affably

What the hell is all this about Dean!girls versus Sam!girls versus Cas!girls? I mean, they mentioned it in The Monster at the End of This Book but seriously? Seriously? We have to do this? It's not enough to have ship wars we have partition fandom further by having character wars? Screw that!

I DECLARE FOR TEAM GABRIEL. He refuses to choose sides when it comes to teams he loves equally. (Though I do have faith that he's gonna come through for me and pick my team ♥)

On a less facetious note, whatever you do, however you watch a television it's your choice and your life etc. But I personally can't see how that would be fun because you're perpetually getting defensive or angry on a character's behalf or crowing against a character you don't like and it's just. Is it such a crime to love and sympathize with everyone? Because in my experience only loving one half (or one third) of a team is much more frustrating and disappointing.

I am much much more for the team dynamic. Of them kicking ass together and sacrificing themselves for each other and saving each other and yelling at each other when they're wrong or they left their stinky socks in the sink. I could write odes and odes about this.

( short tl;drs about how awesome everyone is )

These guys, even though they're fictional, make me believe in heroes. And I'm supposed to just pick one? Yeah no, I don't think so. I don't want to. They are all also extremely good-looking. This isn't even touching the (somewhat) more minor but nevertheless insanely great characters that I want to hang out with all the time. Or the antagonists that terrify me but have fantastic panache. So drawing all these lines in the sand is insane and weird to me when there's plenty of room for everything. I just can't get behind the mentality. Gosh. I ♥ everyone.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

That would be hiatus.


I have thoughts about My Bloody Valentine beyond "Oh my God, that was awesome!" thisbrain has patiently explained to me that I am warped, which is why episodes like this make me happy. Finally the reason Castiel wouldn't let Dean eat the hamburgers in "Lucifer Rising" has come to light. Also everyone getting non-con hugs is so awesome I don't have words. That episode was so hilarious and awful I loved the crap out of it.


I had a long essay about the "treatment of female characters" in Torchwood in contrast to Supernatural, mostly coming down to issues of agency and politics of the body.

It boils down to this: in Supernatural, nobody gets impregnated against their will*, there's only one female character that carries a longterm torch for a guy (and ultimately turns him down) [Jo], nobody gets dateraped, nobody gets felt up at work or treated like a child [Lilith? Ha!], the major female characters are all physically formidable [Jo, Ellen, Ruby, Meg, Bela, Mary, Anna], three of the female characters pull massive one-overs on the boys [Ruby, Meg, Bela], and every single one of them is doing something independent of the boys' lives.

Am I forgetting any reoccurring characters? I guess Pamela and Tessa, but I don't think I need to make a case for Pamela being awesome and brave and heroic, and I hesitate to include Tessa as a "female character" since she is uh, non-corporeal. The ladies may be fridged/not around enough (according to some people), but their characters are treated with respect. They know what they want, they don't sit around whining about it: they go after it and do what they think is right (or what's evil). They don't wait for direction from other people, they make decisions for themselves.

Fandom reception, however is another matter entirely.

Anyway I was going to yell at the people who think the ladyfolks on Torchwood are done better than on Supernatural (okay I do recognize that this is not, in fact, a Srs Debate), until I started watching Children of Earth. Turns out? Get rid of Jack and Gwen turns awesome. And by awesome I mean, normal. We saw this a bit in "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang", but seriously, I want Jack to be buried under a ton of cement all the time if this is what we get out of it.

Then again maybe my standards are more lax because I am pretty much completely unable to empathize with any character on this show, so examining "the female role" is more of a point of protest for the haters. Also I haven't finished Children of Earth yet so who knows, it could all go down the crapper.

Video editing is taking over my life. Which, well, since I've heard the song at least a few hundred times by now, it's expected that I'd be crazy.

*ETA Jesse's mom was, but while it was supposed to be all "demon-spawny" he is mostly a well-adjusted kid.

Okay, this definitely can't just me be hallucinating; my favorite author talking about my brain filter. y/n? Have I finally snapped?

And I definitely agree with her points regarding Show, and one thing I've always been impressed with her is that she's very lovely at delicately disagreeing and letting everyone space to enjoy their own sandbox. I've seen others take up the same issues with Show much more vitrolically — and emotively — which always seems to lead to either cries of "Hear hear!" or bitter defensiveness. Whew, I see intellectual dialogue really happening there!

