GWAR are... GWAR. Jilli should explain them.

because if he's not trying, he's not failing and breaking thing

Even with this, I think the sticking points for me are both Dean and Kevin, and how quickly Sam seems to have given up. (my reading of Kevin's calls was that they ended 6 months ago, and spanned a few months before that at least.) I wouldn't have had any problem with Sam just retiring from hunting, but to me as things stand now, it feels like they set it up as Sam saying "I was alone and it was hard, so I just immediately stopped trying, even though my brother and a prophet of the lord were at stake."

In addition to the fact that in my world, Winchesters don't stop trying on such a massive scale, this is in comparison to Dean being in purgatory and having to fight monsters every day. I don't want Dean to be fucked up AND have to (feel like he needs to) act as Sam's conscious/motivation. It makes the brother dynamic feel too unbalanced to me, at least right now.

It makes the brother dynamic feel too unbalanced to me, at least right now.

I don't see where it was ever really balanced, though, not long term. And you don't see Dean's plan to say yes to Michael as epic giving up? It was sacrificial, yeah, but it would have been essentially suicide.

And you don't see Dean's plan to say yes to Michael as epic giving up?

but it was a last resort, after everything else failed.

Untrue! Because later they made another plan that almost worked. Sam certainly hadn't given up at that point.

okay, it was a almost last resort. :)

Charlie Jane would have called it suicide, but I think he did it because he couldn't work out how to save everyone, but this way he could save half the people. Do you think the part where he burnt his brain out was his motivation? Or a side effect? If it's not a motivation, it's coincidentally suicide, and not the same as stopping because you don't want to fight any more. When Sam did the Keith thing, I felt the larger world was at stake.

Like Lee, I do feel an imbalance. I don't want Sam to have to grovel for Dean's forgiveness because he doesn't know how to act "right" when his brother isn't around to be a compass. I want him to be the sensible guy he was at the end of season 5, whose head had never been further out of his ass...then again, he told Dean to quit after he left, so maybe he was always going to punk out and I was wrong to respect him.

I don't want to be wrong. I want to see that he regretted it. I *hate* curtain fic, because I never buy any of the saccharine or empty reasons they give for the boys to stop fighting.

And, hey! Now half of them are Kripked, and I just got onscreen what I won't read in fic. Yay?

My fingers are crossed for another shoe falling sometime soon. Threesome spit-roasting in purgatory is merely a start at narrative redemption.

Do you think the part where he burnt his brain out was his motivation? Or a side effect?

What part was that?

he told Dean to quit after he left, so maybe he was always going to punk out and I was wrong to respect him.

Maybe that's where we differ. I don't believe just because Sam and Dean can do this job means they have to. We know that there are other hunters. The entire world isn't their responsibility every moment.

I will admit that ignoring the Leviathans was pretty rotten. They were also the Winchesters' responsibility, in lieu of Cas dealing with them, and that clearly wasn't going to happen at the end of last season, even before he went poof with Dean.

Yeah if he decide to drop hunting, I would expect him do it after going after Keith and the Ls. Or at least passing it on to another hunter. A doctor might retire in the middle of treating a patient with a difficult cancer but probably not without passing it along to another doctor he trusts. I'll give Sam a pass on not trying to get Dean back, because he saw him caught in a goo explosion. But if he was going to give up on Kevin and Leviathan I'd expect him to only do so after finding a substitute hunter. No substitute, then retire only after those last two cases. I don't see it character for Sam. That is why I was talking about Amelia beingthe vet and dead. Really I'm backing off of that casue I realize that is advocating fridging and, no - I don't want to that. But on top of Dean being dead, if Sam felt like his hunting was responsible for killing the woman he loved, that I could see driving him to quit and destroy his phones and so on.