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teamfreewill2pointo · 3 years

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Sam’s Emotional Arc 1/3

I hated the finale immediately, but I’ve spent some time with it and talked to friends who loved it. I can see now what it was about, and I’ve come to appreciate the story they were trying to tell, even if I think it didn’t land right.

I’ve been told that my meta on this has helped other people come to terms with the finale, so I thought I’d compile it in one place from across various discord channels and twitter posts. If you are struggling with the finale, I hope it helps you.

Part of this actually started with a shit post. I was making a joke about Sam being psychic since he was scared of clowns when Dean died by one. I realized that may have been deliberate. I dug into the story more and now I’m convinced it was. Then I came across some excellent meta that fit with the themes I was finding and opened up the series even more for me.

Happiness isn’t in the having, it’s in just being. It’s in just saying it.

Cas said it. Dean accepted it. Sam lived it. First, Sam’s journey.

Clowns pop up in s15 before the barn scene. In 15.01, which was written by Dabb, Sam is injured by a clown. Castiel is able to save Sam and heal his injury. The clown keeps coming after Sam, with Sam having fight scenes with the clown, while others attack the other ghosts. The clown is kicking the shit out of Sam again, and Castiel saves him once more. Sam is unable to fight off the clown on his own both times.

They run until they are able to escape outside a magical barrier. Sam turns to the clown and says, “shut up”.

This is literally Sam running from his fears. On top of that, this isn’t just any clown, but the ghost of John Wayne Gacy, from an episode also written by Dabb.

Dean: A serial killer clown. I mean, this is, like, the best/worst thing that’s ever happened to you, you know, ‘cause you love serial killers, but – but you hate clowns.

Sam gets nervous and struggles with the lighter before he’s able to get rid of the clown, for now.

I believe this is a metaphor for hunting in general: it’s both the best of Sam’s life and also the worst. The clowns symbolize his relationship with Dean.

Plucky Pennywhistle's Magical Menagerie was co-written by Dabb (see the pattern?). Sam’s fear of clowns was known since season 2. In season 7, Dabb explored where this fear came from.

On the surface, Sam’s fear is just because he found them creepy, but the episode explains that they actually come from Sam’s fear of being left behind by Dean.

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This episode comes directly after an episode where Sam worried that Dean would get himself killed

Sam: Look... Dean, the thing is, tonight... It almost got you killed. Now, I don't care how you deal. I really, really don't. But just don't – don't get killed. Dean: I'll do what I can. Sam: Well, what's that supposed to mean? Dean: It means I'll do what I can. All right? You can shut up about it.

Sam is dealing with Hallucifer at this moment, but Hallucifer doesn’t really scare him. Losing Dean does.

Sam has a conversation with an employee about greatest fears.

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Recognize the actress? She came back for s15 in 15.06. I don’t believe this was a coincidence. 15.06 featured Castiel helping a parent find their lost child in a season that features Castiel worried about losing Jack. Through his experience with her, Castiel confronts his fears and doubts and then returns to join in the fight against God. [I’ll touch on Castiel’s journey more in his chapter]

Sam’s greatest fear is losing Dean. There’s a lot in the series about how Sam felt lonely and abandoned for much of his childhood. A whole episode, Just My Imagination, centers around this. Sam hated when Dean went off on hunts without him.

source In The Chitters, Sam tells Dean how his fear of losing his family paralyzed him as child. It’s a story where an older brother dies and the younger brother never recovers from it until he’s able to lay him to rest (sound familiar???)

Sam: You know, whenever you and Dad used to leave me to go hunting, and I-and I wouldn’t hear from y’all for a while, I, um, I was always sure that some vamp or rugaru, or take your pick, I always figured one of them finally got ya. I tried to think what to do, you know, the next step to take. I was just lost. Dean: We came back, though, every time.

