[head in hands]

Go ahead, douchebags in fandom, tell me Crowley’s valid, desirable, at all good queer representation, tell me how much you love him, after he just killed a queer woman because he was bored with her fighting Dean, and he wanted to use and then discard another female character--coded as a child--mere minutes after making a “priest and altar boy” rape joke about Dean. (Remind anyone of a particular sleazebucket rapist who wanted to use and abuse a minor last season? ...Especially after he just raped three adults.) Go ahead and ship Dean/Crowley and say it’s mutual attraction (lol no), and so canon, when it’s been made very clear that Crowley is an obsessed abusive rapist with no respect for Dean outside of “I won’t kill him cos I’m into him and/or currently I need him around.” and Dean wants no part of it.

(And when Crowley is as queercoding as it gets.) -_-

...Or maybe get a fucking conscience, and don’t.

Discussing my seeming lack of response to last night's deaths

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the problem with Supernatural is not that there's violence against/murder of female characters. There is violence against everyone in Supernatural. Nearly every single character we've ever met has faced some kind of assault, some kind of pain they didn't cause themselves. And most of them die (though, let's a thousand times discuss the fact that only the male characters come back in any real, lasting, non-fantasized way).

The problem is how these characters are written to die or disappear--with little to no fuss from anyone. Written as plot devices whose relevance to the SPN universe only occurs when the Winchesters (or their allies--and for some reason women are never elevated, though Ruby got the closest, to that particular level of narrative importance, I WONDER WHY) need them. Written in a way that forgets they exist when they die or get Put on a Bus. The problem is that so many female characters have so little significance that for most of them fridging isn't even a concept because the narrative doesn't imbue the audience's proxy, the protagonists, with enough fucking connection to the character for that. 

Characters that have huge impacts on both the protagonists and the SPN universe's makeup, good or bad, are forgotten, are erased, when they die or end up On a Bus. Supernatural actually rarely even respects women's significance to anything--anybody--enough to even call it fridging. The death or disappearance of female characters erases their histories, their current relationships or arcs, and their possible futures, entirely. Anna. Ruby. Meg. Lisa. Charlie. Etc. They don't just die: they're wiped completely out of fucking existence. Fridging would be too kind for what happens to most recurring characters cast with women in Supernatural. (And that's without even mentioning what happens to the ones in single episodes to whom the protagonists do seemingly connect, about whom you'd think they'd ever speak or worry, but don't.)

(Not to mention how often their assaults/deaths are far more gruesome or sexualized, but that's another post for another time: for the record, I thought last night was fairly good about that too. I like that they tend to do that with Dean, because it makes me feel safer, as someone who's faced big guys holding her against things with their bodies; Dean's [possibly chosen by Jensen] recurring desexualization of his holds on women [last night, iirc, he was beside Flagstaff with the blade to her neck, and he was holding Tessa's wrists between them instead of pinning her with his body against hers. I'll also never get the whole 'he sexually assaulted Bela' thing, though I fully support your fears if you do, because I've watched and rewatched that scene and his disarming is quick and methodical and doesn't touch her more than he needs to, but that's another write-up] when he gets violent with them is rare, in male heroes.)

I thought last night actually stepped up a bit in terms of this, writing Flagstaff spearheading her own retribution, contrary to what her Big Male Leader says, and Tessa arranging HER OWN death (as opposed to last season's 22, where Sarah had absolutely no power, her death was weaponized in a fight between heroic men and villainous men and the most blatant example of fridging on this show that's happened since the fucking pilot) to the anger of people who valued her (there was no 'our mother'; 'our friend'; 'our daughter'; 'our captain' etc. it was all 'TESSA?') instead of their relationship to her; we'll see how long that lasts.

(I do mourn Ice Cream Angel, "she" was pretty cool, but I have long given up on the idea of literally any angel or demon except maybe Castiel being allowed to live more than an episode or two [maybe half a dozen at most]. Esp. ones on the opposing side. My numbness to, my recovery time to Supernatural killing p. much anybody [except perhaps Cas: cos me] has reached an all-time high. It's not that I forgive the show; it's that I don't have the energy, the mental space, to devote my focus to the shit I can't change that hurts me right now. I care. I know it's problematic. I talk about it frequently. But I can't bring myself to make it The Thing right now.)

An Interesting Observation in a Fandom That Has Opinions:

What a great thing SPN's writers have had going for years.

They get to blame fans or opposers of specific things for why they got rid of those things and watch fandom fight amongst themselves and tiptoe silently out of the wrongly directed melee, and continue to do what they did to begin with, unchallenged.

"You hated Bela (and her and Dean)!" they scream, even though Kripke himself hated Bela and admitted he killed her off cos it was becoming "The Bela Show". People hated Bela for not giving a shit about the cause of killing Lilith (selling the Colt, for instance), but Bela didn't have to have died even if people didn't like her with Dean and it's bullshit that she hasn't come back as a demon, because that would be incredible. (And easy, it doesn't have to even be the same actress if scheduling conflicts happen.)

