Now that we talked about Sam being the embodiment of love and hate let's explore another important aspect of his character so you can have a better understandment of this moron.
Sam suffers a dissociative disorder.
Giving Sam a proper diag is complicated because of inconsistency. Like Bruce and Hulk, Sam and the Leader used to be two different personality. They had a different way to talk, to behave, to dress etc... At first it wasn't about mental illness but about inspiration. Bruce was inspired by Frankenstein/Adam and Jekyll/Hyde and Sam is Bruce's mirror so just like him he had these "two persona opposing each others" writing. With time, however, it was confirmed that Bruce has a DID, so what about Sam ?
What's a DID ? A DID is a Dissociative Identity Disorder and I'll ask you to make your own research and at least read the wikipedia page before going further. I would be too clumsy to properly talk about this condition in my own native language already so I'll avoid that exercice in English. Bruce officially has a DID, it's something canon in comics.
%20-%20Page%202.jpg)
First, let's talk about the two known Sam persona :
Sam, human Sam, most likely the host, (we'll call him Sammy to differentiate him from the Leader while keeping Sam to talk about the system) is a good hearted lad. He talks with a lot of informally forms, slangs and short forms. He is calm, shy, very insecured, naive, easily threatened and scared but always willing to help, making him a very manipulative guy. He is a very simple man with a very simple life, a nobody with no ambition who works as a night shift janitor and spends his freetime watching TV alone and who would rather stay unoticed. His hair is messy, either blond or reddish-dark brown (depends on the colorist) and blue eyes, he's usually wearing large simple clothing, often gray-ish.
Sam as the Leader is the opposite. He is loud, excentric, ambitious, ressentful, selfish, manipulative, sophisticated, you get the point. He is ironically way more cowardly than Sammy because as scared as he is Sammy is still willing to overcome it if it means helping someone while the Leader would rather run away or beg like a little bitch for his life. He dresses flashy with thight clothes, his hair perfectly styled, green skin, green eyes, very dark green (looking black) hair.
The Leader is also way too emotional no matter how hard he tries to look cold and emotionless. You can always tell HOW he's feelings, he has a huuuge panel of emotions (which is something I LOVE about Matt Frewer's interpretation in the 1996 cartoon, the way he's "over acting" every Sam emotion is very in character) while Sammy is way calmer, his only emotion is being polite and shy, he doesn't really get angry and when he finally does he just sounds kinda annoyed. It seems that Sammy is not good at expressing emotions while the Leader is not good at processing and controlling them, they oppose each others in every aspect including this one.
The Leader is very aware of Sammy's existence though and despises him like Hulk used to hate Bruce, calling Sammy puny as well, however Sammy seems pretty unaware of the Leader.
Sammy and the Leader being two different personnality seems to have been forgotten or retconned through David's run in the 80s/90s and you often had the Leader refering to himself as Sam ever since. But if the Leader is an alter he can very well be fronting while in his human form, like Joe did in Immortal Hulk. Meaning Sammy can front while in his Leader form.
And what if both happened ?
The Red Leader :
Oh this one is kinda complicated. Thunderbolts vol.2 was written by two different team and while the first part by Daniel Way was great, the second was, mh, let's say it's not that hard to guess they didn't even bother opening a wikipedia page before writing their characters. And it's sad, really, because that first part of Thunderbolts was so great it introduced things that will serve Immortal Hulk's story and impact Sam's chara dev forever, giving him a huge importance. For exemple the connexion between gamma and Magic, Sam being followed by death and having a great sinister destiny etc... But it also developped another personnality long forgotten, Sammy.
You see, when Sam reverts back to his human self, he tends to suffer amnesia (which is a symptom of dissociation btw), so the Leader has to find ways to influence Sammy to do what he wants him to do. Which happened in Thunderbolts again.
%20-%20Page%2036.jpg)
%20-%20Page%2091.jpg)
But let's go back to Sammy alright. So in this first part of Thunderbolts you had an amnesic Sam behaving exactly like Sammy. Shy, insecured, thinking he's dumb even in his Leader form, putting other people's need before his own. He was trying to find out who he was and seriously that arc was super cute, it's so sad and upsetting that it was all ignored afterward to write the worst Sam ever written (it was so lame it had to be retcon through one quote "oh yeah I was acting out of character on purpose and doing the dumbest grossest evil shit to go to Hell as fast and as deep as possible to study it"). It gave us Sammy back but more interesting it gave Sammy with gamma power. He went back to his Leader shenanigans once his memory cameback so once the Leader could front again.
And the other way around happened too, the Leader in a human form.
Peter David's Sam :
At some point in David's run, Sam lost his power, he had to do terrible shit to survive and following Bruce in hope of getting his gamma back and that's the thing, it was the Leader acting as the Leader, even without gamma power he was still manipulative, calculating, heartless, etc. He didn't suffer memory loss either, proving that it only happens to Sammy and that it is, indeed, a dissociative symptom.