You might naturally think, “Wait a minute! Sam left Dean multiple times!” Honestly, this was something I had a huge issue with when watching through the show the first time. I didn’t understand Sam and hated him leaving Dean in s8. I was completely on Dean’s side at first. But, on multiple rewatches and talking to others, I’ve realized that when Sam left Dean, he was running from his fear. In this TV Guide interview, Jared perfectly sums up why Sam left in season 1; he couldn’t stand to see his family die. Dabb wrote Dark Side of the Moon along with a comic that explains why Sam left in detail. While the comic isn’t official canon, it shows Dabb’s thought process. In it, Sam sees his family as running towards a horrible end and can’t handle dealing with that.

Dean: So what are you gonna do? You're just gonna live some normal, apple pie life? Is that it? Sam: No. Not normal. Safe.

There are many more points in the series where we learn about Sam’s fear of Dean dying. This would be 3948573945 pages long if I wrote them all out, so I’m going to focus on the key moments that loop back to this ending, but there’s so much more there.

If you are struggling with this and need more, please let me know and I can do a deeper dive into that subject. We first see Sam’s inability to let Dean go in season 1 when Sam refuses to let Dean die in Faith.

Dean: You're not gonna let me die in peace, are you? Sam: I'm not gonna let you die, period. We're going.

Sam’s whole arc in s3 is him being unable to handle Dean dying. He wants to save Dean, but Dean won’t let himself be saved. This was what Gabriel was trying to teach him in Mystery Spot.

Trickster: This obsession to save Dean? The way you two keep sacrificing yourselves for each other? Nothing good comes out of it. Just blood and pain. Dean's your weakness. And the bad guys know it, too. It's gonna be the death of you, Sam. Sometimes you just gotta let people go.

This is how Ruby gets under Sam’s skin and what gets him to start working with her. Everything Sam did was to save Dean. In s4, Sam’s arc is about him sacrificing himself in order to save Dean. He’s gutted from being unable to save Dean. In 4.12, Sam decides to drink demon blood in order to save Dean

Dean: [says that they will die early] Sam: Maybe we'll be different, Dean. Dean: What kind of Kool-Aid you drinking, man? Sammy, it ends bloody or sad. That's just the life. Sam: What if we could win?Dean: "Win"?Sam: If there was a way we could just...put an end to all of it.

When Sam breaks out of the panic room, he’s suicidal. He’s determined to save Dean with his life as the cost he’s willing to pay. He didn’t think he would survive killing Lilith. He was committing suicide in that moment. The reason why Sam is so willing to sacrifice himself in s5 is because he has low self esteem. He blames himself for everything that goes wrong. In Sam, Interrupted 5.11, also by Dabb, Sam has a breakdown under the weight of his guilt. He hates himself and he feels his rage is out of control. In season 6, we see soulless Sam and, unlike souled Sam, he has no rage. Yes, he’ll kill when necessary, but he’s not angry. It was Sam’s fear driving his rage. He felt out of control of his life and let it lead him down a dark path. In season 7, he sees Dean heading down a dark path and he feels helpless to stop it. He worries about dragging Dean down and tells Dean to let him go. But, at the same time, he’s developing coping techniques. He’s starting to face his fears.

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And then Dean disappears and Sam completely falls apart. Sam didn’t have a healthy relationship with Amelia. They were two broken people clinging to each other. Sam and Dean struggle to reconnect after their time apart. There’s a lot of text addressing the horror of a partner dying and people trying to escape from it.

Mrs Holmes: He could see the end of my days were at hand, and... He had lived centuries all alone, but I don't think he could bear the thought of life without me. That's why he drove off that bridge. You must think I'm a monster.

In Hunteri Heroica written by GUESS WHO!?!? Sam finally acknowledges that he was living in a dream world with Amelia. He was running from his past. We see a flash back with Sam pressing on his scar, which he did to help himself distinguish fantasy from reality.

The episode is about a man refusing to engage in reality and harming those around him. Sam has a big confrontation with him

Sam: Look, it can be nice living in a dream world. It can be great. I know that. And you can hide, and you can pretend... all the crap out there doesn't exist, but you can't do it forever because... eventually, whatever it is you're running from – it'll find you. [CASTIEL appears to be taking Sam’s words to heart.] It'll come along, and it'll punch you in the gut. And then... then you got to wake up, because if you don't, then trying to keep that dream alive will destroy you! It'll destroy everything!

