I Cant Be Bothered To Go Into Detail Bc It Is 5 Am And I Have Not Slept But OP Is Right - Tumblr Posts
y’know i know a lot of people talk about how they love shane and seb because they’re the damaged men in the game, and like same 100%, but i also see a lot of people kinda dismiss sam as a golden retriever, positive, happy character. but if you really think about it, sam fits into the same category as seb and shane too. like:
1. his mother expresses multiple times to the farmer that although she loves her children, she very much longs to have a life where she doesn’t have to constantly worry about kids. in a way a part of her deep down wishes that sam and vincent didn’t really exist and it tears her apart and vincent isn’t necessarily old enough to grasp the concept, but sam is and you know he notices it. this is the woman who raised him and (i at least headcanon him) as someone who is very observant. he definitely notices these behaviors coming from her. and idk about you, but having an inkling that your mother is unhappy with her life in any capacity would really screw me up personally.
2. his father went to WAR. like fully went to war and i’m thinking he was in the army for 2 and a half years at least because he has a corporal badge (even though it’s upside down) but that means that he was away for bootcamp, then deployed, and if sam is around what? like 19? 20? that means that he became the “man of the household” at 17 or 18. Because I personally believe Kent was away for three to three and a half years. Bootcamp for about 10 weeks, straight to a base for more training, and it seems as though the active war made it so he got deployed into action fairly quickly. So, not only did Sam have an absence where his father should have been during the years he became a young adult, but he has to adjust to his father coming back and struggling with PTSD and quite honestly being shellshocked. (i also believe kent was honorably discharged, meaning something bad happened to him in the war. perhaps it was the same event where he lost many of his friends, but i fully believe the war is still ongoing even when kent returns to the valley considering the traveling merchant is still smuggling things into the town.) all the memories he had of kent are just memories now because his father will never be the same as he was before. And sam KNOWS that! even vince notices it!
3. he’s literally a rebellious skater kid, one of his heart events is him getting in trouble WITH THE MAYOR because he’s skating where he’s not supposed to, AND he purposely tries to sabotage the soup for the potluck and leads in community service hours. he’s a teenage dirtbag baby! a misunderstood edgy kid who acts out because he doesn’t know how to express his feelings! and on top of that, with his adhd he’s even more misunderstood and people don’t take him seriously at all. he gets scolded for things that he seemingly just can’t help all the time and that just hurts him and makes him act out even more.
4. sam is also a damaged individual - he’s just better at masking it. seb embraces the darkness and accepts that he is an outcast and doesn’t try to hide the fact he is. shane struggles with addiction and depression publicly and it’s not negative necessarily, but he can’t hide it from anyone. sam has a warped idea that he cannot show his ailments, physical or mental because he needs to be strong for his little brother and give an example of what he believes a man should be (and because of the patriarchal society he lives in he doesn’t know that he can be vulnerable because no one told him because the man who would have been able to explain that to him during the years he really needed to hear it wasn’t there). i fear he suffers a bit from toxic positivity and desperately tries to rely on hobbies to distract him from his reality.
long story short, sam is not just a silly guy, he has depth. i mean come on, he’s best friends with sebastian for a reason! they’re similar in ways! he just doesn’t know how to talk about or express it. all this to say, sam is an interesting and deep character that shouldn’t be written off immediately by people.
sam supremacy! lmao