Yeah, Supernatural is not a good example of shows for promoting the girls, though there is strong narrative grounding for that:

1. the show's inherent genre choice is horror and tragic heroism


2. the two main characters' only female role model was murdered when they were kidlets, on their vengeance quest they were raised essentially homeless, and their caretakers (when they weren't left alone) were strange bachelors like Bob Singer and Pastor Jim while their father was off accidentally making families with other people.

Yes, the treatment of chicks in the series could definitely be better; but the show's textual axis revolves around familial/domestic trauma. Consider the basic premise: two brothers drive around the continental United States (1) fighting violent supernatural entities that are almost always located within normative society. In this show the supernatural is disruptive and traumatic to domesticity.

Therefore, by it's premise there can't really be any longterm love interests, and latent female characters are almost always going to be civilians or sites of domestic disruption (read: sekritly evil). For narrative intrigue, this kind of domestic trauma is often going to be located in unexpected places; so in The Benders, not only are there adults that participate in ritualistic cannibalism that dehumanizes their victims, but the apparently innocent, timid girl assists and participates. These narrative twists in the series maintains suspense.

So anyway, disruption of domestic normality but as located in familial trauma it's unsurprising that then our "normal" expectations are overturned. Therefore apparently innocous characters will actually be evil/possessed/have a secret dating back fifty years of drowning their bff.

Which is a really long way of saying that not only are random male characters, ghosts, and demons often evil, but also women and little girls. Seriously, every time there is a child on the screen they are either going to be evil or be rescued (2) at the last minute by Sam or Dean (3).

So with that in mind, consider:
In Dean Winchester's universe, there are two types of people: people he has to protect (civilians/Sammeh) and things he has to kill (ghosts/demons/girl-demon-ghosts/chupacabras). His adult role models growing up were men who were either priests or widowed (and also involved in sites of domestic trauma), he's got his mom as the virgin martyr figure extraordinaire, and moved around too often to make friends so all of his female interactions are either as possible one-night stands or further sources of supernatural trauma. The only girl we've seen him actively "date" for any amount of time rejected him when he told her the truth about his life. Hell, the first friend he's narratively given on the show as someone for himself in whom he can confide his doubts and shit (4) took the series four years. The episode Sex and Violence articulated the problem excellently.

Sam is much better at interacting with wimmin but then again, due to the premise of familial trauma, they die for either being evil or in evil's way. So within the series I find the character's treatment of chicks to be legit. I mean it's shitty, but seriously, it's not supposed to be about a healthy situation. You barely need to see half an episode to see how fucked up these kids are.

Now I'm not in any way advocating the treatment of women on the show Supernatural to be normative; like episodes about cannibals or childhood murder, it's supposed to be wrong, a site of trauma/disruption, and an incredibly basic one at that.

The question the series poses as a whole is whether it is possible to recover from familial trauma; individual episodes indicate that it's possible — civilians are forced to learn that their nightmares are real (usually through really horrible practical experiences thereof) but at the end of the episode the family is shown to be beginning to recover from that disruption of normality. (5) So um, I'm actually hopeful that this whole thing isn't headed for a terrible wreck (though like a good tragedy that's what we expect), though it's just as likely that we'll get a Bonnie and Clyde/I Am Legend ending.

Basically no, the show is not a good/healthy example of powerful, progressive women (though you can't deny that Meg, Ruby, Ellen, and Jo all have pretty significant agency. Jury's still out on Anna though*). To be honest I'm much more disappointed with fandom's response to female characters/possible love interests for the characters than in the show itself.

The racial problems are of course, another matter entirely. But on a different note, this show is one of the first I've seen to significantly deal with class structure — particularly lower class — though not extremely overtly. (6)


tl;dr version: I <3 Show, but if I want awesome chick power I'm not going to be going to the show about the violent trauma of having your mom burned alive when you were a kid.(7)


(1) LOL they can't fix Europe because Dean can't fly.
(2) Kripke would totally kill kids if he could get away with it.
(3) Or be the angel Castiel.
(4) Since Sam falls under Dean's "people to protect" umbrella, it's very difficult for Dean to confide his doubts and fears to him since he has to keep his "game face" on.
(5) Unless it's the Winchesters.
(6) Ask me later.
(7) Okay, Calisto is a special case.

ETA: As of 5x13 "The Song Remains the Same," it's pretty well-established that Anna has plenty of agency, though ultimately not narratively rewarded with success. Still, what a badass.