Girl, I keep coming back to this post that you made
https://www.tumblr.com/faiiryfall/785774144945045504/not-a-req-just-a-thought-yesterday-i-finished-sp
It’s so beautifully worded and so painfully accurate inside the supernatural universe, you have an amazing brain and vocabulary truly
Do you have more thoughts like this that you could share? It’s so interesting to me to see the different takes of different fans on overlooked topics of the series
first of all, thank you so much 🥹🩷 that’s such a sweet compliment, especially because i feel like half of my supernatural thoughts are just me rambling myself into emotional damage and then going “does this make sense?” lmao but okay, since you asked for more thoughts… i actually have one that might be a little controversial...
i don’t know if you guys know this, but i only got into supernatural in the summer of 2024. i started this blog in december of the same year while i was still finishing the show, probably around season 7 or 8. so before i had fully formed my own opinions, i consumed a lot of fandom opinions first. and because of that, there were things i just accepted as canon because everyone talked about them like they were canon.
one of those things was john winchester being physically abusive to sam and dean.
and i want to say this carefully because i’m saying it from a place of privilege. i grew up in a healthy home without that kind of abuse, so i’m not trying to speak over anyone who sees patterns in john that feel familiar or real to them. i also fully agree that john was not a good father in many ways. he was emotionally damaging. he parentified dean. he raised his boys like soldiers. he made revenge the center of their childhood. he left dean with responsibilities no child should have, and he made sam feel like wanting a normal life was betrayal.
!!! so no, this is not me defending john winchester !!!
but now that i’m rewatching the show, i keep asking myself: where is the canon evidence that john beat the shit out of them? where is the proof that when dean was growing up, john would hit him? where is the actual moment that tells us when sam talked back, john shut him up with a belt? and i’m asking genuinely, because i had that idea buried so deep in my head that i treated it as fact. then i started rewatching and realized, oh... i don’t know if i ever actually saw it in the text, or if i absorbed it from fandom.
john was harsh. john was obsessive. john was neglectful. john absolutely damaged them. but physical abuse, specifically? i’m not sure the show gives us enough to say that is canon.
and again, please debunk me if i’m forgetting something. genuinely. because i binge-watched the show the first time while working/writing/playing games, so maybe i missed a line or a moment that confirms it. but from what i’m seeing now, it feels more like a fandom interpretation that became so repeated it turned into accepted truth.
what i do see in canon is a man who loved his kids badly. dangerously. selfishly. a father who thought protecting them meant hardening them. a father who confused survival with parenting. a father who probably thought raising them to be useful, disciplined, and tough was the same thing as raising them well.
and that’s tragic in a different way. because dean and sam are both good men. flawed, damaged, messy men, but still good men. they have manners. they have loyalty. they have a code. they care about people. they protect strangers. dean can be rough around the edges, but he’s also deeply respectful in ways that feel learned. sam is stubborn and angry and independent, but he still has this strong moral center.
and no, that doesn’t mean john did a good job. children can become kind despite bad parents. sometimes they become good because they know exactly what hurt feels like and they don’t want to become the person who caused it. but i do think john gave them something. maybe not softness. maybe not safety. maybe not the childhood they deserved. but values? discipline? that ugly winchester sense of duty? yeah, i think he did.
so my current take is: john winchester was a bad father, but maybe not in every single way fandom sometimes paints him. emotionally abusive? yes. neglectful? yes. damaging? absolutely. physically abusive? i’m not saying impossible, but i’m not sure i see enough canon evidence to claim it as fact.
an example of what i mean is season 1 ep 14, nightmare. that episode literally gives us max who grew up with a physically abusive father and uncle. and sam who is usually the first person to call john out, who has the most resentment toward him, who spends so much of the early seasons angry at the way they were raised—looks at that situation and says, “we were lucky to have dad.” and i think that matters. because if john had been beating them too, that comparison would feel very different. but the way the episode frames it, sam sees max’s home life as something separate from his own. he recognizes abuse there in a way that makes him look back at john and go, yeah, our dad was harsh, our life was messed up, but it wasn’t that.
because then the horror isn’t “john was a monster who hated his kids.” it’s “john loved his kids, and his love still hurt them.” again, john was not father of the year. absolutely not. the man did damage. but i do think there’s a difference between “john was emotionally neglectful, obsessive, militaristic, and damaging” to “john beat his sons growing up.”
and from what i’m seeing on rewatch, the show seems much more interested in john as a father who loved his children badly than john as a straightforward physical abuser. which, honestly, makes the whole thing more complicated and more painful to me.
