fangirl_says | (no subject) (Reply)

And, of course, the moment I say I have nothing to say, someone comes along and says exactly what I think, far better than I could.

I hate that he uses that language. I was cheering when Ruby clocked him and I'm sorry she got caught in the devil's trap because I really wanted her to beat on him some more.

But I don't have to love everything about the characters on my show. I don't have to think that what happens on the show should happen in real life. And I do love SPN in spite of how cringe-worthy it often is. I love Sam and Dean's love for each other and how impossible it is for them to say it aloud, I love how much Bobby loves them and how much they love Bobby and I miss the hell out of Ellen and Jo, I love the fucked up family dynamics, I love the contradictions and hypocrisies, I love how fiercely, murderously devoted to each other Sam and Dean are, I love the monster-of-the-week episodes, I love how they're dancing around the edges of theology, I love the impending doom, I love the chance of apocalypse, I love the stellar performances that all the actors turn in, I love the look of the show --

But none of that means that the show isn't itself deeply, deeply flawed, and offensively sexist and racist. It is. I believe that putting those words into Dean's mouth is just one of the ways that the writers are betraying an egregious failure to see the sexism they're perpetuating or -- worse -- a shamefully opportunistic willingness to use it.

After all, Dean isn't the one setting up the camera to film a woman wearing nothing but a slip dying face-down on a glass table from underneath the table. Dean isn't the one choosing to show women in jeopardy, to show them helpless, to show them dying gruesomely or being saved while wearing little or nothing. Dean isn't the one choosing to use every horror-movie trope that Buffy The Vampire Slayer so gleefully and successfully overturned.

And I do think that Dean is messed up about women. But I don't for a moment think he hates them, despite his language.

[redacted my own rant.]