Grace

It’s constantly brought up throughout season one that John and Sam were always arguing and butting heads, and in s1, ep 8; ‘bugs’, it’s explicitly said by Sam to Dean that “Dad never treated you like that. You were perfect. He was all over my case,” when the brothers saw Matt being yelled at by his Dad, and Sam asked Dean if that reminded him of anyone, to which Dean denied ever being treated like that.

In that same conversation, it’s also mentioned that John yelled at Sam for simply wanting to be a normal kid, shown here;

Dean: “maybe he had to raise his voice but sometimes you were out of line,”

Sam: “Right, like when I said I’d rather play soccer than learn bow hunting,”

To add to that, John showed little sympathy towards Sam as a child, shown in the pilot episode, when Sam says to Dean “I told Dad I was scared of the thing in my closet and he gave me a 45… I was nine years old.”

On top of the lack of understanding and total disregard for Sam’s wants and needs, John frequently abandoned Sam as he grew older, leaving him in motel rooms for days at a time while he and a teenage Dean went on hunts, mentioned in s11, ep 8, ‘just my imagination.’

It’s also heavily implied that after Sam left for Stanford, John cut off all contact with him. He practically disowned Sam because he wanted to go to college instead of hunt monsters. Does that really come across as favouritism? No. I don’t think so.

Sam constantly felt like he wasn’t good enough for John and that his Dad hated him/wasn’t proud of him in the same way he was proud of Dean, which even if that wasn’t necessarily the case, the very fact that Sam felt that way shows us how he was deprived of any support for his achievements and how John blatantly ignored all his hard work because it didn’t align with what John had planned for Sam.

I feel like this idea of Sam being John’s favourite mostly comes from that scene from s1, ep 18; ‘something wicked’, where we see John hugging a 6-year-old Sam after he almost got killed by the shtriga, getting mad at Dean for leaving Sam unattended, which while is unfair on Dean and is bad parenting on John’s part, it can’t be used to sum up their entire family dynamic. It’s one little snippet into their lives, and there are countless other scenes about their childhood where Sam is very clearly mistreated by John.

Now this is not to say that John was a perfect father to Dean, because he was far from it, but John definitely didn’t favour Sam over Dean. If anything it’s the opposite, and it really bugs me when people say otherwise.

Sorry if this turned into a little bit of a rant post, I’m just so sick of everyone finding reasons to hate on Sam and baby/feel bad for Dean.

I feel like a lot of people on this platform focus on romance and fanon ideas, which is totally fine, I just feel there’s so so much more to this show that isn’t talked about enough, and that romance was never really supposed to be the main subject.