Talking Meme, Day 19
I don’t have a whole lot to say about Tony Stark? I’ve only seen him in The Avengers and even then I’m mostly interested in his Bruce-adjacency.
Witches, though…
[Note: I’m writing all of this based on the premise that Rowena is a reliable narrator as to the basic witch mythology she presents to her potential protégées. It could well be all wrong, but as of this point we don’t have anything else to go on, and there’s not much reason (Watsonian or Doylist) for her to have been lying.]
In pop culture in the last few decades, the witch archetype has more or less stood for “someone who has power when society says they shouldn’t.” Genre television being relatively outsider-oriented, this is usually a good thing, or at least a thing that justifies a place at the protagonists’ table. I think the reshaping of witches on Supernatural has reflected (inadvertently, I suspect, but that is completely irrelevant) the progression of the narrative construct of the outsider. Early on, the show was very invested in a normative hierarchy of insider/outsider dynamics: some types of outsiderness were framed as noble (hunters vis-à-vis SOCIETY, MAN!!) while others are vilified as being inherently deviant. It is not coincidence, for example, that witches played a key role in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester, where Sam’s demon blood powers saved hundreds of lives, yet were received with revulsion. (It’s more likely than not to have been unintentional, but it’s not a coincidence that these two bits of mythology felt like they went together.)
Ultimately, the protagonists’ hypocrisy on magic and spells is a feature of the narrative perspective, rather than a bug: witches as a narrative device are about the power of those who are expected to be marginalized. Magic is about the what; witchcraft is about the who. In the normative framework of the earlier seasons, hunters have conventional hard power, therefore they are entitled to use power of any type. As our protagonists’ special snowflake status has become less rigorously defended, the need to set them apart as being legitimate power users has abated somewhat as well. By S7 the Stark witches could be fought off with a spell because they were terrorizing that town and needed to be stopped, not because they’re witches.
Of course, “people who shouldn’t have power” often means “women, who shouldn’t have power.” Witches tend to be a Rorsarch test for a person’s or narrative’s ideas about women, and this is another place I think the expansion of witches in the mythology shows an improvement in the show in that regard. The “witches are whores” language we heard in that first act of the show is categorically distasteful, no doubt; those two words are popular gendered slurs. But it also relates to that knot of deviance/power/taboo: money is power, sex is power, magic is power.
The coven in s3 was one of ….a very few? times (possibly the only time) we saw a group of women on-screen, and they were a long list of misogynistic tropes. They were dumb enough to be duped into selling their souls, but wicked enough to make such an awful choice as to sell their souls. They abused others, their own abuser was (at least appearing as) a woman, they turned on each other at the slightest provocation, with only one of them surviving to see the light after the intervention of The Menfolk. They were thirsty for illegitimate power, and they used it in petty suburban vendettas rather than having the ambition to step into the public sphere. &c, &c. In these later seasons, though, this aspect of the show has improved immensely. Foz Meadows says (I haven’t checked but it sounds right) that every episode so far in S10 has passed the Bechdel test. Now that the series seems capable of imagining women interacting in a way other than being coven of witches, it’s given itself more room to define “witch” as something other than “woman.”
As the show’s understanding of hierarchy has grown more complex, the show seems more comfortable in showing both social structures and outsider status as being morally neutral in and of themselves. The Grand Coven is roughly parallel to the Men of Letters (introduced in mid-S8) and the Knights of Hell (first mentioned with the MoL but developed as a hierarchal order in mid-S9). It’s another insider/outsider dynamic: these are all groups of entities who exist outside of the mundane world, but they’re also groups with formalized structures, with deviants subject to expulsion and defectors able to leave, and the line between those two groups being highly subject to obfuscation. Rowena’s estrangement from the Coven is highly resonant with Magnus’ expulsion from the MoL. These characters may end up as a dark mirror for Dean’s eventual extrication from the Mark.
Though they are expected to curtail their behavior because, like, SOCIETY, MAN, Grand Coven-approved witches may well have more autonomy and agency than any other entity on the show so far. Unlike most humans, they have power; unlike monsters, they are humans with free will rather than animals; unlike angels, they don’t seem to have a particularly effective Big Brother like Michael; unlike demons, they’re still in possession of their own souls and (presumably) don’t have to report back to hell to be tortured in between missions.
Fittingly, as its take on interpersonal cooperation changes, the narrative is shifting on its normative perspective on hard and soft power. Witchcraft is a versatile narrative tool in this regard, coding anywhere on that spectrum depending on the needs of the ‘verse. It tends to be mentally/spiritually fueled, which lends itself to coding as soft power, but witches can go toe-to-toe with adversaries possessing conventional superstrength, which puts them in the hard power league. Magic can have demonstrable effect on the physical world, but it does not require bulging muscles or phallic accoutrements.
