OK, no. This doesn’t fly at all.
When Singer says that they didn’t kill Charlie because she was gay, he’s fundamentally - and, I’d argue, wilfully - misunderstanding the problem. The assertion was never that Charlie died because she was gay, in the sense that the writers killed her for her orientation; it was that killing your only queer character is a really shitty thing to do, regardless of your reasons, and especially when your show has a long history of both killing women and queerbaiting. Saying you didn’t do those things on purpose doesn’t change the fact that you still did them; it doesn’t magically make them okay. And if you’re still doing the exact same thing after ten seasons, even when - as demonstrated by your own rhetoric - you’re aware of the problem? Then it doesn’t matter that you’re not targeting women for death because they’re women, or denying queer narratives out of vocal homophobia: you’re also not taking intelligent, active steps to redress the issue or give those characters greater representation, either. Because you’re not discussing it. Because you don’t think it matters. Because you think there’s a sort of narrative neutrality in failing to mention this stuff, instead of an ingrained bias so deep-seated and normative, you only assume it’s fair.
The assertion isn’t that Bob Singer killed off a queer female character because he hates women or lesbians: it’s that his motives are irrelevant to the outcome, because the woman in question is still dead, and he didn’t care about keeping her alive.
And saying the the issue of the characters’ sexuality never comes up in the writer’s room like it exonerates his choices? Holy fuck, that is not a good thing, and it’s sure as hell not a defence. What it means is that, despite their apparent intention to create a positive portrayal of an LGBT character with Charlie, the writers didn’t discuss how killing her would undermine that effort, or talk about how particular tropes are especially harmful when applied to queer characters. If they had discussed Charlie’s sexuality as a factor that was deeply relevant to her portrayal, then they might have realised that, historically speaking, queer characters don’t get happy endings, and that killing her the way they did - offscreen, in defiance of her capabilities, to motivate the male leads, at the hands of someone who was damn near a Nazi - was about the grossest possible thing they could’ve done, short of subjecting her to sexual violence or torture. If they were absolutely, irrevocably wedded to killing Charlie, they could still have done it in a way that respected her agency and her competence, but they didn’t do that; they didn’t even try. They gave her a cheap slasher-thriller death, and then Singer has the fucking gall to pat himself on the back for it, because clearly, people being upset by it means they made the right call.
Listen: let me tell you a secret. People cared so much about Charlie, not just because she was an awesome character who powerfully represented the Supernatural fanbase, but because the writers assured us she wouldn’t die. Bob Singer and Jim Michaels both said Charlie was safe, and that meant the audience was able to invest in her. Why is this so important? Because compassion fatigue is a real thing, and it absolutely applies to the way an audience receives a narrative. Supernatural, like Game of Thrones, is a show that kills a lot of characters, and while that can up your emotional investment early on, after a while, you withdraw from the story. You stop caring about new characters, because you hurt when they die, and if their death or destruction is inevitable, then why even get invested in the first place? Why risk being hurt? But after so many seasons of death on Supernatural, people felt safe to invest in Charlie - a character who not only embodied the audience, but who was exactly the type of character we’d traditionally expect the show to kill off - because we were told she was safe. Breaking that contract was an act of bad faith, and it’s a card you can only play once. Every scrap of loyalty and emotional capital the show has built up since Charlie’s introduction, Bob Singer just spent in a single, shittily-constructed episode - and he thinks that’s a good thing, because he doesn’t understand that that’s what he did.
“It’s just where the story took us,” says Singer. Here’s what I say: bullshit. Stories aren’t sentient, they aren’t static: people make them up, and people can change them. There is no precious, inviolable muse that dictates what happens next, and when you have creative control, as Singer does, you’re not being forced to answer to someone else. So when he says “we go where the story takes us” to excuse killing their only queer character, that’s a fucking cop-out of the highest order, because “the story” is not a sentient fucking entity with a say in how it’s told. Charlie died because Bob Singer, Brad Buckner and Eugenie Ross-Lemming wanted her dead; because they decided to kill her, and that’s a fucking end of it.
But here’s the thing: when Singer sits there, straight-faced, and says the question of Charlie’s sexuality never came up in the writer’s room - when he acts like the story couldn’t have gone another way? He’s a fucking liar. Because Robbie Thompson, who created Charlie, arranged multiple meetings to try and save her, presented multiple other story options, to try and convince Singer that her death was a bad idea, and you can damn well bet he pointed out that killing their only queer character was a shitty trope to deploy. Multiple actors and writers spoke up against her death, both during filming and subsequently, with a number of cast members coming out to decry the decision at cons and on social media. Hell, when Jensen Ackles got the script for Dark Dynasty, he went to Singer and argued against killing her, too. The story didn’t have to go down that way, and it doesn’t fucking matter why Singer killed her; he still didn’t think she was worth more to the story alive than dead, and in a show with zero other queer characters and an appalling track record re the treatment of women, then I’m going to go out on a fucking limb and say that yeah, maybe Charlie didn’t die because she was a lesbian, but that was damn well reason enough to let her live.
