an older brother who's living kind of edgy/unconventionally

Well, there is credit card fraud and then there is life-o-crime. (Also, Dean is cuter.) Also also, I'd posit that Dean plays the role of the family-oriented guy, whereas it's the younger brother on Prison Break who is "All for you! I do it all for you!!"

a younger brother with the more conventional successful life and who's life is turned upside down by events relating to family.

I will laff and laff if Sam has a full-torso tattoo.

I will laff and laff if Sam has a full-torso tattoo.

As long as we get many a chance to find out, I promise to be a very good girl.

Reposted in a more correct thread:

Sure - maybe part of the demon powers. . ..

Older brother has the whole - stumbled into mass conspiracy thing in one show vs. younger brother with strange demonic destiny in the other show.

I wonder what is worse, to be picked out as a victim of a powerful conspiracy to defraud, debauch, and other wise do evil to the American people*, or to be picked out as His Very Own by a hellbeast with glowy orange eyes?

(* I have no idea what the conspiracy on Prison Break actually is, and that's okay because I'm not sure the writers do either.)

I don't know that I buy the Michael is more family-oriented than Linc, especially given their different orientations to LJ.

Wasn't Linc an absentee father? Michael's doings make even most normal familial associations pale before the light of his obsessiveness.

I think your recollection is correct. I meant more since the start of the series. I don't think it was insignificant that Michael had to be convinced to go get him out of the Court House, even if there's the impulsive/planning (or big picture/immediacy) dicotomy between Linc and Michael.

Because, really, the decision to get Linc out seems to be about the only emotionally-dictated one Michael's had (perhaps apart from sending the swan to Doctor Chick Whose Name I Disremember).

I'm not sure exactly how that dichotomy maps to the Winchester Boys, though.

I make no inherent association between emotionally-dictated decisions and family-oriented ones. I think it can also be argued that the size of Michael's decision to free Linc left no room for any other emotional reactions.

Perhaps not for him, but I think a lot of people who would be the sort of person to make that decision would be the sort of person to be thwarted in that action by other decisions they had to make (to be true to themselves).

In my head it's not so much an inherent association as an assumed correlation, which is certainly not as strong an argument, but would be my assumption for a character, until shown otherwise by the text.

until shown otherwise by the text

The text shows me that Michael's family-dictated decisions massively overwhelm instincts for freedom and protection from physical and mental danger. I see nothing that Linc has done to rival that, and really, it's not sane to be rivalling what Michael has done.

Emotion or no, Michael's Batgod crazy to do what he did, and family-orientation lies at the seat of that.