Likewise, when Sam was with Jessica, he wasn’t honest about himself. He was hiding from his family and his past. Running to avoid pain. Sam is avoidant in general. Not just in his relationship with Dean. When he talks with Rowena in 13.12 Various & Sundry Villains about his fears of Lucifer, he admits that he could talk about it with Dean, but he can’t bring himself to.

Sam: I’ve seen it too. What he really looks like behind – behind whatever vessel. It… Yeah, still keeps me up at night. Rowena: How do you deal with it? Sam: I guess I don’t deal with it. Not really. I mean, I pushed it down and, um, the world kept almost ending, so I keep pushing it down, and I don’t know. [stammering] I really don’t talk about it, not even with Dean. I mean, I could. You know, he’d listen, but… That’s not something I really know how to share.

In 15.20, Sam’s past is front and center. Literally. I know a lot of people found the Winchester family portrait odd and upsetting, but it symbolizes something I’ll get to in a bit. Instead of trying to avoid his grief, Sam has moments where he lets it wash over him. He goes and sits in the car. He’s no longer avoidant. He’s no longer running away. He’s letting his grief move through him. He’s literally sitting with it.

Soulless Puppy pointed out that the characters emotional arcs is similar to DBT. Please look through their awesome meta here.

Personally, I see them as similar to the therapy I do called ACT. Both are forms of therapy where instead of fighting against them, you accept painful emotions and allow yourself to feel them. If you don’t do that work, then you can’t stop feeling them and your fears/ghosts will always haunt you. In Swan Song, Chuck tells us that “Dean didn't want Cas to save him. Every part of him, every fiber he's got, wants to die, or find a way to bring Sam back. But he isn't gonna do either. Because he made a promise.” In 15.20, Sam initially didn’t want to let Dean go. He’s been refusing to do this since season 1. When he’s separated from Dean he lives a fake life or destroys himself/the world trying to get Dean back. There’s a moment in 15.20 where Sam looks at Dean’s guns. He wants to commit suicide, but he makes the choice to live. For the time in Sam’s life, he let Dean go and lived with his pain. He no longer ran from it. After Swan Song, Dean was unable to let Sam go. He wanted him back. After Carry On, Sam is able to do what Dean couldn’t do. He lives a life outside of Dean. What’s more, Sam has reconciled himself with his past and his family. It’s clumsy and I wish it were better shown, but having the family portrait and their parents in heaven isn’t meant to excuse the way Sam and Dean were raised. In order to move past the trauma of his relationship with his parents, Sam fully integrates them into his life. In Lebanon, Sam was able to confront and forgive his father. In doing so, he can also forgive himself. Mary asks for forgiveness too, and he grants it to her. He doesn’t forget what happened, but he’s able to move forward and leave the intergenerational cycle of violence. He’s able to raise his son, Dean, the way his brother should have been raised.

Happiness isn’t in the having, it’s in just being. It’s in just saying it.

Cas said it. Dean accepted it. Sam lived it.

I can see why people see Sam’s life after Dean as unhappy. I hated it so much because I saw it as horrible and sad the first time through. I had to sit with myself and my emotions first. I think it’s because we’ve been told by society that we have to get rid of our grief in order to be happy. The finale was showing us that it’s possible to do the opposite. [Personally I think it would’ve been better had they showed more overtly happy memories, but many of my friends saw this straight away] When I began therapy, one of the first things I learned was that there aren’t “negative” emotions. When working with our kids, we call them Big emotions. In DBT/ACT, all emotions are treated as normal and natural. Grief, anger, sadness, etc, these are all normal parts of the human existence. We don’t need to run from them in order to have happiness. We can live with them. As interstitial said in our chats, “you can't change the past, you can only change your relationship to it. To accept that your past contained both love and heartache, to miss it, but also know you can do better; that's actual recovery, as good as it gets.” As Soulless-Puppy explained to me, Sam lived in duality. Dean was dead, but Sam lived. Sam was happy, but he grieved. Dean was with him in the watch and the car and his son, but Dean also waited for him in heaven. I hated the finale the first time I saw it, then next watched it with my boyfriend who loved it. As we were watching together and discussing it, I realized that Dean’s death scene wasn’t just about him, but about the show itself.

