The thing about spn is over and over for 15 years it asked the ethical question "is it a character flaw to want to escape your abusive family?", and over and over for 15 years it looked us all dead in the eye and answered "yes".
Along with all the anger, there actually is a lot of moving personal history and good analysis in the tags, and I especially wanted to peer review two sets of tags:
From @deanwinchestergenderenvy:
I think @deanwinchestergenderenvy is right that it is textually there that Sam tries to distance himself from his family background and the way he was raised. It's especially obvious at the beginning, but you can see it to some extent throughout the show (e.g. Lebanon, where without John's death, Sam becomes Lawyer Bill Gates, but also in things as minor but imo clearly class-coded as the brothers' needling each other about salad vs hamburgers or dad rock vs podcasts about the protestant reformation). And I do also think spn often presents Sam's distancing himself from his roots as a moral failing, and that for a shorthand to describe that (alleged) failing, classism is as good a word as any.
@wendibird is not the only one who mentioned the crab bucket metaphor, and I think it's on point. Is Sam classist to attempt to escape the bucket if the other crabs don't (or at least vigorously, if not always 100% convincingly, claim not to) want to leave?
Spn's class analysis sucks. The vibes, for many of us who grew up poor/lower working class in the US, are impeccable. They remind us so, so much of home. Ngl the nostalgia for early-years!Dean's life specifically is so powerful for me it sometimes makes me cry. But its actually not awesome-like-Superman to work for shit (or no) wages in unsafe conditions to benefit people living in homes you'll never be able to afford with lives so divorced from yours you'll only ever be able to imagine them as fiction. You're just being exploited. And its actually not classist to be heartbroken your loved ones are dying like flies of preventable causes around you or to wish your life expectancy was at least the shitty national norm or that you had a job whose benefits included insurance. We all deserve to escape poverty and systemic (and family) abuse together.
Any analysis of whether Sam is classist or not in the end comes back to Stanford and his attempt to escape hunting and his family inheritance of violence and abject poverty. Fans who feel angry about him dissing Dean's EMF meter or sitting on the hood of Dean's car complaining about Dean hustling to support them both; yeah I hear ya'. Sam's being kind of a douche there. But his desperate prison break just failed and cost him the life of yet another loved one, and he's grappling with the fact that he's not gonna make it--he's not gonna get out, and Dean's right there, telling him this objectively awful marginalized life is wonderful. He just lost the biggest, most devastating argument of his life. Of course he's pissy about it.
For any of y'all who want a somewhat better class analysis of a real life equivalent of Sam and Dean's childhood, I can't recommend Liz Murray's Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard enough (no link because I don't want to give tumblr grounds to deactivate me, but its available pirated if you can't afford it). I actually hated that book with all my heart lol. I hated how triggering it was and how she found some things shocking that seemed normal to me, and how deeply the author felt like a class traitor to me and how bullshit I knew that feeling was. But I still recommend it as an antidote to spn, because wanting out is okay. It's normal and fair and just.
