fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #535 ]

[ SECRET POST #535 ]

⌈ Secret Post #535 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 11 pages, 257 secrets from Secret Submission Post #077.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 2 3 - broken links ], [ 1 2 3 4 - not!secrets ], [ 1 2 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 3 - too big ], [ 1 2 3 - repeat ], [ 1 2 - response ], [ 1 2 - why me ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

See, that's the thing. I don't there there are actually very many of us who hate ALL the females on the show.

Cassie, Jo and Bela are generally disliked, this is true. That still leaves... Sarah, Ellen, Lenore, Ava, Madison, Ruby, Tamara, Casey.. uh... Hallie, Kathleen, Layla and Meg, that's 12 female characters that are pretty much liked by most of the fandom off the top of my head.

Granted, three of them are dead, but it just seems unfair to paint the fandom as this group of vagina haters when in reality, we seem to like 4 out of 5 vaginas the boys come in contact with.

Er... not that there aren't a few really creepy fans out there that write snuff-fic about every woman that comes with in ten feet of the boys, but I'm pretty sure they're the minority.

Except that most of those are not females that the male character have much sexual tension with. The characters who are sexually connected with DEAN especially get the brunt of it-- especially the ones where the relationship might be open ended.

Other than Ellen, who was too old to be a love interest, and Ruby, who was hated plenty, just not as much as Bela, none of those women were on the show more than once. If they came back as regulars, I suspect everyone holding them up to prove that they don't LOVE women, really!, would decide they hated them just as much as every other woman who came within ten feet of Sam and Dean in more than one episode.

Well, that's kind the point. You don't actually know why I object to Jo or Bela. I could be one of those fangirls who think Sam and Dean are secret lovers and icky girls get in the way of the buttsex. But I could also be someone who thinks that Jo and Bela were horribly written and miscast, and would have loved for Ava to have stayed around, or for someone to write a realistic damn love interest for Dean because I WANT HIM TO TAKE HIS FUCKING SHIRT OFF.

The point is, you automatically start shrieking 'vagina hate' if someone says they didn't like Cassie or whoever, and it's fucking rude to assume that just because I'm female and a fan of Supernatural that I can't possibly have logical, valid reasons for thinking Bela sucked ass as a character. Because she really, really did.

Also, as far as Dean getting the brunt of it, Sam just hasn't had the crap characters forced on him that Dean has.

But you better believe that when they gave Sam that wet dream about Bela, people went batshit because they thought the writers were trying to pawn her off on Sam.

The point is, you automatically start shrieking 'vagina hate'

The point is, every female character who sticks around for more that one episode and is not old enough to be Sam and Dean's mother is massively hated throughout fandom. Is it possible individual fangirls have good reasons for hating individual female characters? Sure. But it's a lot less likely that there is no vagina hate involved when every female character who sticks around for more than one episode and isn't old enough to be Sam and Dean's mother is massively hated throughout fandom, EVERY SINGLE TIME.

I'd love for the fandom to eventually prove me wrong on this, but it's been three years and it hasn't even made baby steps in that direction, while there has not been a single male character, recurring or otherwise, who has been hated in the same way or on the same scale. So, yeah, I'm very comfortable saying SPN fandom as a whole has a major fucking problem with women. They showcase it every time one appears onscreen.

I don't know about that; I haven't seen most of these characters, but assuming people aren't flat out lying about what happens in the later seasons, most of these female characters seem to be incredibly badly written.

Perhaps the women who watch the show aren't so much to blame as the writers for it?

(I'm just wondering, as I haven't actually seen very far.)

I haven't seen most of these characters, but assuming people aren't flat out lying about what happens in the later seasons, most of these female characters seem to be incredibly badly written.

No more so than many male characters on the show, who never get any kind of hate at all. I have no idea if people are "flat out lying," but I do know that SPN is full of badly written characters of both genders, and the fandom only ever hates the women.

And Dean, it seems? As i said above, the latest I heard was the giant uproar about Dean's misogyny.

"Badly written" and "female" really are used as synonyms in a lot of SPN fandom. Someone recently proposed writing letters to Kripke to ask him to never put any female characters on the show again, because they were all so badly written, and received hundreds of comments telling her how brilliant she was. Suggest to these same people that any male character is badly written (and a whole lot of them are, including, frequently, the two male leads), and they tend to start screaming about how the SPN writers are modern-day Shakespeares and how dare anyone suggest that anything they write is less than brilliant. Except the women, of course. In three years, the SPN writers have written every male character perfectly, and every female character so badly that their mere presence makes a lot of SPN fangirls want to throw up. It's amazing.

Oh, every single character on the show is horribly written. Including the men. My feeling is you have to be a fairly talented actor in order to pull off the crap the writers throw at them, and IMO, most of the actresses hired aren't.

