Posted in support of The IJ Asylum Meme (January 2009 Edition)
It’s never struck me from interviews that Eric Kripke is really all that interested in the characters of Sam and Dean. I don’t mean to say he is disinterested but simply that it’s never been a focus of his. I gathered this from the DVD extras on S1 and it was pretty much confirmed from watching the Paley Festival session. For him SPN began as a case files type of story and the characters were literally an afterthought after his original idea was scrapped. I also gathered that it’s really Bob Singer, other writers and even Kim Manners who are more interested in the character exploration that most fic writers also latch onto, and who are largely responsible for fleshing out Sam and Dean. By comparison, for Joss Whedon the characters were everything and the story simply serviced our need to see the characters grow and and interact with one another.
I say this to explain why I think it’s impossible to determine from the outside what the intention actually was for Sam and Dean’s relationship because it seems to have been developed largely on the fly and with various hands at work on it. Certainly they were supposed to be both drawn together and yet antagonistic and I think that’s established pretty well in S1. But in watching “Asylum” (and “Skin”) in particular it seems to me that the relationship between the two was intended to be far more antagonistic than it was ever portrayed. While we can’t be too sure of the truth in what the shapeshifter tells Sam about how Dean resents him, as far as we can tell, Sam is being himself (if an enraged self) in Asylum when he tells Dean how much he hates him right back and is, in fact, willing to kill him. That’s a jump beyond annoyed, or resentful, the way anyone might feel about someone they’re in constantly close quarters with. At the end Sam tells Dean he didn’t mean it and it’s shrugged off, never to be spoken of again. My own sense was that Sam felt more guilty and alarmed at what he was capable of doing. This, after all, was a character who had never killed another person and who was as yet quite empathetic even with the spirits they hunted. You’d think that nearly killing anyone would have to truly shake him. ( Read more... )
Revising an essay I wrote about the similar positioning of Dean from Supernatural and Spike from the Buffyverse, I also looked at changes in Dean's character in S3 of the series.
Considering all the foreshadowing that goes on in Restless, (some of it, such as in Buffy’s dream, quite deliberate), I always found it curious that Spike does not appear and is not referenced at all in Buffy’s future. By this time Mutant Enemy was definitely considering a Spuffy storyline for S5. I thought I’d take a crack at puzzling some things out about it.
Wondering about the answer made me realize something else. Spike couldn’t have been in Buffy’s dream because it would have detracted from the theme. ( Each dream represented the weaknesses/fears of that character )
As ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
buffyversetop5 is wrapping up its Classic Recs run this year, I will be interested to see if 2007 will bring more stories about a post-Shansu Spike. Given that AtS: After the Fall will start next month, the trend that seemed to build in 2005 may die out. There were stories about a Shansu!Spike before AtS S5 even started, but knowing what happens in the alley may change things. In any case I’m still hoping for a definitive version. I’ve read wonderful interpretations of Souled!Spike and Chipped!Spike, PreChip!Spike, newly-raised Spike, William, Jerk!Spike and Romantic!Spike. But so far, while there have been some enjoyable takes at Shansu!Spike, I don’t know if any of them have been completely satisfying. And I wonder if this is because, well, we really have no idea what he’d be like. We’ve seen all those other incarnations in canon, but from the sound of it we will never see a Shansu!Spike, so that one is left ( completely to our imagination )
I was recently asked to revise an older meta post I made on this topic and decided I would post it here as well.
I was having a discussion with someone about why some ships were heavily written and read and others such as Sparmony were practically non-existent which begged an exploration about why Spander became the ( fourth most popular ship in the Buffyverse )
It always seemed significant to me that Spike’s final task was to save a baby in the AtS finale, I just wasn’t sure why.
( For what it’s worth, here’s a possibility for consideration. )