5 Things To Celebrate About Sam
K all, these are gonna be hella random, because I was at a loss about what to write about so I just went through my screencaps searching for ideas. Ahaha. So thematically this is a bit helter-skelter. But oh well! Read on if you dare.
1. The first thing I wanna celebrate about Sam is his faith. There was a thread going around a month or so ago (with sunflowerchester and peanutbutterandbananasandwichs) about what we mean by Sam’s faith, what he actually has faith in, etc., and a lot of this is cribbed from what I said then.
I don’t think that Sam has a faith that is attached in any meaningful way anymore to personal deities (Judeo-Christian or otherwise) or to the goodness or strength of any supernatural beings. I think that once you’ve sat in a boardroom with a pantheon of annoyed and bored gods and goddesses; once you’ve seen God in a housecoat and demons have become things you fight by rote with things from a khaki bag – well, I think that creates just a profound disconnect with faith or belief in those beings. Sam knows them as things very different from their traditional conceptualisations and (more critically I suppose) knows them as things he can never, would never be able to trust. The supernatural isn’t something that Sam could see as salvific or transformative, not when it’s something that he saves people from. I don’t think he would have ever consciously *stopped believing* so much as he simply wouldn’t respond to it anymore because of his own experience of the world (natural and otherwise).
A lot of people talk about Sam’s faith in other humans and I agree with that. He believes in the people he loves and also has a really generous faith in the inherent possibility and strength of other people. But my headcanon is that he also has some sort of … hopeful agnosticism, I suppose, an undefined faith in some ultimate benevolence – to steal a line from Anne Rice, I think that Sam has faith ‘that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.’
2. Sam’s bitchface (told you this would be an erratic ride). There is literally nothing that gives me more joy in life than Sam’s bitchface. Not just because it’s cute (and omg it is); but for two other reasons. First it belongs to the part of Sam that’s witty and dry and a little removed, that’s able to observe people and situations with a sort of detached interest and curiosity. The part that laughs at things with Dean but also laughs at a few things Dean doesn’t think are funny – and, flip side, gets exasperated at things not because that’s the mood of the room (whatever room that happens to be and whoever happens to be in it), but just because he thinks it’s exasperating.
In this sense I think it’s also one of the places we’re able to see his inner life and feelings about things, his perspective on things and his sense of humour and pet peeves, even when he’s not talking much in the scene.
3. Sam’s intellectual focus.
This is a weird one, but hear me out. :) Think about all the times we see Sam researching or working on a case, putting notes together or searching the web or reading file folders ‘borrowed’ from police stations. Some of this will be just background reading or general web searches to narrow a field or check up on data, sure. But some of it, a lot of it, is coming up with effective search terms, eliminating things that don’t work, brainstorming and thinking outside the box to try to see patterns in a pile of data or draw lines between unrelated cases. It’s also a shit ton of lore, and we know that the lore the boys need to keep track of is always changing and evolving as they encounter new monsters etc. Some of it is in other languages, and in archaic forms of languages. Sometimes he’s reading old cases, filtering data and trying to find things that are significant but might not appear that way at first glance.
My point is that we see Sam doing stuff that requires both quite focused concentration and also stuff that requires pretty creative intellectual attention, and we see him doing all of it in a WILD variety of situations and places. At motel room tables, in diners and bars, in the front seat of the Impala, in the sunlight, in the dark, in long sessions or off the cuff moments, surrounded by people or alone … and often with the urgency of some immediate threat hanging over him, or some existential dread of a longer-term horror, or the memory of recent loss. He does it when he’s bone-tired and un-caffeinated and grieving and terrified and stressed.
Whereas I in order to work productively need to be fully fed and caffeinated in a not-completely-quiet-but-not-loud-environment and with no other serious stress hanging over me and then if I’m lucky I *might* be able to focus. So Sam’s intellectual focus is kind of goddamn sexy actually. (And themegalosaurus I think it also lends credence that in the universe where Sam becomes Hot Professor Sam he actually would make a very good academic, not just a hot one…)
I want to say right up front that I don’t mean to trivialise or gaslight any of the awful things that have happened to and around Sam over the course or the series. I think actually that the bigger trivialising danger is to think of them as things that ‘wrecked’ Sam (i.e. marred him permanently or left him inescapably broken), or to think of Sam as an eternal victim, the little boy lost of SPN. Sam isn’t the little boy lost.
And it’s not the fact that Sam has gone through awful shit that’s worth celebrating, or even just the fact that he’s gone through it and endured it and come out the other side; but (I think) it’s the variety and the kinds of things that he’s gone through. Because he is living witness to the fact that you can experience awful and complicated things and put yourself back together afterwards.
So yes, he survived the Cage, and the years of straight-up torture, which was torture, obviously, yes, but no one could fault him for it or read it as anything else. It was suffering for some greater good. But he also survived his year as Soulless!, his soul ripped from his body and then forced back in, and repressed, and dragged out, and all the psyche-shattering aftermath of that. And not just the mental pain and instability of it but the weight of the fact that it could be read as something else, that he wasn’t just the boy-king-made-martyr – that this was messier and more complex, because there was guilt (in him) and blame (from outside) and it wasn’t just hard but he had to do it without the legs he normally stood on.
And then of course his history with demon blood, the addiction and the rationalisation and the certain amount of good that was done and the claws it dragged down his guts. And he lived all of that, not as a victim but as the flawed, well-intentioned protagonist who tore the sky down on his own head; and I think (headcanon, you don’t have to think this :)) that there’s still a tiny bit of Sam’s head that feels like he’d do it again, that still understands exactly why he did it; and he has to live with that bit too.
But he isn’t the lost little boy. He has survived awful things but he’s more than the sum of them and more than the sum of the people that he was in them.
5. who the what? where why am I? //struggles to regain powers of speech//
The last thing to celebrate about Sam is that he’s hot af. I’m hesitant to start down this path, frankly, for fear of where it will end (answer: NEVER AND NOWHERE). This picture is a good start. But there’s also his hands and his shoulders and the way he sprawls on furniture, his profile and the way his hair hangs in his face, his jawline when he’s angry and how big he is and the way he pushes his hands into the pockets of his jacket. He is a constant source of gorgeous and if you wish to hear more you can just click on some of those links and read some of my long-winded and usually histrionic tags. :)
origamiaround
dededos
romaincrisis
snowghoul
vaporwave
blakekathryn
gummygunk
jacobvanloon
baratheonpilled