So I tend to blame the extra-suckiness of the women on the casting department. They seem to go more for 'hot' than talented. It's pretty much "Boobs and shiny hair? You're hired".

I will say that when the female writers on staff get a hold of the women, they're a lot less horrific. Too bad it usually ends up being their last episode.

Lauren Cohen is quite a good actor, and it didn't stop anyone from hating her. And we've had plenty of sucky male actors who couldn't pull off the material, and it didn't make anyone hate them. There's just no way to spin it to claim SPN fandom doesn't have a gigantic double standard. If a character is female, they find a way to hate her, and they find a way to justify it ("I hate her because she's badly written! Wait, men are also badly written, you say? Then I hate her because she's a bad actor! Wait, there are also bad male actors on the show? Then I hate her because she's a bitch who tried to kill Sam! Wait, Gordon tried to kill Sam multiple times? Then, um, I hate her because she's a skanky whore!"). If there was a single male character, in three years, who had provoked even a quarter of the ire routinely lobbed at female characters, I might be willing to cut the fandom a little more slack. But there's never been one, and if I were a betting woman, I'd say there never will be one.

Oh, poor Lauren Cohan. Maybe she is a great little actress. I don't care who you are, no one in the world could have made the steaming pile of crap that was Bela less atrocious. And comparing her to Gordon is ridiculous. Gordon was a villain from the start, and we were never expected to believe that the boys would willingly work with him a week after he'd tried to kill them, nor was he shoved down our throats over and over, he appeared what, 4 times in two seasons? Gordon and Bela were two completely different situations, and him having a penis instead of a vagina had nothing to do with it. In fact, that was one of main issues with her. That the writers expected us to pretend she wasn't an evil, sociopathic bastard simply because she had a vagina. If she'd been a man, Dean would have beat her ass down the moment she shot Sam. It was lousy, lousy writing and it didn't matter who they cast for that role.
And this goes for other females as well. Like Jo, who could have been interesting, but they wrote her as a 16 year old girl and she looked like a 16 year old girl and it was skeeving people out. There are valid reasons for disliking the female characters, just as there are valid reasons for disliking the males.

There are valid reasons for disliking the female characters, just as there are valid reasons for disliking the males.

And yet, SPN as fandom a whole loves every male character and hates every female character. Which, again, is the point. They always have "good" reasons for why they hate all the women and love all the men, but they always hate all the women and love all the men. You personally might not fit that description, but SPN fandom taken as group does.

They always have "good" reasons for why they hate all the women and love all the men, but they always hate all the women and love all the men.

So I guess your stance is that we should just accept a terribly written, badly miscast character simply because she's a woman?

The writers consistently fail to create believable, sympathetic, intriguing female characters, why should we give them a pass for that? Are you honestly saying that Bela was well written, and it was only the fangirls who didn't like icky women that complained?

But... wasn't the whole fandom in an uproar just recently over how badly Dean was written? That he was turned into some misogynistic asshole (yeah, I wasn't too fond of his attitudes towards women in the first parts, but this seem to have been much worse)?

And the discussions seemed to be all about how awful Dean was to the poor women too.

Someone recently proposed writing letters to Kripke to ask him to never put any female characters on the show again, because they were all so badly written, and received hundreds of comments telling her how brilliant she was.

Wow, really? That's batshit all right! I usually only see what's linked to metafandom. And sometimes fandom_wank.

But... wasn't the whole fandom in an uproar just recently over how badly Dean was written?

No. The whole fandom was in a huge uproar because a few people suggested Dean had been badly written and everyone else started screaming about how perfectly Dean was written and how anyone who thought there were any issues with the writing should get the fuck out of the fandom. And to a woman, everyone screaming about how Dean has been written by the pens of angels were the same ones who hate all the female characters on the show because they're "badly written."

Wow, really? That's batshit all right!

Yes, really. And like everyone else I mentioned above, she though the writing of all the male characters on the show was flawless, and that anyone who had a problem with it was an idiot who needed to shut up.

No. The whole fandom was in a huge uproar because a few people suggested Dean had been badly written and everyone else started screaming about how perfectly Dean was written and how anyone who thought there were any issues with the writing should get the fuck out of the fandom.

Most of the essays I read were about how awful he had turned out, though. Except for two, I think. And they were hardly screaming, you know, only arguing against (though they weren't very convincing IMO). More disagreed in comments, of course, but I didn't get the impression that one side was in the extreme minority.

As I said, though, I read what's on metafandom, mostly. So I might have missed a large part of the fandom (and I wouldn't know anything of the fandom outside LJ or IJ).

Yes, really. And like everyone else I mentioned above, she though the writing of all the male characters on the show was flawless, and that anyone who had a problem with it was an idiot who needed to shut up.

I have run into people like this in several fandoms. It's useless to even try to have a discussion; usually I just keep away.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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