SPN month: that old black magic
favorite monsters antagonists
WITCHES. Because witches are always the best! And because Ruby totally counts as one too and I love her way more than the other demons. And because whenever Dean calls a woman a bitch I put a nickle in the pottymouth jar and like her a little more on principle, which has the cumulative effect of making me Team Witch Forever. Dean, what even.
here is the part where I ~vent a bit.
I still have a lot of ish about Malleus Maleficarum, because there could be a lot there - I think it is excellent development for Sam and especially Ruby independently, and their interactions are fantastic. But it is so deliberately misogynistic, in a way that honestly shocked me to see. Obviously I am not a fragile hothouse flower when it comes to unintentional or coded misogyny but damn. Witches are whores. Burn witch burn. Anything even conceivably domestic sphere - and therefore for purposes of contextual folklore about witches and the episode specifically - was one of their sinister tools. The sadistic glee Dean threw into the stabbing makes my skin crawl. I'm okay with showing all that stuff, as long as it's for purposes of exploring and exposing it for what it is - but this was all to show they were EVIL WHORES and deserved to DIE DIE DIE.
Obviously, like with the horrible Lilith mess which is a whole other "most disturbing narrative ever" post, I'd prefer to choose to respond with some positive re-invention and like them better, but this is seriously foul. I'm...yeah. not going to try to defend it. I'm not much more pleased with the S5 appearance of the witch couple, because it was ultimately yet another rehash of "woman realizes she is too horrible to live and submits herself to a man to kill her" which, retch, but it felt like business-as-usual narrative sexism, rather than the explicit vilification of femininity through the witch symbolism. Still, that's a really low bar.
Which is why, like with the angel thing, I was really encouraged by S7. Shut Up, Dr. Phil would've been excellent based on the guest star score alone, of course. But it also took a lot of the sting out of the handling of witches in the earlier seasons. The Starks' conflict is a thoroughly domestic dispute, like witch-power so far, but it's a clash between both of them, and coming from their own power. That's a really encouraging contrast to the "scheming harpies selling themselves to leech off of someone else's power." And they both walk away from it at the end. The power isn't innately toxic, or a sign and agent of inevitable self-destruction, and it's not buying into that super-rigid gender binary nonsense, it just is. see? growth. It's a thing, I'm a fan.
(By the way, this is where I start to want a crossover more than anything. Can we imagine Dean spewing his anti-witch nonsense in front of Willow Motherfucking Rosenberg or Bonnie Motherfucking Bennett? HAHAHAHAHA.)
WITCHES. Because witches are always the best! And because Ruby totally counts as one too and I love her way more than the other demons. And because whenever Dean calls a woman a bitch I put a nickle in the pottymouth jar and like her a little more on principle, which has the cumulative effect of making me Team Witch Forever. Dean, what even.
here is the part where I ~vent a bit.
I still have a lot of ish about Malleus Maleficarum, because there could be a lot there - I think it is excellent development for Sam and especially Ruby independently, and their interactions are fantastic. But it is so deliberately misogynistic, in a way that honestly shocked me to see. Obviously I am not a fragile hothouse flower when it comes to unintentional or coded misogyny but damn. Witches are whores. Burn witch burn. Anything even conceivably domestic sphere - and therefore for purposes of contextual folklore about witches and the episode specifically - was one of their sinister tools. The sadistic glee Dean threw into the stabbing makes my skin crawl. I'm okay with showing all that stuff, as long as it's for purposes of exploring and exposing it for what it is - but this was all to show they were EVIL WHORES and deserved to DIE DIE DIE.
Obviously, like with the horrible Lilith mess which is a whole other "most disturbing narrative ever" post, I'd prefer to choose to respond with some positive re-invention and like them better, but this is seriously foul. I'm...yeah. not going to try to defend it. I'm not much more pleased with the S5 appearance of the witch couple, because it was ultimately yet another rehash of "woman realizes she is too horrible to live and submits herself to a man to kill her" which, retch, but it felt like business-as-usual narrative sexism, rather than the explicit vilification of femininity through the witch symbolism. Still, that's a really low bar.
Which is why, like with the angel thing, I was really encouraged by S7. Shut Up, Dr. Phil would've been excellent based on the guest star score alone, of course. But it also took a lot of the sting out of the handling of witches in the earlier seasons. The Starks' conflict is a thoroughly domestic dispute, like witch-power so far, but it's a clash between both of them, and coming from their own power. That's a really encouraging contrast to the "scheming harpies selling themselves to leech off of someone else's power." And they both walk away from it at the end. The power isn't innately toxic, or a sign and agent of inevitable self-destruction, and it's not buying into that super-rigid gender binary nonsense, it just is. see? growth. It's a thing, I'm a fan.
(By the way, this is where I start to want a crossover more than anything. Can we imagine Dean spewing his anti-witch nonsense in front of Willow Motherfucking Rosenberg or Bonnie Motherfucking Bennett? HAHAHAHAHA.)