winterlive (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
winterlive) wrote2006-04-07 01:11 pm
winterlive) wrote2006-04-07 01:11 pm
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[ not quite yet ]
first, i'll sum up.
dean shouldn't have been playing mommy to little sammy all the time. they shouldn't have been left in the hotel room alone for three days. john shouldn't have yelled at him like that.
mary shouldn't be dead. a demon shouldn't be actively hunting john's children.
life sucks. get a helmet.1
okay. that was the summation, and now i explain.
people have been throwing around the word abuse. people are saying john is an abusive father. let me address that.
mirriam webster defines abuse as:
- : a corrupt practice or custom
- : improper or excessive use or treatment : MISUSE
- obsolete : a deceitful act : DECEPTION
- : language that condemns or vilifies usually unjustly, intemperately, and angrily
- : physical maltreatment
the u.s. department of health and human services tells people looking for signs of neglect to check if:
- the child shows signs of malnutrition or begs, steals, or hoards food.
- the child has poor hygiene: matted hair, dirty skin, or severe body odor.
- the child has unattended physical or medical problems.
- the child states that no one is home to provide care.
- the child or caretaker abuses drugs or alcohol.
nobody was home for three days. that's too long. so that counts, definitely.
the last point, i imagine, is where a lot of people will get hung up, but let's imagine for a second that we can ignore that. let's not discuss whether or not john is an alcoholic, for the time being. we'll put a pin in it, and address it at the end.
so.
neglectful parents, says the DHHS, are often ordinary parents under stressful circumstances. they specifically mention overwhelmed single parents with no support system. typical support systems include family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, religious community, support groups/forums and counseling services. john, as a man who travels the country hunting evil for a living, has access to precisely one of these - friends. pastor jim.
now. this is where this argument always breaks down. why doesn't john settle down in one town, get a real support system and raise his family like a normal person instead of constantly hunting monsters? what is his motivation there? why does he do it? and that's what you have to address if you're going to discuss this issue. and there is no way in the world that i will ever take someone seriously on discussing this issue if they haven't read papa's journals.
the journals are available on the website. i have transcribed them, here, and there are numerous other transcriptions available across the internet.
in these journals, john says, quote and sic:
Last night I was sitting in Sam and Dean's room, in the dark, ad I heard these noises... Mike said it was the wind, and okay, maybe it was, but it sounded almost like whispering, like someone was whispering a name, under their breath, again and again... like something is out there in the dark, watching us... I stayed up all night, just watching them, protecting them. From what, I don't know. Am I protecting them? Am I hurting them? I haven't let them out of my sight since the fire. Dean still hardly talks. I try to make small talk, or ask him if he wants to throw the baseball around. Anything to make him feel like a normal kid again. He never budges from my side - or from his brother. Every morning when I wake up, Dean is inside the crib, arms wrapped around baby Sam. Like he's trying to protect him from whatever is out there in the night.
regardless of whether you believe him about something being after them, or you think he's just paranoid, you can't doubt his intentions. john winchester's intentions are to protect his children.
he faces hard decisions every day about how to raise his kids, harder than most of us or our parents ever had to make. his circumstances are extraordinary, the exception to the rule. but his motivations are crystal clear.
so why doesn't he give his kids an ordinary life? because he believes, and not without evidence, that if he stays in one place for too long, his kids will be in danger. and he places their continued survival above considerations like whether nine years old is too young to be looking after your brother. that is a hard fucking choice, i won't tell you it isn't. but he made it, and i couldn't possibly fault him.
he can't get a babysitter. you can't explain to a babysitter why if someone turns the knob on your door, you should have a gun in your hand when you check to see who's there.
in a world with dopplegangers and mind control, there'll always be an outside chance that pastor jim's place isn't going to be safe for them. they're safer with john than they are anywhere else. they're safer together.
the strega hunt in something wicked was planned to last one night, no more. three days was unplanned for, just like it was unplanned that the fucking thing would be resistant to normal bullets and be able to move too fast to track.
i don't know how john showed up when he did, but i know he wasn't using the kids for bait. leaving aside questions of whether he would do such a thing, if he'd been lurking around the hotel waiting for the strega to show up, he would have a) seen dean leaving and bawled him out for it, and/or b) seen the strega arrive, and showed up just as it started feeding. which he did not.
so. no ordinary life for the winchesters, which means a very spare support system, which means yes, john leaves them alone for too long. john puts too much responsibility on dean, too early. it's true.
some kids have jobs when they're nine. some kids are considered adults at that age.
dean has quarters for an arcade game.
it's easy to judge john for fucking up raising the boys. it's really easy to look at him and say, i would have made a different decision, i can see it clearly, that was bad parenting. but how many of you are parents? how many of you have had to face hard decisions and not known if you were doing the right thing? maybe it was neglectful. maybe it was hard on the kids.
but it was the right thing to do.
sometimes everything doesn't work out perfectly. sometimes the best option has downsides. john makes mistakes, but not the big kind. he yells at dean, and i'm sure he feels bad about that later, but the big decisions - fight the bad guy, teach the kids to protect themselves, keep them safe - these are the right decisions. his mistakes are trivial in comparison, and no matter how much they might be crucial mistakes if a normal parent makes them, john is outside of that. he has bigger concerns, because something wants his children dead and he has to stop that from happening. there is no question about that. no real parent could do anything else. so he makes the choices he does and he does the hard thing and, most importantly, he puts his kids first. he doesn't take the easy road. john winchester is the kind of man that will do what needs doing, and it doesn't matter if it wears on him or if it's difficult, because it's the right thing to do.
now.
ask me if he drinks.
1: quoth the great denis leary.
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