I'm not a doctor, everything I know I learnt through reading, talking with doctors and talking with people with DID and my brain and memories aren't the most reliable things so again don't take what I say for granted and make your own research (and if you see a mistake feel free to reach to me so I can correct it).
The Leader's voice is described as a voice inside Sam, if it was an hallucination created by another mental issue it wouldn't come from inside, it would be an "outside" voice, coming from somewhere else, not inside ourself. It's pretty clear that the Leader is part of this body, he said so himself.
Sam is "manipulated" by the Leader, he influences what he's doing, sometimes Sammy is still conscious and suffers headaches as the Leader is trying to forces himself out but sometimes he is not, he's just totally dissociating and the Leader controls the whole body. There's different lvl of dissociation, you're not always "inconscious" when it happens, sometimes it's just about feeling like your surounding isn't real, having headaches, blurry vision etc etc, sometimes it's like being drunk, you're not in control of yourself anymore.
It was pretty clear before Peter David that Sam had two persona, like Bruce and if Bruce is canonically diag with a DID then Sam shoubd be too, especially with all these dissociative symptoms he shown.
So the reason he's not dissociating while being human in David's run is either because Sam having two persona has been retcon or because the Leader is an alter and that second theory makes way more sense because if the Leader's personality can exist without gamma it means this change of personality wasn't created through gamma. So he was already here.
I said it already and will have to say it a few more time but Sam was rejected by his family, most likely even kicked out so while we don't know exactly what he went through his childhood seems pretty bad. A DID is created during the childhood to cope with trauma, so maybe the Leader was created back then. That would explain why he's such a villain cliche, we know Sam used to watch tv a lot (I guess it was a way to escape his reality) so maybe his alter was created after these cartoonish villains he saw on TV, just like Joe was born through Bruce watching a lot of Film Noir.
And after David's run, during Jenkins' run, so when Bruce's DID was canon, this happened :
Long story short Sam died, he saw something, he felt good and at peace, he wanna go back to that state of ultimate consciousness, it's complicated but the interesting thing here is what Sam is saying, he is saying that he can hear both Sammy and the Leader screaming, calling them "they" as in "two different persons" and also implying that he's a 3rd persona (oh I have a whole theory about that, that rather than a 3rd persona it would be a possession but I'll go back to that).
Then we got Thunderbolts that we mentionned above and then... Then we got Immortal Hulk.
%20-%20Page%2010.jpg)
In Immortal Hulk 34 Sam explains that during Peter David's era he reverted back on purpose to force Sam (we'll assume it's Sammy) to adapt. There's this moment with Sam as a human talking about the Leader and it's a bit weird because he feels like Sammy, way more humble, but he is aware that he is the Leader so to me it's Sammy under the Leader's influence, not completly free and aware but enough to be himself, if that make sense. And that's how the Leader will first grow and become way more mature and powerful, because through Sammy's humility he will understand that his biggest weakness was himself, because he thought he was already the smartest and didn't need to learn and grow, unlike Sammy who knows his limits. I think that's what Sam means when he says "everytime I'm Sam, Sam is smarter", they now both learn from each others. The Leader used to keep Sammy away but now he learns from him just like Sammy learns from the Leader and they both become stronger. Kinda like Green Scar was this strong in World War Hulk because Bruce allowed him to, working together.
%20-%20Page%2017.jpg)
And then Immortal Hulk 50, the great final. Bruce is saved and surprisingly so is Sam and when he's saved that's what he's saying :
%20(Digital)%20(Zone-Empire).jpg)
The first thing he remembers and mentions is Bruce.
... I'll go back to that another time.
Ok, the second thing he remembers and mentions is the night of his mutation, probably when the Leader started taking over and preventing him from fronting. Slowly the memories of what he has done as the Leader catches him up and you see him crying and begging to die, full of remorse so you start to wonder, maybe Sam was the Leader after all and the gamma was the reason he went pure evil. But then you notice the way he talks.
.jpg)
And you remember what I said at the beginning of this post about slang and short forms that he used back when Sammy and the Leader were canonically two different persona and when you know how Ewing enjoy this kind of little details you understand that it's Sammy, not a powerless Leader, Sammy, the shy, insecured good hearted persona, the host, the other persona.
It's pretty much a fact at this point, Sam also has a DID, there's Sammy and there's the Leader, though it's sometime a bit harder to tell them appart because unlike Bruce it's not canon and it will probably never be so a lot of writers will just ignore it and write them as one.
Why is that ? Well I guess it's complicated, that would be yet another mass murderer being excused by a mental condition and that's a problem. There's a reason neuroA people are seen as dangerous monsters, that mentally ill people are the most abused people. Think about it, why do bigots think homosexuality and transidentity are bad ? Because to them it's a mental illness, that's litteraly their only argument and even if it was true why is it a problem to them ? Because mental issues = dangerous and that's a very harmful stereotypes that are highly reenforced through fiction with all these mentally disabled people doing atrocious shit so yeaaah, even if having Sam with a DID makes perfect sense and would be interesting to explore it would still be a problem.