Early seasons SPN was deeply suspicious of power which was not conventional guns-and-fisticuffs hard power, and witches were easily identified as its opposite. When the angels came on the scene, they were the primary antagonists and unquestionably dominant in terms of hard power, and so the soft, squishy Power Of Heart gained some (limited) traction. The “knowledge is power” theme of S8 is, like witchcraft, harder to classify: Kevin’s prophet powers are intellectual and passively received, but they lead to his ability to build bombs.
This isn’t to say that I think soft power is the new hard power in the ‘verse, where physical altercations are preemptively morally suspect and mindpower belongs to the worthy. (Earlier generations of MoL seem to have had this attitude, but the narrative doesn’t support them as being correct in that view.) It’s that the show seems much more aware that power itself is neutral. Witches are no worse than other players in their world, including different factions of humans, though they are also no better. I totally love narratives that treat magic and soft power as heroic, but that’s not necessary for the plot device to work, and for numerous reasons it probably wouldn’t work so well here. This is illustrated by Rowena, who is the witch we’ve gotten to know this season. As both a witch and a narcissist, Rowena has more than one type of soft power at her disposal. She uses her manipulative skill (quintessential soft power) interchangeably with her magic. And she, after all, made Crowley, who became the King of Hell armed mainly with his own silver tongue - and a few magic tricks he learned from her.
So anyway! That’s the thematic stuff. There’s also the fun issue of looking back at past seasons with new information, and figuring out how it all fits in.
It’s fun to speculate on what type of witch the previous ones we’ve met were. I doubt we’ve met many (any?) from the Grand Coven. If this is the case, I suspect it is because the Coven provides sufficient incentives to keep its members in line. This hypothetical policy may be based on a number of possible motivations: discretion, an unwillingness to see power concentrated in small handfuls of witches who are willing to go above and beyond what the collective deems wise, ethical concern for the non-magical, and/or something else. I suspect we’ve met a few naturals: the Starks didn’t seem to be answerable to anyone else, and neither did the card-playing witch from S5.
Under this rubric, I would hazard a guess that the striga from way back in S1 was not properly classified as a witch. They aren’t demons, which is what would have become of someone who sold their souls. They’re not naturals who just have power, they need to get power from childrens’ life force. They don’t seem sentient enough to do much magic, even that which would help for hunting, and going around getting caught eating babies is not really secret-society-type behavior. I would tentatively guess that the striga was a garden-variety monster that got named a “witch” because its feeding patterns fit the popular culture concept of what a witch was (anti-child; capable of manipulating mortals by mere physical appearance).
Not like you need to be a witch for that.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/340840.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
Witches, though…
[Note: I’m writing all of this based on the premise that Rowena is a reliable narrator as to the basic witch mythology she presents to her potential protégées. It could well be all wrong, but as of this point we don’t have anything else to go on, and there’s not much reason (Watsonian or Doylist) for her to have been lying.]
In pop culture in the last few decades, the witch archetype has more or less stood for “someone who has power when society says they shouldn’t.” Genre television being relatively outsider-oriented, this is usually a good thing, or at least a thing that justifies a place at the protagonists’ table. I think the reshaping of witches on Supernatural has reflected (inadvertently, I suspect, but that is completely irrelevant) the progression of the narrative construct of the outsider. Early on, the show was very invested in a normative hierarchy of insider/outsider dynamics: some types of outsiderness were framed as noble (hunters vis-à-vis SOCIETY, MAN!!) while others are vilified as being inherently deviant. It is not coincidence, for example, that witches played a key role in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester, where Sam’s demon blood powers saved hundreds of lives, yet were received with revulsion. (It’s more likely than not to have been unintentional, but it’s not a coincidence that these two bits of mythology felt like they went together.)
Ultimately, the protagonists’ hypocrisy on magic and spells is a feature of the narrative perspective, rather than a bug: witches as a narrative device are about the power of those who are expected to be marginalized. Magic is about the what; witchcraft is about the who. In the normative framework of the earlier seasons, hunters have conventional hard power, therefore they are entitled to use power of any type. As our protagonists’ special snowflake status has become less rigorously defended, the need to set them apart as being legitimate power users has abated somewhat as well. By S7 the Stark witches could be fought off with a spell because they were terrorizing that town and needed to be stopped, not because they’re witches.
Of course, “people who shouldn’t have power” often means “women, who shouldn’t have power.” Witches tend to be a Rorsarch test for a person’s or narrative’s ideas about women, and this is another place I think the expansion of witches in the mythology shows an improvement in the show in that regard. The “witches are whores” language we heard in that first act of the show is categorically distasteful, no doubt; those two words are popular gendered slurs. But it also relates to that knot of deviance/power/taboo: money is power, sex is power, magic is power.
