Sam gets a century of torture, too! And that's on top of everything else the boys had going on before either of them ever died.

After all that shit, my guess is the writers realized they just didn't want to deal with processing the immense volume of trauma they put everyone through and just kind of minimized the effects.

Note: I stopped watching during season 6, so I apologize if I've misremembered things.

My issue is mostly with the balance. I feel like Sam is allowed to deal with his trauma a bit, and but Dean is never allowed that chance. It just seems like they don't treat the brothers equally.

That's very fair. And that's probably why fandom (or the corners I found) tended to favor Dean so heavily. Someone had to, as long as canon didn't.

Exactly. I mean - I still watch Show, I love it to death, I love the boys (fictional and real). But the simple fact of the matter is, if they were 'real', they'd spend most of their time curled up in a ball in the corner and/or medicated to the eyeballs. These boys are *fucked up*, and we're lucky they can actually walk and talk, much less function normally.

I get that the writers can't really give them the massive PTSD that we all know they have, but i wish they'd address it a little more often and little more in the 'real' way.

You totally remember right, and since you stopped in season 6 you totally missed when, in order to insure that Sam wouldn't suffer after said century of (not defined) torture... He gets to forget because CAS absorbs all his pain. So Sam has no trauma, no PTSD, and then abandons Dean and Cas to Purgatory to hook up with a random woman he meets when he hits a dog with the Impala.

While Dean, on top of his Hell time, gets blamed for the Apocalypse (seriously, that was so fucked up that even now it's "The Winchesters started the apocalypse" when Dean was TORTURED to do his part), then spent a whole year in Purgatory which is... well, Monster Heaven, beign chased by monsters just to find Castiel, getting a huge dose of suicidal ideation with it.

Which was promptly turned into "Dean, you have to support Sam or Sam will want to die because you don't trust him enough"

And Sam girls STILL claim that Dean is the bad guy for not understanding Sam.

Ahem. I might be a biiiit bitter about all that.

The way the narrative tends to blame Dean while absolving Sam is really frustrating.

Both of the brothers fuck up. Sometimes in big ways. But with Sam it's treated as a mistake or based on external factors, while with Dean it seems to be a lot more about how he did this because he is a messed-up human being.

Case in point, when he killed the Styne kid and it was treated narratively as this moral event horizon, because we'd had a whole episode of watching how this kid didn't want to be what he was.

But Dean didn't have access to any of that information. For all he knew, this kid was just as complicit as any of them and lying to save his own skin.

But nope, Dean's a horrible horrible person for killing him.

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