Sam’s love for Dean?

[rusty_halo]

I keep reading in meta and fic about much Dean and Sam both love each other, and I keep hearing complaints that many people can't get into season six because Sam doesn't seem to love Dean as much (or at all) anymore.

Obviously something's really wrong with Sam right now, but I've been thinking about why the brothers' estrangement doesn't bother me so much, and it's hit me that I've never quite bought into the idea that Sam loves Dean anywhere near as much as Dean loves Sam. I think at times the show wants me to believe it--after all, it was Sam's love for Dean that allowed him to overcome Lucifer at the end of season five.

But most often we see Sam's love not as something that comes spontaneously from Sam, but as a response to Dean:

* Season one is all about Sam looking back on his unhappy childhood with adult eyes and realizing how much Dean sacrificed for him and needs him now.
* Dean sells his soul for Sam so of course Sam responds by trying to save Dean.
* Dean shows up to die so that Sam won't die alone and it inspires Sam to overcome Lucifer.

All of these are predicated by a sacrifice from Dean, and Sam's response can be read as guilt and obligation as much as love.

And the show also presents:

* Sam as the one who chose to leave his family in the first place.
* Sam not saving Dean from hell; he says he tried, but it only took a month or two before he gave up on Dean and shifted his focus toward vengeance.
* Sam choosing Ruby over Dean, and leaving Dean beaten and half-strangled on the floor.
* Sam's heaven consisting entirely of moments he escaped from his family (and no, I don't think there's any canonical evidence that this was a manipulation by Zachariah).

I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. Sam's attitude is the more mature and emotionally healthy; he loves Dean but he also recognizes the need to move on, to live his own life and to maintain relationships outside of his family.

But all this stuff about how Sam loves Dean so much? I'm just not feeling it. Sure, Sam does love Dean, but a lot of Sam's emotions toward Dean seem more like a mix of guilt and obligation because he knows how much Dean needs him and how much Dean has sacrificed for him. And we frequently see Sam feeling suffocated by Dean, contemptuous of Dean, and wanting to get away from Dean.

I'm not ripping on Sam--I actually think he's the more emotionally healthy of the two, at least pre-season four--but I also just don't see the epic love fandom keeps talking about. (But maybe part of this is that I just don't get Sam as a character, whereas I totally connect with Dean. I also love people in ways that are desperate and needy and all-consuming, even though I recognize how stressful and suffocating it can be to be loved in that way. And I'm particularly not-bothered by season six because Dean's relationship with Lisa actually seems like a healthy progression for him.)

Anyway, I'm posting this because I am totally open to being convinced otherwise. If you think the epic love story is also epic on Sam's side, I'd love to hear why.

(Follow-up post here.)

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

Comments

[musesfool]

Sam's love for Dean is less obvious and less clingy, but I don't think it's less in terms of depth of feeling. It's less parental. Dean's love is practically maternal, and I don't think Sam's has that same overtone, which makes it seem like it's of a lesser quality, but I don't think it is. He does sometimes look at Dean like Dean is everything; not as often as Dean looks at him that way, but it's definitely there.

I think Mystery Spot shows just how broken he is without Dean, and how much he needs him, and how every dumbass arrogant thing he did after that was to save or protect Dean. It takes him all of season 4 and some of season 5 to recover from that. I certainly don't fault Sam for going to college - John's the one who told him not to come back; I don't think that was ever his intention - and I don't see it as evidence that he loves Dean *less*; he just shows it differently. I also think there's a difference between "I'm not with my brother 24/7 because 1. I have boundaries and 2. I'm at college" and "My brother is in hell because he sold his soul to revive me," you know?

I do think he's more overtly resentful of how much he needs Dean (and sometimes, of how much Dean needs him), especially in the earlier seasons, but I think that's just because he's more self-aware and more analytical.

He's also a lot angrier (not without good reason) to begin with, and responds to being afraid by getting angry, so a lot of his fear about losing Dean expresses itself that way.

[rusty_halo]

Hmm. Yeah. "Mystery Spot" is one episode where I can really see it--everything Sam does in that episode has the goal of getting Dean back, and he's obviously deeply traumatized from having to watch Dean die. I was surprised when I started season four to see how much Sam had shifted his focus to vengeance instead of to rescue, though, considering that in "Mystery Spot" months went by and he didn't give up.

And it was particularly striking because Sam seemed almost annoyed that Dean was back--he was more focused on getting revenge for Dean's death than on the fact that Dean was actually alive and in need of his emotional support in the present. He was contemptuous of Dean's "weakness" (emotional fragility after the torment of hell!) and thought that Dean was "holding him back," which pretty clearly translates to valuing vengeance for Dean more than Dean himself.

I totally don't fault Sam for going to college. It's normal and healthy for children in this culture to leave their families, and John is the one who shut the door on Sam's return. And it certainly doesn't mean that Sam didn't love Dean--I think he does, I just don't think he has the kind of all consuming love that directs the course of his life the way that Dean does.

I think you're right that Sam tends to deal with his emotions by getting angry, but ... I don't know, at a certain point, especially in seasons four and five, it felt like he cared more about his anger than about Dean. (I know that in season four the demon blood was affecting his responses, but still--I just don't feel the love from Sam the way I do from Dean.)

I'm not really trying to argue, just trying to understand where you're coming from and reconcile it with my own perceptions.

[musesfool]

See, I guess I don't really see Sam as contemptuous of Dean most of the time in s4 (I think we get it in the siren episode, much as we got it in Asylum in s1, but while I think he does have those thoughts, I don't think they're the majority of his thoughts or feelings towards Dean)?

