queenofthevaseline:
Just because they’ve inserted some representation at one point within TEN YEARS doesn’t mean that it’s enough. There is a lack of representation, not no representation. We don’t have nearly ENOUGH of people of colour and GBTQIA+ representation.
This isn’t equality and it sounds so ignorant when you say it is.
This show has had more positive and varied LGBTQA representation than any other non-queer-centric show I’ve ever watched. And do you know what happened every damn time? They were dragged by people who felt that queer representation didn’t mean equality, it meant putting queer people into a perfect glass case and saying they deserve different treatment form straight characters. I’m only going to give a few examples because I’m short on time but there are more than this:
All Hell Breaks Loose 2.21 we had Lily, a female character who was one of Azazel’s kids and her super power was that she killed people when she touched them. She shared that she had accidentally touched her girlfriend and killed her. This was important for two reasons. #1 it was emotional for the audience and made us feel for her. #2 she was not presented as a queer character with super-powers, she was presented as a character with super-powers who was also queer.The reason this was important is because that’s how straight characters are introduced. Most shows would have presented Lily as a flag for queer representation but Supernatural didn’t, they presented her as a person with an emotional backstory who was also queer. This reminds me of season 1 of Torchwood. If you watch the dvd extras you’ll see that in Greeks Bearing Gifts 1.7 the love interest of Tosh was originally conceived as male. Someone suggested that it be played by a female actress and gay showrunner Russell T. Davies said yes but that they wouldn’t talk about the fact that Tosh was attracted to a female, they wouldn’t make a big deal about it, they would just present it as an accepted fact the same way straight attractions are presented in tv shows. Supernatural did the same thing. They gave us a female character who happened to be queer but was not defined by her queerness. Saying it like that sounds like it should be industry standard but it’s not, queer women are highly sexualized in mainstream media because it gets good ratings but Supernatural, a low budget show that was in dire need of a ratings spike, did not do that with Lily. They presented her as a relatable person who was also queer, not as a sexualized queer female. And yet I rarely see anyone in the fandom mention Lily or her heartbreaking backstory in a positive way. All I ever see are people dragging the show because Lily died, All of Azazel’s children died, including Sam. The only reason Sam came back to life is because he has a brother with the knowledge and willingness to sell his soul to hell. Saying that Lily should have lived when everyone else died isn’t equality, it’s saying that queer characters need to be given special treatment. In a show where death happens frequently, equality means that queer characters can also die as long as it’s a scenario that would have resulted in death if that character were straight. I’ve also seen the fandom claiming that they only made Lily a lesbian to feteshize f/f sex, despite the fact that there was nothing titillating about her scenes at all.
My second example is Damien and Barnes from The Real Ghostbusters 5.09. These were everyman characters, which means they were conceived to be relatable to most of the audience. An everyman character invites the audience to live vicariously through them, the entire point of making everyman characters is to let your audience identify with them. We spent an entire episode with these characters, being invited to identify with them on a personal level. We saw how brave and heroic they were even though they were normal people with no hunter training. Then, at the very end, we were told they were in a same gender relationship with each other. This means that everyone who engaged with that episode and lived vicariously through these everyman characters were told at the very end “BTW, they’re queer. That doesn’t entirely define them, they have many facets to their personalities as all queer people do, but the people you spent most of this episode identifying with do happen to be queer. Just like many people you have positive encounters with on a daily basis happen to be queer. Because queer doesn’t where a uniform, we come in all shapes and sizes.” This was powerful. Many fans would have spent most of the episode identifying with those characters and were then confronted with the concept that “queer people are just like you.” And yet the feedback I always see about this episode is “The fandom is mostly female. They were being sexist by putting men in that role.” Or “They made a joke out of their gayness by waiting until the very end to reveal it.” I agree that there should have been more female fandom representation in that episode and I’m disappointed that the con audience was predominantly male, but if the roles of Damien and Barnes had been portrayed as females I think it would have resulted in the fandom accusing the show of fetishizing lesbians since they made that accusation with Lily despite her obviously not being fetishized. With Damien and Barnes, Supernatural did a fantastic job at representing a same gender couple in a non-stereotypical way that allowed the audience to identify with the characters on a personal level before knowing their sexualities. This is the ideal, this is what queer people want, we want to be real characters where our sexualities are a side-note rather than a defining feature. Supernatural gave us the exact kind of representation that I’d been advocating for since I was 15 and yet the fandom responded negatively to it. Why? Because they were male? Because they weren’t conventionally attractive? Because they were everymen heroes instead of all-powerful indestructible heroes?
There are other examples. I’m short on time but a couple quick references I can make are that in Sacrifice 8.23 a cupid, who gets her orders from heaven, fixed up a male couple. Castiel, an angel of the Lord, said he was utterly indifferent to sexual orientation when faced with an anti-gay church leader. The point is that they did not insert representation only once in ten years, they’ve done it multiple times. If they only representation you’re thinking of is Charlie then you have ignored years of canon representation on this show.
