waterbird13:

bangingpatchouli:

Here’s the thing about the awesomeness that is Charlie Bradbury: It undermines Sam and Dean’s story. The early seasons lead us to believe that it was the way John raised his sons that made them the skilled hunters that they are. It was growing up as child soldiers that forged their relationship and gave them the knowledge and skills to beat monsters and angels and demons, but Charlie’s story tells us that anyone with brains can learn to be a hunter like Sam and Dean in a few short years. All the fear and deprivation of their childhood was unnecessary.

But we…already knew that?

Look, I have issues with how Charlie learned. She learned reading out of the Supernatural books and limited practical experience and extrapolating fantasy stories she loved onto her real world, and obviously that’s kind of iffy.

But the idea that hunters can’t learn to be hunters in a few short years, through books and research and just learning the trade? John Winchester? Bobby Singer? Rufus Turner? Pretty much any other hunter we interacted with?

Bobby Singer lost his wife to a demon (ie, like Charlie, had the Supernatural enter his life) met Rufus Turner (another hunter to aid him), and picked up everything he could learn out of books and mooching off of the information he could get from Rufus. He was a better hunter than the Winchesters for a long stretch of time, with more knowledge and practical skill, and was the person they turned to.

John Winchester learned in the same way, only he is presented as even more stubborn, so he seemed to not really interact with other hunters until he already had his foot in the door, meaning he learned all his basics from Missouri, books, and practical experience.

Dean and Sam are unique in their upbringings. It made them unique hunters in the capacity that both of them have an incredibly difficult time functioning outside of hunting because it’s their primary reference point, but it doesn’t make them better, or more special. They got good because of time and effort, but so did people who learned out of books in a couple years because they were confronted with the Supernatural later in life.

People have whole hosts of issues about Charlie, but other hunters have already shown us that, in many capacities, the boys’ childhood was unnecessary. This need to glorify what they went through is somewhat disturbing, but not the main point here. Charlie learned to hunt just like any other hunter who isn’t Sam, or Dean, and unless you want to argue that Bobby, or John, or most any other hunter we interact with, were only mediocre hunters who didn’t live up to some standard only Sam and Dean can achieve by the childhoods they had, then this argument doesn’t really work.