The only way to avoid that would be to assume that the Leader being a cold hearted murderer was because of the gamma (so TOBA) influence, I mean, there's a lot of exemples of gamma folks losing controle and doing destructive shit. Bruce himself of course but also Jen, Betty, Samson who called that the Hulk syndrom and said that they developped DID symptoms because of Bruce's blood. But except for Jen they never really had more than one personality, it was more like being... Well, possessed, so basically what TOBA did to Brian, Sasquatch, Sam and a few other irradiated.
That's kinda what happens with Bruce too, when him or his alters lose controle they go World Breaker and isn't the World Breaker oddly similar to TOBA's possession ? Glowing gaz-y eyes and all ? Talking about hate and destruction ?
Isn't ODDLY familiar to when TOBA possessed Sam ?
%20-%20Page%2020.jpg)
%20-%20Page%2020.jpg)
%20-%20Page%2021.jpg)
But anyway, we're not here to discuss the World Breaker = TOBA topic. So as we said here, the most Sam hates the most he loses control, like Bruce with anger.
Sam didn't kill at first, he would use non lethal weapons. He was playing the villain but he kinda tried to avoid hurting and the more he hated, the more lethal and dreadful he became. So rather than "Sammy killed because of his Leader alter" it would be "they killed because of TOBA's influence, because they lost control".
A lot of people (including Sam himself) think he's one of the gamma irradiated who has the best control over his mutation but really that's the other way around, he's like Bruce on that matter, he doesn't control shit. Sure unlike Bruce he can revert back and transform at will but first it's not really that easy 'cause as we saw he can't always control his human self afterward and second, have you noticed that all, and I mean ALL, gamma mutated can do that without pain ? In a snap, taking merely a second to change. Except for Bruce.
And Sam.
It's easy for everyone but Sam and Bruce, the two characters with DID symptoms.
So let's assume that all these theories are facts, what kind of alter would Sam be ? You have a lot of different kind of alters :
-Little, like Savage, they're young children, usually the host stuck at a young age (Savage is basically Bruce at a young age).
-Protector, it's in the name, they're meant to protect the system. Devil is one, Joe seems to fit that category now too even if he would be more of a persecutor before.
-Fictional Character. This one is more common than you think and sadly often used as a way to mock people with DID and call them fake. And yet, Devil Hulk is one. He's litteraly the Devil snake, he was created to be a protector through the Eden snake.
-Persecutor, they are dangerous to other alters, often hurt and manipulate them. They often blame the host and/or other alters for all the trauma they went through. The Leader would be one if he's an alter.
Of course there's a lot more, I just mentionned a few we find in Hulk.
So to me the Leader is an alter, Sammy is the host. He was meant to be like Devil but instead of being the dad Bruce never had because he was beaten up and mentally abused by his dad, the Leader would be Sammy's older brother. Sam deeply loves his brother and wanted him to love him back and protect him and do his duty as a big brother, just like Bruce loved his father and wanted him to love him. But in both case they were abused by the person who was supposed to protect them. So just like Devil was created to be that good protective father, I like to think that the Leader was created to be that older brother but just like Bruce and his alters rejected Devil out of fear, Sammy might have rejected the Leader and somehow the gamma freed him. I mean, everytime the Leader is fronting while human it's when Sam feels deeply threatened, despaired, scared. In Moment when his life is directly threatened so maybe the gamma accident had the Leader fronting because his life was threatened (he litteraly died that day y'know). And maybe because he was locked down, similar to Devil, for years once he escaped he just directed all the hatred and bitterness he had in him toward Sammy who didn't let him avenge and protect them both and because Sammy's self hatred eventually made him think that Sammy's kind shy heart is the reason they're suffering so in order to protect the system he keeps Sammy away and blames him.
I don't think the Leader hates Sammy as much as he pretends to though, like Bruce and his alters actually care about each others even if Bruce and Savage are still in a complicated ground. He has some odd unecessarly behaviors, like leaving cigarettes to Sammy even if as the Leader he doesn't smoke because Sammy smokes a lot. Or singing comforting song from their childhood, or "training" Sammy to be smarter and more independant and just not killing him at all. It's possible to kill alter, we saw Madman killing the host (and, oh, that's Sam's older brother, maybe the Sterns bloodline is most likely to develop a DID, which is a friendly reminder that Bruce is also a Sterns) and Sam killing Devil after all.
But the problem of this theory would be that Sam wouldn't really be a villain in the way that if his evilness is created by TOBA then he's technically not responsible and, I mean, that's the whole point of this theory, having a DID not yet another mass murderer. And always trying to excuse a villain's behavior is another problem.
So yeah, while it's clearly a thing it's very complicated to canonicalize Sam's DID because in both case it's just complicated so the easiest way is just never officialize it and pretend it can be anything else.
But in a way or another, Sam is Sam's first victim.