Dean promising Sam that he will be with Sam in Sam’s heart is also the show promising us that they will never leave it. That’s why Alex kept posting “The end has no end.” Just as Sam carried Dean with him in his heart, we will carry the show with us. I hope this helps. It’s a terrible thing to feel upset about an ending and thinking of the show this way, recognizing these patterns, is bringing me peace. I still have issues with how it was written, but now that I see what they were doing, I wish all the more that they had the chance to do it right. Please share your thoughts and experiences. I love hearing different opinions. Next up, Dean. Then Castiel.

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sepiadice · 6 years

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D&D 5e (03/10/18): Geographical Collision

Guess who’s finally back to rolling dice?

Me. I am. With the improv club, though this time with a much more expanded roster and mostly new people. Nine players total, not counting the GM.

Hopefully it goes better this time?

At the very least, Windy Jerk’s player gave their character an actual name this time,[1] so maybe someone learned a lesson.

Not me, of course. Learning things is for other people.

Anyways, session one:

My character this time is Theodora ‘Teddi’ Bell-Seely. She’s a thief. An actual, commits crimes thief. But, you know, only against jerks and such.

I figured I might as well do one actual thief character. Just get it out of the way so I can then proceed with my parade of ‘I like the class, but not the criminal baggage’[2] characters I enjoy.

Teddi is 26, half-elf, has brownish-red hair, and ice blue eyes. Also goat horns and goat eyes. No one’s asked about them in story yet, so it can be a secret here as well!

We begin in a world of floating islands. Just a bunch of floating land masses aligned with three governments.

Teddi’s from a place called Jaruphat. (The other two are called Alonzee and Kratt). There’s various bits of history.

The important thing to note is that, as far as the general populace knows, there’s nothing beneath us, so might as well throw waste over the edges of the island. That certainly won’t end poorly for anyone!

So, yes, before we started, it was clear either someone was going to come up or we were going to go down. Because of the world information we were given, I was leaning towards the ‘invasion from below’.

The actual start was in a tavern on a small, mysterious island discovered about twenty years ago. There were ‘Adventurers Wanted’ ads, so that’s why the party was beginning to gather.

Starting with a man named Gabriel, who arrives, pays the barkeep a copper, and gets a drink thrown at him for his troubles. Gabe successfully catches it, though, so that’s nice.

The enters an older Genasi named Solomon, whose gimmick is he knows almost everybody already so, hopefully, we’ll gravitate together better. It… was a noble attempt!

He gives the barkeep a gold coin, so he gets a drink handed to him politely.

Solomon and Gabe know one another, and they grab a table.

An NPC sneaks in. There’s a lot of PCs (most of whom I’ll forget to introduce, but will try to as they do important things)[3], so let’s tiptoe around the NPCs for now.

Teddi then arrives, sees Solomon, who she knows, and meets Gabe. Solomon buys Teddi a Drink,[4] and Teddi gladly joins the table.

Then more PCs and three more NPCs start trickling in as Teddi eventually starts a game of Old Maid[5] as she meets people.

Once everyone arrives, we mingle for a couple more minutes before our employer arrives: A woman named Dahlia[6] who wants us to come with her to explore a cave to find whatever device keeps the islands afloat.

Teddi asks about payment, and Dahlia gives a vague ‘whatever payment you want’ answer.

Teddi’s mostly just looking for adventure, so sure. Let’s go with that.

The party heads out, Dahlia gives more exposition, Teddi asks if Dahlia intends to do anything untowards to the device once we find it, which Dahlia denies.

Then the enter party gets hit with a psychic wave that simultaneously filled them with dread and happiness. So that’s not good.

