on 'gender equality' and supernatural s8
so back during the summer hiatus, when everyone was acting like s8 was going to be the second coming, ben edlund said at a convention that they were going to try and improve the gender equality of the show this season. at the time i was dubious, but i thought they might at least make an effort.
turns out the joke was on me, because i think this season has been one of the worst (if not the worst) for its appalling treatment of women. which is saying something, given this show’s history.
content warnings for discussion of character death, sexualised violence, sexual abuse and general grossness below the cut.
In which I surprise myself and write Joffrey Baratheon meta
Probably after Cat, Robb, and Cersei, I feel like Joffery is the character who’s been manipulated the most by D & D (although less people are inclined to care because he’s Joffrey) But GRRM’s episode really illustrated my frustrations with how this character has been written. I’m not a Joffrey fan and I will probably never be one, but I feel bad that his character has been so twisted by the show.
SUPERNATURAL AND THE LOVE NARRATIVE: A Non-Shipper's Perspective on Destiel
and a look back, and forward, on the canonization thereof
Part 1 of 6 in a collection and analysis of the different parts of the Dean/Cas love narrative.
In this installment: a brief speculation as to why, and a comparison to X-Files.
Hi, my name is Sarah. I’ve followed this show since it was just a few scraps of a pilot script floating on the internet, and I do not ship Dean and Castiel, but I am eager to see where they go.
Because they must, absolutely, at this point go.
Okay so
can we talk about
this line?
Because what I’m hearing here is Dean emphasizing their connection. What I’m hearing is Dean intentionally saying that what they have is deeper, more important - essentially, more profound than Castiel’s bond with anybody else. Even Sam. Even Cas’s brothers, the angels he served with for millennia.
This isn’t the first time Dean has expressed that his bond with Cas is special and distinct from/above other bonds (“You’re going to feed your friends into a meat grinder? Cas, too?”, “We need you” vs. ”I need you”) or that Cas has expressed the same (“Dean and I do share a more profound bond.”). But it is the first time that Dean has brought up the idea that their relationship should entail a higher level of intimacy than they have with anyone else. He’s making it clear that what hurts him is not just the abandonment, but that of all the people Cas could potentially have turned to, he expected to be the first one, the top of the list, the one Cas could trust no matter what. He even puts extra emphasis on the me the second time around to make it clear that Cas was in the wrong because he should have made an exception for Dean.
Basically, this is Dean saying to Cas that they have a special relationship, and that said relationship should make him the most important thing to Castiel. I am really hoping that this is set-up for moving the subtext of these lines - of why he’s most important - to text in the next episode.
Sam Winchester in a Traditionally Female Character Role and Why People Don't Like That
Hello boys and girls, today I want to talk about traditional gender roles in fiction, the modern double standard on gender roles, and how sexism plays into that. Specifically, as you may have predicted, I’ll be focusing on the character archetype that Sam Winchester fits into, and why it makes people uncomfortable.
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The question keeps coming up, “why don’t queer slash fans care more about canonical queer characters.”
It’s the “Did you stop beating your wife” of fandom questions. It’s leading. It’s reductionist.
There is the obvious answer — Queer fans are people, and people in general care more about main characters most directly influential to the main storyline of any tv show, book, movie, etc. The vast majority of queer characters are minor characters crammed in for politically correct purposes, without any real character development. The few that do get actual development are usually still not central to the plot of the show. I often feel when people ask me this question that they are essentially asking me, “Why aren’t you grateful for table scraps?”
Uhm.
Because I’m not a fucking dog?
The few cases in which queer characters do get to be main characters central to the plot, the story usually revolves entirely around their queerness. And when I say queerness I mean gayness. Because let’s face it, no one in the media takes bisexuality seriously.
With precious few notable exceptions in niche genres, all the bisexuals on television are women. This is because the media doesn’t take female sexuality seriously. This is because the media doesn’t take women seriously. The media is going to keep dismissing bisexuality for as long as bisexuality is coded female only.
