:( I know. I've never hurt for a TV character as much as I hurt for Dean. And WIAWSNB is one of the hurtiest episodes there is. It gets me every single time, in so many ways. He really, really does always believe that whatever is wrong must be his fault somehow, and that belief is so much a part of him that he barely even notices it, it's a subconscious reflex. And that's learned behaviour. I mean, sure, people can be self-sacrificing and self-effacing by nature, but Dean's baseline of having no self-worth whatsoever, of always taking the blame for everything on himself, that's learned. It's what his life has taught him, and...I really try not to blame John for everything, because I totally understand where he was coming from. But at the end of the day he was the parent - he was Dean's sole carer, so the buck has to stop with him. It was his parenting methods, or lack thereof, that gave Dean this complex that he seems so completely unable to shake off.

Getting back to the Wendigo discussion, sort of, the cracks were visible early on, but easy to overlook - a bit like a chip in a car windscreen. The damage is visible, sure, if you look the right way, but it's tiny and seems unimportant and the windscreen remains fully functional, which is all that matters, surely. But unless that chip is treated properly while it is still a chip, if the stresses and strains on it remain constant or increase, sooner or later it becomes a crack, and then one day the whole windscreen shatters. And it could have been prevented. And that's Dean in season one.

If that makes sense.