I just. ooooooooooooo the rage I feel thinking about how dirty they did bobby’s legacy. in the original pitch of the show, kripke specifies that sam and dean do NOT have any sort of mentor in their life — it’s highly important to him that they are alone and getting along only by skin of their teeth because he’s drenched in this toxic notion of white american individualism, that it’s better to lose the fight with one hand tied behind your back than use both to win. but you literally can’t write a story about family like that! especially one where your two male leads look like kicked puppies begging to be taken home. the show about absent fathers and bad fathers and fathers who are obsessed bastards needs fathers or else the very odyssey to find dad the pilot introduces doesn’t work. and so we cycle through a rodolex of dads and would-be dads from “nightmare” to “first blood” to fucking “the benders,” figures of misery and control, and it seems like fatherhood is hopelessly corroded. and somehow. there’s bobby. the man who could never see himself as a father because he thought he was corroded all the same by his own dad and the things he never got to settle with his wife before he had to kill her. and in his grief he decided the best thing he could do was try to keep anyone else from feeling this. he wears a trucker cap and he’s as redneck as they come and he’s got one of the best libraries of supernatural lore in the country and he made it just by talking to people and collecting their stories and in return he picks up the phone when the hunt is going sideways. he built everything he is himself! he doesn’t HAVE a secret society or a family legacy. he’s just trying to help people. and he didn’t ask for john to shove two adolescent boys at him before he went off to chase down another dead end but he just. figured it out. maybe reasoned he couldn’t fuck up someone else’s kids that badly when they already came to him traumatized down in their bones. it wasn’t quite the same but the details didn’t matter so much, he knew that the scars people leave and the scars demons leave when they fuck with your sense of home end up about the same. he didn’t have to be their dad he just had to let them be kids for whatever stretches of time he got. maybe that was the same too. the show doesn’t make the connection between cas’s fatherhood and bobby’s fatherhood but it’s there all the same — just two guys who want the boys they’re raising to think twice before they decided the only answer is to sacrifice themselves. to put their own needs above what they have to offer.