like it is--one of thee wildest parts to me is that sam wasn't... I mean no okay he was suicidal. but he wasn't like wed to the concept of his own immediate death. he was probably clinically depressed and he was extremely willing and ready to die in order to prevent future harm to others, but his expressed wish wasn't just To Die as an end in itself and he literally out loud twice agrees that no okay he'll live then. (I think this is muddied later by the way dean and sam both talk about these moments like dean forced sam to live, but genuinely onscreen he didn't. he asked and sam said okay. dean's requests have an outsize impact on sam but dean didn't actually prevent sam, in the moments he was just verbally asking, from dying. right up until he does force sam into something.)
so i mean. what happens onscreen isn't 'dean prevents sam from committing suicide and that's a problem.' it's 'dean prevents sam from dying in the line of duty, which is fine, and then when sam almost dies anyway dean reviews sam's dnr form which says "okay you can bring me back except not if you have to do it with this one drug. i've tried that family of drugs before and it causes me physical and mental anguish so severe it's not a circumstance I, a rational adult person, am willing to live in. so in THAT case I'd rather not be rescuscitated." and dean, who very specifically can talk to sam because that is how he accomplishes this entire thing, tells the man in a lab coat he found in an alley "ok i'm going to distract him and you pump his veins full of this stuff. we're not going to ask him whether he feels differently now or is willing to try it this one time. he just told me he wants to live so maybe he would budge but we're not consulting him on this. I WILL be holding him down." and then they both kept doing that for months despite the fact that they could at any point have asked sam hey, you seem loads better, do you think you'd be down to try this lifesaving drug now or is that still a hard no?" and that is. in fact. a problem.'
Absolutely fascinating, the way in which a certain segment of SPN both in fandom and within the show’s universe is founded on a basic inability to recognize Sam’s essential humanity.
One of my dearest concepts wrt a Stockholmed Sam post-cage or, more generally, a Sam who is basically dealing with having to integrate and acknowledge all the non-malign moments in his relationship with Lucifer, is that I do not think Lucifer ever really tried to make Sam like him. Certainly not post-5.22, but even before then, Lucifer’s not using a sales pitch: he courts Sam with inevitability, not with an appeal that he thinks is particularly likely to endear himself to Sam.
Lucifer is a character who never really cares to present himself as something other than what he is, and what he is is generally insufferable. What he’s got on his side is not his personality; it’s his sheer power and the sheer amount of time he’s spending with Sam. So, Sam doesn’t have complicated feelings about Lucifer because he thinks Lucifer has legitimate mitigating personality traits, or because he makes good points, or because Lucifer’s put any true effort into getting Sam to like him, or similar: it’s because of psychological inevitability.