The coven in s3 was one of ….a very few? times (possibly the only time) we saw a group of women on-screen, and they were a long list of misogynistic tropes. They were dumb enough to be duped into selling their souls, but wicked enough to make such an awful choice as to sell their souls. They abused others, their own abuser was (at least appearing as) a woman, they turned on each other at the slightest provocation, with only one of them surviving to see the light after the intervention of The Menfolk. They were thirsty for illegitimate power, and they used it in petty suburban vendettas rather than having the ambition to step into the public sphere. &c, &c. In these later seasons, though, this aspect of the show has improved immensely. Foz Meadows says (I haven’t checked but it sounds right) that every episode so far in S10 has passed the Bechdel test. Now that the series seems capable of imagining women interacting in a way other than being coven of witches, it’s given itself more room to define “witch” as something other than “woman.”
As the show’s understanding of hierarchy has grown more complex, the show seems more comfortable in showing both social structures and outsider status as being morally neutral in and of themselves. The Grand Coven is roughly parallel to the Men of Letters (introduced in mid-S8) and the Knights of Hell (first mentioned with the MoL but developed as a hierarchal order in mid-S9). It’s another insider/outsider dynamic: these are all groups of entities who exist outside of the mundane world, but they’re also groups with formalized structures, with deviants subject to expulsion and defectors able to leave, and the line between those two groups being highly subject to obfuscation. Rowena’s estrangement from the Coven is highly resonant with Magnus’ expulsion from the MoL. These characters may end up as a dark mirror for Dean’s eventual extrication from the Mark.
Though they are expected to curtail their behavior because, like, SOCIETY, MAN, Grand Coven-approved witches may well have more autonomy and agency than any other entity on the show so far. Unlike most humans, they have power; unlike monsters, they are humans with free will rather than animals; unlike angels, they don’t seem to have a particularly effective Big Brother like Michael; unlike demons, they’re still in possession of their own souls and (presumably) don’t have to report back to hell to be tortured in between missions.
Fittingly, as its take on interpersonal cooperation changes, the narrative is shifting on its normative perspective on hard and soft power. Witchcraft is a versatile narrative tool in this regard, coding anywhere on that spectrum depending on the needs of the ‘verse. It tends to be mentally/spiritually fueled, which lends itself to coding as soft power, but witches can go toe-to-toe with adversaries possessing conventional superstrength, which puts them in the hard power league. Magic can have demonstrable effect on the physical world, but it does not require bulging muscles or phallic accoutrements.
Early seasons SPN was deeply suspicious of power which was not conventional guns-and-fisticuffs hard power, and witches were easily identified as its opposite. When the angels came on the scene, they were the primary antagonists and unquestionably dominant in terms of hard power, and so the soft, squishy Power Of Heart gained some (limited) traction. The “knowledge is power” theme of S8 is, like witchcraft, harder to classify: Kevin’s prophet powers are intellectual and passively received, but they lead to his ability to build bombs.
This isn’t to say that I think soft power is the new hard power in the ‘verse, where physical altercations are preemptively morally suspect and mindpower belongs to the worthy. (Earlier generations of MoL seem to have had this attitude, but the narrative doesn’t support them as being correct in that view.) It’s that the show seems much more aware that power itself is neutral. Witches are no worse than other players in their world, including different factions of humans, though they are also no better. I totally love narratives that treat magic and soft power as heroic, but that’s not necessary for the plot device to work, and for numerous reasons it probably wouldn’t work so well here. This is illustrated by Rowena, who is the witch we’ve gotten to know this season. As both a witch and a narcissist, Rowena has more than one type of soft power at her disposal. She uses her manipulative skill (quintessential soft power) interchangeably with her magic. And she, after all, made Crowley, who became the King of Hell armed mainly with his own silver tongue - and a few magic tricks he learned from her.
So anyway! That’s the thematic stuff. There’s also the fun issue of looking back at past seasons with new information, and figuring out how it all fits in.
It’s fun to speculate on what type of witch the previous ones we’ve met were. I doubt we’ve met many (any?) from the Grand Coven. If this is the case, I suspect it is because the Coven provides sufficient incentives to keep its members in line. This hypothetical policy may be based on a number of possible motivations: discretion, an unwillingness to see power concentrated in small handfuls of witches who are willing to go above and beyond what the collective deems wise, ethical concern for the non-magical, and/or something else. I suspect we’ve met a few naturals: the Starks didn’t seem to be answerable to anyone else, and neither did the card-playing witch from S5.
Under this rubric, I would hazard a guess that the striga from way back in S1 was not properly classified as a witch. They aren’t demons, which is what would have become of someone who sold their souls. They’re not naturals who just have power, they need to get power from childrens’ life force. They don’t seem sentient enough to do much magic, even that which would help for hunting, and going around getting caught eating babies is not really secret-society-type behavior. I would tentatively guess that the striga was a garden-variety monster that got named a “witch” because its feeding patterns fit the popular culture concept of what a witch was (anti-child; capable of manipulating mortals by mere physical appearance).
Not like you need to be a witch for that.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/340840.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.