This Is A Very Out Of The Blue Post For Me To Make, But Thirteen Hours Ago Numerous A-list Celebrities

Tell me why scream is just a bunch of people slashing up other people in a mask and costume yet i deem it a comfort series

One of my moots on tiktok told me Maureen Prescott looks like Stu in a wig and I’ve been fucking gone ever since

this is gonna be so long for no reason i know it already but i’m painfully rewatching parts of season 8 and i really just will never be over how people severely underestimate the impact of trauma on sam’s whole arc in season 8, and that’s obviously because the writers were so fucking asleep at the wheel when it came to that, but it’s the only thing that makes everything slot into place in a way that makes sense (to me, at least). 

the thing with sam in season 7 is that it wasn’t his post-hell arc the way season 4 contained dean’s post-hell arc: sam is still functionally in hell in season 7 in at least some way shape or form - in other words, up until the last 5 episodes of the season, sam is experiencing some form of hell-related trauma, not the after-effects, but the actual thing. it may have been psychosis, but as we saw, it was real to him and frequently debilitating. so that makes season 8 sam’s real post-hell arc, compounded with the sudden and confounding loss of dean (his “stone number one”) at the end of season 7, again, barely 5 episodes after sam’s 17-episode long psychotic break ended. 

sam canonically (per jared, not the writers, of course) has PTSD from his experience in lucifer’s cage and we see that manifest in more understandable ways in later season when he’s faced with lucifer again, but it has to exist before then even if left unacknowledged by the narrative. but the season 7 hallucifer arc is in itself traumatic and not just a response to the older trauma from the cage because his mind is at all times trying to convince himself he’s still in the cage. that barely ends before he loses his brother again. so that’s a double dose of trauma and sam has to deal with both at the same time. that’s what gets us to a sam that is so unable to function in his life alone that he runs away from every responsibility and settles down into a pretense of normalcy with amelia. it’s not just grief or losing dean but effectively the first time his mind is not actively dealing with the trauma of the cage and instead now in post-trauma mode.

PTSD manifests itself differently in different people but it certainly can cause a debilitating fear of change, as after experiencing trauma people seek a sense of security and stability, so losing the “rock” that he had throughout his traumatic experience in season 7 (dean) so soon after he finally “escaped” hell would obviously send him into that kind of spiral, where he can only stabilize once he’s found some solid ground to re-orient himself and someone to effectively replace dean with. the need to feel safe, to feel secure, stable, in control, are all very real post-traumatic things.  and then dean coming back is a similarly disorienting experience for similar reasons, resulting in him wanting things to be the way that he got used to while dean was gone. 

moving on to benny, the thing that bothered sam about benny is, as astutely pointed out by jared and never really acknowledged by the writers, the hypocrisy of dean being able to have this monster friend and expect him to be trusted automatically when he was deeply mistrusted for his relationship with ruby and then berated to hell and back (LITERALLY) for having been stupid enough to trust her. now having difficulty trusting others is also very much a symptom of PTSD in people who were victimized by others which is something that just generally applies here in my view.

but for sam specifically, this is the origin point of his trauma - he went to hell because this, trusting ruby, ended the world and made him feel guilty enough to think that was his sole fault. this is compounded by the fact that for sam, prior to the in-between year between 7 and 8, the events of season five are basically the last time his mind and memory were functioning in a linear and normal way. for half of season 6 his soul is in hell and for the remaining half he has no memories of either thing except brief flashbacks and then suddenly he has all the memories again, centuries of memories, but then trauma is destroying his psyche and messing with his sense of reality etc. and season five is when he was being raked through the coals for this very thing, which led him in an incredibly, fully direct way (“i let him out, i gotta put him back in”) to the source of the horrifying trauma that his mind is forced to process. now PTSD obviously causes memory issues in and of itself so adding that to the absolute mess that sam’s mind/memory is because of the above, it’s hard to say objectively what’s “fresh” in sam’s mind vs. what isn’t, but the causal link between “trust monster” and “almost unsurvivable trauma” is definitely present. 

that obviously adds another dimension to sam wanted to be “pure” and rid himself of the thing inside him (demon blood) that, to him, was the root cause of all of this - if you didn’t have the evil blood, they wouldn’t have been able to get to you, you wouldn’t have deserved to go to hell - but also would apply to wanting to scrub himself of everything done to him and his traumas and become clean again, whole again, instead of the mangled mess he sees himself to be after hell. and it of courses adds another dimension to my beloved sacrifice church scene because this entire time sam would have been coping and struggling with unimaginable trauma compounded by the loss of dean in the only way he can, trying his best not to hurt someone again the way he did the last time he lost dean, and he’s being berated and blamed again somehow for doing it the exact opposite way this time as last time - having lost not only the security he built with amelia but not being able to find any solid ground the whole season with dean either, who was capricious at best with his brotherly affection due to his own issues post-purgatory and his woundedness and blame towards sam for not looking for him - and then the rules of who to trust and not trust are flipped on him but just before the church scene dean again brings up trusting ruby like it was a cardinal sin but only when sam does it - resulting in a desperate breakdown at the end of the season where he doesn’t think that anything he does can ever be the right choice because he’s done diametrically opposite things in the same situations and been berated both ways, but now i’m getting off topic. anyway season 8 sam didn’t do anything wrong in his life ever 

Unpopular opinion but I miss Samandriel and want him back :( He was my favorite angel, other than Cas and Hannah, and I wish brainwashed Cas didn't obliterate him into the Empty

Been havin' bad luck all of my days, yes

Born Under A Bad Sign by Albert King + Jack Kline

Sam being adorably weird.

if they were allowed to swear on supernatural that would've been a fun opportunity to introduce lore that angels can't swear like what happens when you're in heaven in the good place. cas would be like "dean, it appears that we're in, uh.." "deep fucking shit?" "an unfortunate situation, yes"

I don't know if this is an unpopular or rare perspective on Jack, and I'm a huge over-analyzer, but I think that he purposefully makes himself more naive as a way of making himself likeable/less intimidating.

Like at first he's genuinely new to everything and doesn't understand what's going on, but I think he starts "masking" fairly early as he notices people react well to certain things and react poorly to others.

An example that stands out to me is his expression and the way he holds himself.

At the start, he has a "scary" expression reminiscent of the Kubrick stare. His head is tilted down, chin in, and eyes furrowed. It seems to be his default state, as he reverts to it when he's overwhelmed or just focused strongly on something else, like when he uses his powers.

However, at the police station he ends up getting his first positive feedback (lack of fear/nervous response) from his body language

Being down on the ground, he looks up at the officer and ends up with his head tilted up and his eyes unfurrowed. With his mouth full his expression also changes compared to how slack his face was before.

Then when he wakes up in the cell with Sam, he's back to his normal expression and angry about Sam tazing him, and Sam apologizes and explains why.

What's interesting to me is what Jack does next -

He sits crosslegged like he did earlier, despite being on a bench, and apologizes back. Because he just learned from Sam that if you hurt someone and regret it and want them to forgive you, you apologize and explain why it happened.

And he gets into the last pose that worked for him - legs crossed and tilting his head up, because it makes him look less threatening. And it works, it relieves some of Sam's obvious fear.

(part 1)