#boykingsqueen

i dont think i legally can pick one favorite so. stargazing on the impala <3

“There’s something in the water, I do not feel safe.”

https://archiveofourown.org/works/1017905 Pretty sure this is the fic they're looking for!

Here it is noonie! The Ballad of the Invisible Boy by dollylux

i’m still doing them!I wish I had pets awwAlso wow! Concerts are always exciting! Hope you have fun!-i love your url because damn I wish I could be the boyking’s queen ahajhshs. your posts are amazing and everytime you’re in my notifications it makes me smile!!! also “Jared Padalecki is ruining my life”??? SUCH A MOOD SIS

bitchypersonbluebird

aborddelimpala

lizdoral79

gothpandawincest

samwinchesterappreciation

wetsammywinchester

dianadethemyscira

wellcometothedarkside

#okay but dean has a point#I'd like to see some meta on this

OK here's a stab at that (informed by many discussions with wiser heads than me): Dean is right that Sam has been playing mediator all season. He's always so willing to bend over backwards and see the other person's point of view that some of the Sam fans I know have been getting frustrated with it - because it effectively erases Sam's own wants/needs/opinions from the picture altogether. He's just, like, a compromise machine. But rather than (or at least as a possible alternative to) seeing this as bad writing (which is certainly... an explanation but less fun to get into than trying to make things work on a narrative level), it's possible to read this as a kind of emotional defence mechanism on Sam's part. If he concerns himself with the reconciling the conflicting desires of the people around him, it means that he doesn't have to take the time to consider or tackle his own. It's self-preservation (and it's particularly useful given that Sam's desires are usually thwarted. He really didn't need that reminder from Mary that we don't always get what we want).

This tendency of Sam's seems to be closely related to his tendency to process or talk about his own experiences primarily in the context of other people's - so for instance when he is talking to Magda about his own psychic powers, or when he is talking to the girl in the Hitler episode (who discovers she's Hitler's descendant) about having been chosen as Lucifer's vessel. Packaging up his own traumas as reassuring lessons for others is a way of making them into something useful (which is good) but is also I think born out of Sam's feeling that he's not, sort of, entitled to feel his own emotions on their own merit?

I wrote a fic in season 11 after Chuck came back which was sort of about this, about my feeling that Sam's refusal to get angry really with anybody on his own behalf is a symptom of the carefully constructed mental architecture that he uses to handle all the horrible shit that happens to him. (He'll get angry with Magda's mother for betraying her daughter but he's repeatedly shown willingness to work with the people who have violated, tortured and otherwise hurt him if he's told that it's necessary for the greater good.) He doesn't necessarily process his feelings, he swallows them up and deflects the question by focusing on the feelings of others around him. Thus also his tendency - and we see it in this clip for 12x14 - to be always asking how Dean feels, even (especially?) at moments when Sam's own feelings might legitimately be brought into question.

Does that all make sense? I don't know if it's all terribly obvious or terribly vague or... what, but I was interested to see Dean call Sam out on 'playing peacemaker' because it is definitely something that I see as a key constituent part of Sam's personality in later seasons, and it's something that I would love to call Sam out on because it's part of his tendency towards self-erasure (as a self-preservation strategy). If he doesn't ask himself what he really wants then he can't be unhappy about not getting it. But he also sort of thins down into this person who isn't the primary contact for anybody (I keep thinking about that scene in 'Regarding Dean' where he's like 'oh your phone is broken so I better tell Mom and Cas to contact me if they want us', like, Dean is the one everybody talks to by default - even Alicia ringing the Bunker in 12x09 asks for Dean), where he doesn't have his own car, he doesn't really ever assert himself meaningfully as a person with wants and interests and connections and desires of his own. (That's when the rare occasions where he does do that, like in the Lizzie Borden episode where he gets all nerdy serial killer happy, are such a delight.) I think that's why the fact that Mary seems to share all Dean's interests has been a sore point for so many Sam fans, too - her arrival (especially her wariness about hunting) seemed to suggest a space for alternative possibilities to open up in their lives, like even a space where 'not hunting' as a choice could be played out by ANYBODY, but it hasn't been realised.