What I meant is, in S2 the plotline for the first half was basically, oh man, Dean, your brother might go dark side, and if you don't save him you might have to kill him. But it's one of those things where like, lol, when was there really ever likelihood of that? Arguably Dean took John's word seriously and anguished over this and whatever, sure. But that never seemed like a particularly strong tension within the season (2x09, 2x14). Sam never went all THAT dark side, and Dean never got all THAT close to having to kill him, per John's words. So the tension of that was largely separate from what S2 actually ended up doing. I was saying that if S2 had acknowledged that, and cast 2x21 as this moment where it specifically retailored that warning, expanded it to 'well, someone might have to do bad dark things in order to Save Same, whom you don't necessarily have to kill BUT you do have to decide whether you want to upset the balance of nature like that,' (which actually does have a lot of S2 resonance), that would have tied up better, and would have made these things thematically coherent. Since they didn't, really, but they spent all those weeks making such a big deal out of Dean's Secret From Sam in S2, it reads to me like they hadn't really pinned down these things when or as they were writing them, and just kind of changed their minds and made it up as they went along. Which, it's TV, that is kind of what you do! And what SPN does to some degree every year. I don't really hold that against anything, because it's kind of part of the medium, really. But then no one ever seems to want to recognize that about in S2, so in the meantime I've gotten obsessed about it and have Opinions. XD
Anyway, in the context of B_L's fic I was saying that her emphasis on the part by bringing out these visions of Samifer, and by guiding John's obsession by making it in this fic very pointedly about trying to keep his son from that, and his trying to skirt the very full-frontal possibility of this 2014!verse alternate timeline, the fic gets back to that sentiment from the first half of S2 and reorients it in a way that I find useful in elaborating and rediscovering that particular thread of canon.
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What I meant is, in S2 the plotline for the first half was basically, oh man, Dean, your brother might go dark side, and if you don't save him you might have to kill him. But it's one of those things where like, lol, when was there really ever likelihood of that? Arguably Dean took John's word seriously and anguished over this and whatever, sure. But that never seemed like a particularly strong tension within the season (2x09, 2x14). Sam never went all THAT dark side, and Dean never got all THAT close to having to kill him, per John's words. So the tension of that was largely separate from what S2 actually ended up doing. I was saying that if S2 had acknowledged that, and cast 2x21 as this moment where it specifically retailored that warning, expanded it to 'well, someone might have to do bad dark things in order to Save Same, whom you don't necessarily have to kill BUT you do have to decide whether you want to upset the balance of nature like that,' (which actually does have a lot of S2 resonance), that would have tied up better, and would have made these things thematically coherent. Since they didn't, really, but they spent all those weeks making such a big deal out of Dean's Secret From Sam in S2, it reads to me like they hadn't really pinned down these things when or as they were writing them, and just kind of changed their minds and made it up as they went along. Which, it's TV, that is kind of what you do! And what SPN does to some degree every year. I don't really hold that against anything, because it's kind of part of the medium, really. But then no one ever seems to want to recognize that about in S2, so in the meantime I've gotten obsessed about it and have Opinions. XD
Anyway, in the context of B_L's fic I was saying that her emphasis on the part by bringing out these visions of Samifer, and by guiding John's obsession by making it in this fic very pointedly about trying to keep his son from that, and his trying to skirt the very full-frontal possibility of this 2014!verse alternate timeline, the fic gets back to that sentiment from the first half of S2 and reorients it in a way that I find useful in elaborating and rediscovering that particular thread of canon.