InsaneJournal

Yellow Fever, After School Special, On the Head of a Pin, bullying and PTSD

Dig my overly long and convoluted, thus Properly Academic title.

Dean is not a bully. They’ve joked about him being typically older brother ish in keeping the baby bro in line or indulging in a little playful pushing around with Sam but basically, because he and Sam are brothers and they know the other one can take it. He doesn’t treat strangers like that, his entire job, one which he happens to actually enjoy, is about protecting people who can’t protect themselves. He’s the one always defusing arguments before they turn into fistfights, he’s patient and gentle with children and terrified victims and he displays a general “live and let live” philosophy of life. He is utterly miserable about having been a torturer in Hell. Those times when Dean is behaving like a genuine bully towards people who absolutely do not deserve it always ring false and…grate…on viewers. People didn’t like his “sadistic gym teacher” turn or when he ridicules a child being bullied in “Wishful Thinking”. I mean, yes , we've seen him physically or verbally threaten people, but usually they are other hunters, or evil, or something like that. Not the victim of the week or random passing strangers.

Sam is actually the one with the bully potential, as we saw in After School Special, where tiny fourteen year old Sam actually becomes the school bully for a brief moment. Sam calls Dean “weak” and “pathetic” in “Sex and Violence”, letting viewers in on something he’s hinted about before-that he views himself as the emotionally and mentally stronger one. But in order for Sam to come into his own as “the strong one” he needs for Dean to step aside. Because in Sam’s eyes, only one of them gets to wear the pants and if Dean refuses to acknowledge this and step aside voluntarily, well, Sam’s just gonna have to make him. Sam needs someone else to be weak in order to feel strong, and that’s the mark of a potential bully.

Dean makes jokes about stuff he’d never actually do, Sam never does because when Sam decides to be bad, there is no kidding around. Sam is so repressed, and feels so powerless, that it gets all twisted up inside him and comes out even worse. There’s an episode in S3 when Sam , after having done something particularly cold and horrible, gives Dean this whole “you’re gonna be gone soon and I’ll have to be Dean for both of us” speech and Dean is genuinely shocked that Sam thinks he’s really like that.

During much of this season, I thought “Wow. A realistic portrayal of PTSD” when they were exploring Dean’s Hell experience. The fact that he seems a teensy bit more uh…breakable now, is part of the point. Or it *should be*. Sam sees Dean as being less than a proper man now, but Sam wasn’t exactly a reliable point of view in S4, Sam doesn’t understand and because he doesn’t, he went overboard trying to compensate for Dean’s “weakness”.

But then, like a lot of viewers, I sometimes got the impression the show didn’t grasp what Dean’s trauma meant. A lot of the time, they portrayed PTSD far more realistically than most shows with male characters suffering from it ever do. Other times, they turned to cruel and insensitive humor that seemed to view Dean’s pain as whiny and weak.

I mean, “Yellow Fever” is *hilarious* until you realize Dean’s genuinely terrified. I can't remember if that episode aired before or after he admitted to being a torture and that might make a difference.

But then you’ve got “On the Head of a Pin”, which is a really good exploration of Dean’s new issues and, as it’s been pointed out, is quite novel in its approach to the problem.