Oh, narrative parallels. These are some quick-and-dirty gifs, but they make the point. SPN makes liberal and obvious use of narrative parallels constantly. That’s not exactly special, honestly, parallel narratives are part of the bedrock of storytelling. It’s a super straightforward concept: they show you a thing that clearly means X, then they show you another thing that draws similarities to the first thing to show that the second thing also means X.
You can’t just conveniently forget how Storytelling 101 works just because something looks kinda gay. This episode is pretty light on Sam-specific development because Sam’s main job today is to make Dean look queer.
Yes, I’m serious.
In the scene where Sam and Dean meet Rio and Gunner, they each do 4 distinct things: they get giddy over recognizing their childhood idol, they stutter and flail while they try to look cool, they admit they had a thing for the person, and they do something fannish and embarrassing. Like so:
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