"You hated Jo, you never wanted her with Dean!" people yell, ignoring that Jo and Dean hadn't been seen together in seasons and that the original writing was supposed to have Dean and Anna together in S4 on, so it was unlikely anti-shippers had anything to do with her death (and since she had grown out of her crush on him--which is a super feminist way to portray that relationship--that they weren't going to be together before she died). Ignoring that as fucking bullshit as the loss of Jo and Ellen is, they actually died in a way that closed their arc satisfyingly.

"They killed Meg cos of Destiel shippers/ Megstiel anti-shippers!" is said, like Meg wasn't marked for death as a villain from the start and they hadn't changed her specifically in a way that made that ending pretty certain for her (though the extent of no homo from her end was surprising). Like they hadn't been slowly draining away her allies and overwriting how fucking powerful and remorseless she was (yet not making her likable enough to be a Good Guy) with "put up or shut up" and and "I need friends" / "mutually assured destruction", as well as giving Abaddon--a more powerful and mysterious and unknown Meg, basically, in all things--her arc of hating/fighting Crowley, taunting the Winchesters, and making a regime change. As though there was just nothing to do with Meg that didn't have to involve the half-baked no homo they tried (and failed) with Castiel. As though they hadn't clearly grabbed the first no homo trope they could find after the sexist writing that had essentially defanged her and sidelined her real "cause" for no homo OOC reasons over two seasons to fridge her. "My unicorn." as her reasoning for fighting someone she already hated by herself, as though Meg could be Redeemed by Love without actually changing at all. /Simba-esque pfuh.

"They killed Anna cos of Destiel shippers!" is said, with ignorance of the fact that writing Castiel into Anna's role (because he was at the beginning of the coming of age Anna had already gone through before she appeared) didn't actually have to mean killing Anna. (She could have been with Ruby, helped Ruby escape at the end of S4 instead of either of them getting caught, and it would have been a fascinating side plot and queer and demon/angel without rape cos they both had empty vessels and actually liked each other and don't even fucking touch me, I'm so pissed about that. She could have been friends or more with Sam, that would have made a lot of sense, actually, in terms of their characters, Sam trying to stop her from killing Sam in Song and a relationship developing there if she had to be a fucking love interest and they'd already tried that with Dean and Ruby still died [cos as much as I hate what was done to S4 Ruby after S3 Ruby, S4 Ruby goes out at the top of her game in a very feminist end for a villain]. She could have escaped Michael and been a double agent in Heaven for a while. So much potential, she didn't have to have the storyline Cas fit in better to have a storyline.)

(I'm not going to go into Wincest, cos from what I've heard, a lot of Just the Brothers Wincest shippers would gladly shove most love interests Dean and Sam have ever had into a tree shredder. And it doesn't actually matter, because once again, it was the writers' choices to get rid of them.)

Nobody mentions that institutionally racist and sexist and heterosexist writing are the fucking reason the fans reacted to them that way to begin with, that villains are written to be hated, and that TPTB are well aware of this when they write them, even if they're not consciously choosing to write and cast villains (and shitty allies and people who derail the main cause by which the protagonists order themselves) as such.

Nobody mentions that literally nearly every single character is hated by some vocal faction of fandom, and though individual contributions to sexism and racism makes the lady and PoC haters louder, hate is not a singular reason to kill off a character. The writers chose which factions to listen to; liking or hating (or NOT CARING AS MUCH ABOUT) a character is not a fucking crime. The privileged as fuck writers wrote characters and their storylines and their relationships cognizant of how fans would likely react to them and then used the fan reactions as justification for them doing something they'd always intended to do. And y'know, it's just oh so coincidental that they always do that with ladies and PoC (as well as Cas one memorable season, and they chose to bring him back).

Yet. They also claim the fans are entitled to nothing from the writing and that everybody's interpretations are supported (mostly in response to accusations of having baited queer people). That "X thing in fandom" isn't something they think or talk about, that they don't write for specific fans.

I'm just saying. You have to admire the comfortable position they're sitting in, watching us all hate each other for having opinions about characters and relationships, picking out a faction to blame if they decide to do something terrible to that character, no matter how many people actually hated them to the point that they wanted them gone.

A faction which we will then attack as the reason for the character's fate, while the writers get off scot-free. Which is exactly as they planned, writing specific characters to be responded to and then blaming us for responding to them (usually appropriately so) if they fuck them over.

(This, fyi, is why I do attack the writers--the problem is in the writing, not the extremists/subjective haters' reactions--and I don't actually give a shit if people like or hate characters or relationships.)

(P.S. If this isn't obvious already, though of COURSE not every single fucking death of any marginalized character is purely -ism, just like Meg's fridging at the end of an arc that overwrote a lot of her as an agreeable tool for the Winchesters and ended in out of the blue half-baked no homo was sexist [heterosexist] writing [just like how they wrote Bela, Anna, Linda, Ruby, Naomi, Channing, Linda etc...] if women say so, Kevin's sidelining so that we felt mostly anger and shock [if that much] at his death and his pretty predictably written, somewhat final death itself is racist writing if PoC say it is. And they do. So shut it. The writing that prizes white dudes over other characters [that tries to make you care more about their stories, whether you end up doing so or not] is the fucking problem, so let people complain of it so we can maybe actually resolve the problem.)