Still figuring out the world of SPN fanfic

[rusty_halo]

Oddly enough, after reading quite a bit of Sam/Dean and Dean/Castiel, the genre of Supernatural fanfic that’s most pinging my interest is… gen. (This is a little bit threatening to my identity as primarily a slash reader!)

I think it’s because I go to fanfic to zoom in on and delve deeper into the bits of canon that most appeal to me, and in Supernatural that’s Dean, his martyr complex, his dark side, his defense mechanisms, his hidden layers–and all of these things are so tied into the way he interacts with his family. Dean’s most intense relationships in the text are gen relationships, with Sam and John.

So far no Sam/Dean slash story has really hit my narrative kinks, although quite a few of them are wonderful stories, well-written and totally worth reading. The problem is that they fundamentally alter the dynamic that appeals to me and makes me want to read fic in the first place–they make it about Sam and Dean dealing with their romantic/sexual feelings for each other, when what interests me is them dealing with their relationship as brothers, the effect of their (at best) negligent father, Dean as the substitute parental figure, Sam trying to assert his independence, Dean trying to take all the responsibility onto himself, sacrificing his own needs to protect Sam, and Dean so obsessively needing Sam as family because he never learned how to live for anything else. What exists in canon is already more interesting to me than a romance would be, so I want more of it, not a transformation of it.

Of course, most of the slash ships I get into aren’t technically canon either, but in most of those cases it’s much easier for me to read a slash subtext–adding the romance aspect just makes the relationship more interesting and doesn’t alter what interests me about the dynamic. Like, what interests me in Peter and Neal is their growing respect and admiration and fondness and trust for each other, and if you add romance to that it just intensifies it. Whereas if you add romance to Sam and Dean, it crowds out the aspects of the relationship that I’m really there for.

Here’s a fic rec that I totally loved: Red by big_pink. It’s a well-written, excellent-paced plotty adventure, which is awesome, but what I particularly love is its intense focus on Dean and what he’s willing to do for his family. Maybe it overdoes the woobification and angst, but OTOH, nothing in it feels implausible as part of the Winchester family backstory. It’s like someone wrote an entire fic to fill in the history behind Dean’s “[John] wouldn’t be proud of me–he’d tear me a new one,” and John’s “I put too much on your shoulders, I made you grow up too fast. You took care of Sammy, and you took care of me. You did that. And you didn’t complain, not once.” I’m going to have a hard time watching the show and and not thinking of this fic as canon. (It’s also one hell of an absorbing story.)

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.