Dahlia agrees it’s not good, as she didn’t intend to do that, so our employer steps behind a nonexistent curtain in reality.

So that’s strange.

One of the NPCs, an elderly man named Nicholas (who happens to be Teddi’s neighbor back home) looks concerned at the sky, then flies away as he tells us to brace ourselves.

Solomon slams a shovel into the ground as Gabe ties most of the actual party to a tree.

Also a young boy with a feathered cloak gets his hand stuck in the hole dug by the party’s Pine Marten Assassin.

Then another island crashes into our island. So that’s a problem.

The party, however, wakes up feeling pretty okay. Not emotionally, obviously, we just had the major landmass we were standing on fall down and don’t know how to get back up; physically, though, everyone was fine.

Also there’s a mysterious city on the horizon. And, for those of us with sharp ears, the sound of a siren (like, air raid siren, not nautical).

And our surroundings stink like poop and there’s garbage everywhere. Just… all over the place, trash. Because we floating island residents thought throwing things over the edge of the islands was a good idea.

Insert environmental aesop here!

The mysterious youth party member in a feathered cloak decides to wander away from the group as we talk about what to do, meandering towards the city.

So, eventually, the party decides searching for other survivors would be tedious, so let’s go to the city, why not.

But we do so carefully! Who knows what horrors live on this mysterious Down Here place?

Giant Bugs/Parasites, that’s what![7] We learned that by discovering a giant bug eating one of the NPCs who did not survive the fall.

(But it’s okay. Lady was evil and liked to throw people over the side of islands for fun. Karmic restitution, I guess?)

Though, maybe the giant bug killed her. Probably should keep that possibility in mind.

Keep walking, and we find a man(?) in heavy protective clothing[9] scavenging the waste.

As we were clean-looking fellas, he instantly pegged us as being from above. He was also very snarky and not very informative. At least, not directly.

Learned our money isn’t good down here, because the guy (who wouldn’t give us an identity beyond being a ‘lowly worm’, so we call him Worm) has a whole bunch of gold coins.

Which makes me wonder who’s throwing gold coins down here, and to such a quantity as to utterly devalue gold, but Teddi doesn’t have time to write an economic research paper.

We also gets hints of a social pecking order before getting tired of the sass and leaving Worm be.

Continued movement, we reach the end of what was once the Starting Island, and come upon a sea of garbage, which wading through would be tedious. We tried anyways.

Then a submarine with tank treads came to our rescue. We talked to the sub’s… driver? Sailor? Pilot?

The sub’s owner (think his name was Donovan), confirmed that, yes, Worm is of a scavenger class not allowed in cities.

Presumably because he’s kind of rude.

Donovan takes pity on us and takes us to the city as he advises us to look way less stylish so we don’t stick out like a sore thumb.

The session ends as we reach the boardwalk within the city walls.

Then we had another session two days later, but that’s a story for another time.

Until then, may your dice make things interesting.

[1] I still do not know the character’s name. I’ve been told a couple times, but it’s super unusual, and sticking to Windy Jerk is just too funny.

[2] Which 5e is really bad with, actually putting in very heavy mechanical implications of a shady background. Systems need to learn not to dictate characters.

[3] I’m also not a note-taker, and most of the group hasn’t posted character details to the Discord yet...

[4] Yes, Drink brand beverage, my favorite alcoholic drink!

[5] My thought being ‘Don’t actually want to gamble; Go Fish is the obvious joke; Old Maid gets played in Animes a lot.’

[6] Stand by for the non-evil twin sister named Iris.

[7] Pretty sure the GM’s visual aid were Zergs. So, y’know, probably should keep an eye out for… Starcraft plot stuff?[8]

[8] I suddenly realize I don’t know Starcraft’s plot too well. There’s Kerrigan, but that’s about as far as my knowledge goes.

[9] Lot of crosstalk, so I missed the description, but I’m imagining Chub.

#SepiaDicePlays #Fifth Edition #Teddi BellSeely #Dungeons and Dragons

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