And in re your thinking on Sam's transformation -- I put the lines you quote in there knowing they would be ambiguous. Does Sam indeed think himself weak, and externalize his own strength? Does Sam want Dean to have participated in this powerful event in his life, despite that not being true? Is Sam trying to give Dean a reason to forgive him? (It wasn't really that bad; it was necessary; I couldn't have done it without you.) The phrasing also appeals to my sense of Sam as faintly melodramatic, when speaking about himself.

Ultimately, your interpretation of those lines will color how you feel about the whole story: Sam committed a terrible crime against Dean, that might have been necessary. If you can totally and instantly forgive Sam for what he did, then the lines you quote above are unnecessary and even deleterious to your reading enjoyment. If you can't, if you're still angry on Dean's behalf, those lines are there to let Sam express his awareness of, and maybe regret for, his ambiguous position.

And after all, I do think in some wise it's true: Sam is lesser without his brother by his side. That's true of Dean too.

In re point 1, you're working much harder than I meant you to do!

In re point 2,

And after all

I think you are very hard on Jo. If you'll look at the wedding-dress scene again, you'll see that it's Dean who initiates sex to change the subject, not Jo. And really -- she totally would go out alone if he didn't want to go. That's just who she is. And if he can't explain himself -- and I tell you explicitly that he can't -- then how is she to know what's going on in his head?

As for your negative take on hunting -- Jo has a different opinion, and, this is much more important: so did Dean, when he was himself. He "embraced the life" of hunting (cf. the Lenore episode). He loves that shit. The problem isn't that Jo and Dean have different needs, hunting-wise; the problem is that Dean is not himself.

How that plays out in the later chapters, I leave up to you. Jo has a relatively positive vision of parents who hunt (John Winchester) and a powerful counterexample of how it can go wrong (her father). But if you'll look at what she and Dean actually say, when they argue over Betty's head, they're never actually arguing the merits of "we should/should not hunt because X." Dean just flips out and starts yelling, and never listens to her point of view. There are a lot of reasonable arguments against hunting that he could use -- he doesn't use them.

Oop, sorry, I killed the thread.

Unless you are all staring agog at "Spider Bites on All Your Lovers"?

(N.b. Very much not for the prudish or those with heart conditions.)

[link]

When it comes to Sam's act, I fall into the terrible, but necessary end of things. Sam, being very much like John, would feel that ends justify, but don't excuse, the means. And in my Blood, Love, Rhetoric school of Winchester Analysis, Dean's the blood, and both Sam and John understand this, even if Dean doesn't. I mean, don't get me wrong: I thought it horrific. I twitched a lot. But I understood it. To me, those lines served the dual purpose of acknowledging what he'd done, and explaining to Dean that all this time, he'd never been abandoned. I view Sam as a character as very strong, but in a different way than Dean, and in a way that Sam wouldn't necessarily view as a strength. They do complete each other nicely.

I think Sam has options for the first time since Jessica's death, but he has to learn to be Sam again, just as much as Dean has to learn how to be Dean.

And as for Jo, the only one of them who never doesn't know who she is and what she wants, I kind of ached for her, because there's Dean, only not, and Jo never buys him as Sam, never quite believes the facade. She's Jo, she's the freak with the knife, and what she wants and needs is what the Dean she first fancied wanted and needed. And at the end, she's maybe the most lost of all, because Dean has Sam and Betty, and Sam has Dean (and I expect that his fellow Luck Children will remain in his life in some way, and he's Sam, and so he's able to expand beyond family), and Jo has... maybe Betty (well, she has Betty, but dude, the favoritism of late baby/early toddlerhood is HORRIBLE and gutting to a parent, and Betty's Daddy's girl right now), and maybe part of Dean, but not the part that clung to her and wanted someone, anyone to stay.

Sigh.

Oh, CHARACTERS.

Unless you are all staring agog at "Spider Bites on All Your Lovers"?

Nope! Well, you know. Umm. I would be, but I've stared agog at it a lot. So, you know, composing its pimp post as I speak.

Suffice it to say it brings new meaning to Sex as a Weapon, and that (spoilers for Six of One) doing read-throughs on both stories at the same time last week/this weekend, with all the Dean mindfuckery, gave me nightmares.

Unless you are all staring agog at "Spider Bites on All Your Lovers"?

Are you spying on me? Because I can brush my hair.

OMG, can you see me through my screen??

(I started "Spiders" at work, which was a Mistake, because I skipped cheerfully past the warning, and have only just finished it now.)

And after all, I do think in some wise it's true: Sam is lesser without his brother by his side. That's true of Dean too.

Oh, I definitely agree. I think it's been shown over and over and over again that the two of them are stronger together than they ever are apart (or maybe that's the huge amount of fanfic I've read bleeding into the memory of the episodes I've seen; I'm beginning to lose track).

And I do think that what Sam did to Dean may have been necessary and expedient, but it was deeply, deeply awful (as was Jo's complicitness with it). I also believe that Dean is equally capable of ruthlessly doing whatever he believes is needed to protect Sam, whether or not Sam would want him to do it. So I think that if it were required, Dean would do something similar.

As for Jo and hunting, it's not that I don't think she wasn't capable of doing it, or shouldn't be allowed to do it, at least while they were in Florida. My personal take on it (and yes, I know this is my personal viewpoint), is that once she has a baby reliant upon her she owes it to that child to not be out risking herself chasing ghoulies and ghosties. Much less following her plan of putting the baby in a carseat, Dean on the roof of the car, and herself out in the field.)