I think he's really truly concerned that Dean is broken and can't do what the angels want him to do (this is certainly his position in OtHoaP), and he's going to have to step in to save Dean from having to bear it all himself. Of course, Ruby is totally stroking his ego and Sam's besetting sin is pride - he believes he knows what's best for everybody, and so he has to focus on that and hold hard to it when everything else is falling apart, because it's the only way he can maintain any semblance of control over a situation where he's basically a pawn in a much larger game. He's afraid, and he can't control everything, and that makes him angry and if Dean could just SEE that he's doing all this for HIM... but of course, Dean can't see that etc. And yeah, some of it is selfish, is of the "I have to prove I can do this, I couldn't save Dean but I can save the world" variety, tied up with his pride, but at base, I do think it was all about protecting Dean because he couldn't bear to lose him again, and that his focus on vengeance was his way of showing love (he does the same thing when Jess dies, though not to quite the same degree), i.e., he's John's son in a lot of really unfortunate ways.

So I see all of his behavior in s4 as his version of Dean going to the crossroads - Dean sells his soul for Sam all in one go, while Sam does it piecemeal, rationalizing that it's not so bad (and honestly, in his shoes, if someone told me I could save the world by drinking demon blood and killing a demon, I might believe it, especially given how wrecked and irrational he was after Dean was gone), and his motives are good etc. while he slips further and further down the road to hell.

[rusty_halo]

I think we get it in the siren episode, much as we got it in Asylum in s1, but while I think he does have those thoughts, I don't think they're the majority of his thoughts or feelings towards Dean

I think there's a strong undercurrent of contempt in Sam's relationship with Dean. You mention Sam's pride--I think it comes with a significant superiority complex. It only comes out blatantly when he's manipulated into revealing it, but he often has little asides or faces he makes that imply that he's looking down at Dean for being less educated, childish, or vulgar. (Not that I wouldn't probably look down on Dean for a lot of the same things! But there is a thread of contempt coming from Sam toward Dean that I think runs throughout the series.)

Now, of course that contempt is mixed in with a huge amount of love and obligation, which is why Sam's such a confused mess in season four, and why it's so easy for him to mistake his good intentions for a justification of everything he does.

Sam does it piecemeal, rationalizing that it's not so bad (and honestly, in his shoes, if someone told me I could save the world by drinking demon blood and killing a demon, I might believe it, especially given how wrecked and irrational he was after Dean was gone), and his motives are good etc. while he slips further and further down the road to hell.

I totally agree here. I thought Sam's descent was wonderfully well-written. It was fascinating to watch because I could understand and sympathize with both brothers, and it wasn't until the final episodes that it really became clear that Sam's ends didn't justify the means, and that a huge part of Sam's mistake was his pride leading him to think he could assess the entire picture clearly and not realize that he had been manipulated by Ruby and Lilith.

A lot of this is subjective, of course. I think a big part of it for me is that I just don't feel much intensity of feeling from Sam toward Dean because of the way Jared Padalecki plays him. And it's also that I'm so much more invested in Dean, and I think Dean becoming more detached from Sam is probably the most emotionally healthy thing that could happen to both of them. The show seems to have repudiated him, but I still think Sam was right in season one when he was still planning to go back to Stanford.

Thank you for your comments--you've given me a lot to think about.

[yourlibrarian]

I love your way of putting that -- the "all at once" vs. piecemeal. It suits their personalities too, Dean action-oriented and impatient and Sam a long-term thinker and plotty.

[(Anonymous)]

More emotionally healthy, huh? How about mid-season 3 where he goes near insane after the trickster lets him out of the loop but kills Dean anyway. Did you see what he did? He didn't move on, he had papers and videos and pictures of the trickster everywhere, trying to track him and kill him, once he kills Bobby (not actually Bobby but could've been) the damn trickster appears and Sam practically begs for him to take him back to before he was killed, and once he wakes on the Wednesday, he gives Dean a huge, heartfelt hug. Almost cries, too. Sam is miserable without Dean, too. He just expresses it as anger.

[(Anonymous)]

*He expresses his grief as anger.

[yourlibrarian]

I think the problem with talking about "love" is that it may mean entirely different things to different people, so that no two are exactly the same. Their personality types may be similar and thus their forms of expression may line up. But really, it's a basket of emotions whose contents varies, and it's also very culturally influenced. I remember reading a few years ago the results of a study that looked at how often parents touched their children, and among cooler cultures it might be once or twice and hour and among warmer ones, every 2-3 minutes. I imagine if you swapped the kids and parents of those cultures, there would be a lot of distress involved in terms of how their behavior was interpreted.

I thought this was curious:
But most often we see Sam's love not as something that comes spontaneously from Sam, but as a response to Dean

I wasn't clear how you could see Sam's feelings as something that were reactive specifically to Dean, and not Dean's as something that were equally reactive. I think, for example, if one looks at Dean's feelings about his parents their origin becomes a lot clearer.

[rusty_halo]

I wasn't clear how you could see Sam's feelings as something that were reactive specifically to Dean, and not Dean's as something that were equally reactive. I think, for example, if one looks at Dean's feelings about his parents their origin becomes a lot clearer.

I think what I was getting at there was that Dean's love for Sam is the primary thing driving his character and the actions he takes within the story (often in negative ways because his love is so unhealthily codependent). Sam's story is driven more by other things (his need to assert his independence, his grappling with moral issues, and his struggle with his own anger and arrogance).

I'm not saying that Dean's love for Sam is "better," but that I don't find Sam's love for Dean as compelling. Your comment did make me realize that a lot of this is due to the way the narrative is structured; Dean's love for Sam is more integral to the nature and development of his character than Sam's love for Dean is.