There are a hundred ways in which you are awesome, and the fact that you separated out your irritations from your squee in your post is just one of them. *g
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This is why I love talking to you about the show :D. I can totally buy this take on Castiel--how this is a new experience for him, his fascination with Dean and humans generally, the questioning of his own preconceptions. I would love for them to develop that as a character arc and as character growth. And it doesn't hurt that Dean and Castiel have great chemistry, with a lot of potential to that relationship. I mean, beyond the usual slashy way *g*.
Of course now I'm wondering if God is going to punish his eventual disobedience by making him human, or banning him to hell so Dean has to return the favor and save him, or any number of very juicy scenarios....
It's the pervasiveness of this stuff that gets to me--that no one on SPN or the CW's staff stopped to think that hey, maybe this really isn't what we want to put out there. And I feel like 10 years ago, someone would have. I'll stop there before I depress myself further, but in any case, thank you.
But like whore and bitch and skank and slut, the show got to use a racist term while attempting to shed all the consequences and responsibilities that come with it, and that's where my main problem lies.
You know, I would actually feel better about the all skank and slut and whore stuff if I felt like they even thought there were consequences and responsibilities that came with it. It obviously didn't occur to them that having a black actor use racist terminology doesn't magically make it not racist, but I don't think, at least in S3, that it occurred to them that there was anything problematic about skank and slut and whore in the first place. They made pretty clear that they shared the predominate fandom belief that those terms are A-OK (charmingly, someone was claiming they were actually feminist earlier this week), because the world is filled with women who deserve to be degraded and humiliated like that. So far this season, they've more or less limited those types of insults to bad characters, so I'm really hoping the fannish
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That's what bothers me about the whore-bitch-skank stuff--that it's so culturally pervasive and accepted. Like, "fag" will get bleeped out on Bravo (rightly so), but "whore" is okay.
I don't think SPN was deliberately trying to be misogynistic, either, but yeah, that's the larger problem. And I agree that they've gotten better this season; I think the show as a whole has gotten better. I wish they weren't replacing it with skanky race issues, but maybe they'll get a clue on that, too? Sigh.
I agree--there were some great women characters S1--the cop from The Benders, Sarah from Provenance, Cassie. I think that makes it harder to bear. If they'd started out with the kinds of one-off women characters we get now, I probably would have just dropped the show.
Last year, I posted that one of the things I loved about SPN was Dean and Sam's lack of casual contempt for women. Then we got S3. What bothers me is that I don't know if it was because a) they stopped trying, b) it was a deliberate shift to try to bring in more young male viewers, or c) this is Kripke unfettered.
Hee, my knowledge of Celtic mythology is sketchy at best, but even I knew that wasn't right. I think SPN really does think we're dumb sometimes :(.
"Mud monkeys" isn't a racist term in itself, at least not that I've heard, but characterizations of non-white people as "mud races" by white supremacist groups, and certainly the 19th c. depictions of Africans as having monkey-like features, make the term very racially charged.
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Of course now I'm wondering if God is going to punish his eventual disobedience by making him human, or banning him to hell so Dean has to return the favor and save him, or any number of very juicy scenarios....
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But, yeah, I think you nailed it.
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You know, I would actually feel better about the all skank and slut and whore stuff if I felt like they even thought there were consequences and responsibilities that came with it. It obviously didn't occur to them that having a black actor use racist terminology doesn't magically make it not racist, but I don't think, at least in S3, that it occurred to them that there was anything problematic about skank and slut and whore in the first place. They made pretty clear that they shared the predominate fandom belief that those terms are A-OK (charmingly, someone was claiming they were actually feminist earlier this week), because the world is filled with women who deserve to be degraded and humiliated like that. So far this season, they've more or less limited those types of insults to bad characters, so I'm really hoping the fannish ( ... )
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I don't think SPN was deliberately trying to be misogynistic, either, but yeah, that's the larger problem. And I agree that they've gotten better this season; I think the show as a whole has gotten better. I wish they weren't replacing it with skanky race issues, but maybe they'll get a clue on that, too? Sigh.
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Hee, my knowledge of Celtic mythology is sketchy at best, but even I knew that wasn't right. I think SPN really does think we're dumb sometimes :(.
"Mud monkeys" isn't a racist term in itself, at least not that I've heard, but characterizations of non-white people as "mud races" by white supremacist groups, and certainly the 19th c. depictions of Africans as having monkey-like features, make the term very racially charged.
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