venusdebotticelli:

almaasi:

Let me tell you about what kept me awake last night. (Warnings for rape, murder, and Crowley/everyone. Contains spoilers for 11x01 “Out of the Darkness, Into the Fire”.)

I am so fucking disturbed by what Crowley did in 11x01. For those of you who don’t know, he smoked out of his immobilised Mark Sheppard meatsuit, possessed a woman, then proceeded to engage in an orgy with two men and one woman, before murdering them. Then he goes back to his Mark Sheppard meatsuit and appears to be his usual chipper, very-much-alive old self.

Now, there was supposedly an attempt by Jeremy Carver to make the sex consensual. I don’t want to re-watch it, but from what I gathered, the possessed woman’s husband sat her down and told her he agreed to a foursome with the other couple. But the problem with this is that they were consenting to sex with the actual woman (I think she was named Marnie?). As @selfihauntyouithink​ assured me when I had second doubts about the rapeyness of this, they were not consenting to sex with Crowley. This is called “rape by deception” - and, need I say it, it’s rape.

Plus, y’know, he kills them after, and that’s just rude.

Okay, I get that Crowley is a demon and he’s ~evil~. No doubt that would be Jeremy Carver’s excuse if someone said “Hey, you just made the same mistake that Eugenie Ross-Leming and Brad Buckner made in 9x03.” But there’s a difference between writing a bad guy who you’re meant to root for, and feel sympathetic towards, and one you’re meant to hate. Crowley is still being written as a bad guy you’re meant to want to root for. He goes back to his Mark Sheppard visage and as the audience we’re meant to feel “oh good, he’s back to his old self, and he’s not dead.”

I don’t feel that. At all. Until now I kind of begrudgingly accepted that Crowley was going to stick around, being Dean’s demon ex-boyfriend, and occasionally being adorably evil. I liked him a bit, because hey, Mark Sheppard.

But frankly, rape is my limit. Maybe that’s a personal thing. I can accept that demons are going to murder and manipulate and torture people, because those are evil things to do. Evil can be fun to watch - that’s why I enjoy characters like Abaddon or Lucifer or - Chuck help me - even Dick freaking Roman. But I don’t want to feel like I’m compelled to enjoy Crowley’s character for the rest of this season, knowing he did this. I don’t want to root for a rapist. For me there is no longer any fun in watching Crowley exist.

Now, I have to mention this, because it’s important: Crowley’s portrayal, particularly in this episode, is straight-up queercoding. Queercoding is when the baddies are the non-hetero folks, so in a weird way, the viewer learns to associate queerness and/or sexual nonconformity with evil. Crowley is a fairly established bisexual character. I mean, he was introduced in a scene where he’s kissing a dude. He’s had orgies with demon!Dean and male triplets, he’s smooched Bobby, he had a history with Naomi. And as difficult as the producers seem to find it to make Dean canonically queer, nope, it’s totally fine when it’s Crowley. Because he’s evil. Literally, that’s how it works. That’s how the producers think.

But back to Marnie, or whatever her name was. I know this kind of possession-murder happens a lot on the show, but a large part of what kept me tossing and turning last night was knowing the wreck Crowley left behind in Marnie’s life. It’s fiction, I know, I know, but this really fucking bothers me. I have a lot of empathy for victims and this one really got to me.

So Crowley raped and killed Marnie’s friends - and technically raped her too, while we’re at it, since while she’d agreed beforehand to the orgy, she did not agree to being possessed while having sex. Afterwards Crowley smokes out of her. Does he kill her, does he leave her alive? I don’t know which is worse. If she’s still alive, all her friends are dead, she’s traumatised, her life is ruined and her DNA is on everything so she’ll be arrested for murder, whether she pleads guilty or not. If Crowley killed her, her name is mud because anyone who walks into that house is going to see what happened: she was the one who killed them.

Basically, there’s no way to fix what happened to Marnie. Of all the horrific things that happen on this show, this one is actually one of the more haunting things, for me. And it’s not the act itself, really - it’s the way it’s portrayed by the writers. It seems as though the narrative’s excuse for keeping Crowley around is “It’s okay, he’s a bad guy, he does bad things. Look, he has a funny one liner! Laugh now!”

But for what reason did Crowley do this to Marnie? Answer: no fucking reason at all. Does a rapist ever need a reason? He got out of his body and was like, “Well then, I suppose I’ll go and do some brutal murdering now. And while I’m at it, let’s rape some people too, since I have the opportunity.”

I’m just…. so done. With this episode, Jeremy Carver has single-handedly ruined the character of Crowley for me. Which is a shame, because the rest of the episode was pretty decent, in my opinion.

There’s no redemption for Crowley now. No amount of “I deserve to be loved!” is going to make me like him again, because no, he does not deserve to be loved any more. He doesn’t deserve anything except to have his bones salted and burned and buried so deep in the pits of Hell that he’ll never crawl out.

And while we’re about it, someone take that damn crown off his head. (Carver’s too.)

I bolded some points in your post, because THIS is exactly what made it especially bothersome for me. Yes, he’s a bad guy and bad guys do bad things that are condemned by the writers. But it wasn’t presented as the horrific thing that it actually was¿? It was presented as “omg how funny lol what a boss”, and what worries me just as much, is the amount of people on my dash that I saw react in that exact same way¿? so many posts laughing about how “hilarious” it was and how “great” Crowley is¿?

Yeah, I have nothing against fiction portraying horrifying things, but only as long as the tone is right and it doesn’t feel that they’re just trivialising it for some cheap joke. And tbh I’m also baffled by the reactions of the people I’m following, specially after 9x03, I didn’t expect that many people to laugh about it and find it endearing¿? I feel like barfing about the whole thing tbh.

  1. rococodollfie reblogged this from almaasi
  2. puredicks reblogged this from ghostral
  3. orangemeta reblogged this from messier51
  4. harlequincrown reblogged this from thoughtlessthinkythoughts
  5. thoughtlessthinkythoughts reblogged this from almaasi
  6. deansfruityboots reblogged this from autisticbee
  7. the-fandom-life-rocks reblogged this from autisticbee
  8. autisticbee reblogged this from almaasi
  9. canyoubelievesomeone reblogged this from almaasi
  10. cenevans reblogged this from wingsdestiel
  11. calistomyth reblogged this from rainbofiction
  12. thewhisperwoman reblogged this from almaasi
  13. sunshinexlollipops reblogged this from almaasi
  14. messier51 reblogged this from rainbofiction
  15. rainbofiction reblogged this from drsilverfish and added:
    All of this. Plus the fact that this is the first time his queerness is explicit maintext … and they had to put him in a...
  16. tatltaelfairies reblogged this from drsilverfish
  17. almaasi posted this