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People in Teen Wolf ask, “Why aren’t you more invested in Danny? Why aren’t you fighting for him to have more backstory and more plotlines.”
As a media consumer and a pragmatist, the logic of this question is completely backwards. “Why aren’t you invested in a character that lacks flaws, motivation, depth, and for that matter anything else that might make you invested in said character? Isn’t it your moral duty as a queer/woman/POC to base all your character preferences on how similar a character’s minority status is to your own?”
I feel like the people asking these questions are asking me to choose what emotions I feel based on ideals. They’re asking me to choose between being a feminist/poc activist/queer advocate and being human.
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I think of High School musical, whose entire fandom following both slash and het ships a multiracial pairing. Not out of moral duty, but because the POC in that movie series are well written and central to the plot.
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Often when a show has a lot of race/sex/gender diverse cast you will hear white/cis/het people complain that the show is “trying too hard” to be diverse.
The fact is, oftentimes minority characters do seem awkwardly placed in a storyline, for the sole purpose of being politically correct. And they do feel out of place and unnecessary. And the problem isn’t that the show creators are “trying too hard.”
They’re not trying hard enough. They thought it was enough to slap on a few characters haphazardly, without fully integrating them into the storyline.
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I think people need to focus more on how women/poc/queer characters are represented, instead of just focusing on how many.
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No one seems to ask why lesbians read/write m/m slash.
I’ve met a lot of lesbians who read/write m/m slash.
People like to assume that slash is purely voyeurism and than compare it to “straight men watching mainstream lesbian porn.” That comparison is pure bullshit. Accusing lesbian/bisexual women of voyeuristically fetishizing gay male porn, for that matter accusing women of fetishizing men in general is like accusing black affirmative action advocates of reverse racism.
Anyone can be a bigot, but racism is bigotry + power. Sexism is bigotry+power. Transmisogyny (prejudice by cisgendered people towards transgendered/genderqueer people) is bigotry+power. Monosexism (prejudice by people attracted to one gender towards people attracted to more than one gender) is bigotry+power.
There’s a whole conversation that needs to be had, about slash as escapism, rather than voyeurism. About allegories. Not in this post. Maybe later. I have a post in the works.
Just need to say something (though I’m hardly a Stannis expert):
When people say Stannis puts the needs of the realm before himself, they’re talking about the time he was the only person who responded to the Night’s Watch’s pleas for help to fight the White Walkers. (Maybe not everyone has read that far in the books, but uh if you haven’t it might be wise to put your judgments of characters aside until you have. Or at least put them out of the tags.)
Robb Stark ignored those pleas. Balon Greyjoy ignored them. Joffrey ignored them. Renly ignored them (or probably would have, if it got to him before he died. I don’t think he was alive when they sent those letters so idk). Dany might have ignored them too? We don’t really know, she wasn’t in Westeros at the time.
The point here is that Stannis is the only one to recognize that the realm is in serious danger from the Others, and that the War of the Five Kings won’t mean shit if everyone is a blue-eyed zombie.
Did he make selfish choices before that? Sure. Did he make mistakes? Sure.
But none of those things negate the fact that he’s the only one who is able to put their stupid war aside and deal with a real problem.
Not to mention the fact that he’s really the only one of the people fighting over the throne who wants it not because he wants it, but because he believes in the law and the law says it’s his, so he has to fight for it whether he wants to or not.
Balon, Joffrey, Renly, probably even Dany to some degree although I think she thinks she has to fight over the throne because it’s her birthright - they all want power for power. Even Robb Stark is fighting a war over vengeance, not for the good of the realm.
So it’s actually not “bullshit” to say he’s the only one who cares about Westeros, because when the biggest actual threat to Westeros in thousands of years is brought to his attention, he’s the only one who actually bothers to do a goddamn thing about it.
