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... )
giandujakiss has posted a wonderful Spike/Angel vid. Although the idea behind it was rather simple I really like what she did with her cuts and contrasts, and
it made me rather thinky in spots.