SPN month, subheading angel week
As much fun as character-specific spotlights are - and I am so excited to get to my massive love of Castiel/Anna/Lucifer/Balthazar - I've had this post mostly bubbling around since around the time I caught up with the show.
There’s been a really interesting evolution on the whole angel consent thing. I well knew to spend those first five seasons off in the Land of No Expectations, but if I hadn’t I’d have found it extremely questionable. Fine, angels have to ask permission. It distinguishes them from demons, which possess without consent. Demons, they’re the real enemy. Okay, neat little worldbuilding detail.
But then, we see that Castiel took sweet, naïve Jimmy’s vague, open offer of goodwill as an invitation. That he still knew that didn’t count as a yes, so he warped Jimmy’s sense of reality until the poor guy barely knew up from down. Sketchy as anything, but for the sake of argument, Castiel is incredibly literal even by angelic standards, even if “he didn’t get it” is cold comfort for the Novaks. And then threatening Jimmy’s daughter with the same brutal fate to get that “yes” counts as consent? For Castiel to do whatever he wants with Jimmy, forever? Jinkies.
Then we see Zachariah’s idea of consent, which includes ripping Dean out of his own reality against his will in order to create favorable conditions to a technical “yes,” reminding Dean more than once that he has the power of life or death over Dean and his brother, even torturing them to the brink of death. Consent is off the table at this point. Like the issues I talked about yesterday with the inherently exploitative crossroads (*wince*) deals, the pretense that humans have any meaningful power to refuse strikes me as a psychological fiction the characters are telling themselves.
What I worry about is the extremely delicate balance of showing Dean’s refusal as the logical outgrowth of some excellent character work (which I very much think it is, don’t get me wrong), and normativizing that. The principled thing to do, come hell or high….um, hell. There’s a whole chastity metaphor there with Dean, which okay is the funniest thing ever, but there it is. That he’s allowed this distance from sexualized abuse; that he’s the “good” brother who won’t let Michael in. And if he could say no, why can’t everyone else?
“Everyone else” being Sam. Sam, who lives in a world where Lucifer has methodically convinced him there is no other option; a world which Lucifer has altered until there is no other practicable option. Even if he’s out of his head smoking the fumes of his burning world, that still counts as yes. Anyway, once an addict and a screw-up, always teetering on the edge of presumptive consent, amirite?
Oh.
I’m not sure I want to put a value judgment on this, but it’s worth saying that the only significant female-presenting angel we see in S4&5 is Anna, whose human body is a body she came by as honestly as any one of us. Well, Castiel possessed Claire for a second, but it’s fairly clear Cas intended that to be a temporary ploy to get Jimmy to permanently sign on to vesseldom. By the time that happens, Cas is a “he” for the audience regardless. I’m not sure Anna’s outlier status was a conscious attempt to dodge the squickier implications, or a simple manifestation of the show’s male-default problem. But it does serve to gender the angel-as-invader role as masculine.
I’d be extraordinarily surprised if anyone were consciously aware of the strength of these parallels when the angel worldbuilding was happening in S4-5. The show has dealt with questions of agency, manipulation, and complicity since the beginning, and I’d expect similar topics to come up at some point or another.
But, as surprised as I’d be if it was ever intentional before, I’d be even more surprised if there weren’t at least some people on board now who are consciously considering the story they’re telling, in that it’s not metaphor any more. S7 shows Sam dealing with the fallout of abuse on an explicit, in-story level. With the fact that no matter what, this angel thing is a violation. Sam could not possibly have wanted the thing he said he’d do; Lucifer is the party responsible for the conditions in which he felt he had to do it. The power discrepancy in this relationship is such that free consent is impossible. That's how it shook out in Swan Dive, and then, more insidiously, in Repo Man. It’s different now. You let me in. You didn’t fight me once, Sam, with everything you had left inside you, after being worn down for months and months, and now you’ve given up your mind forever. That metaphor colliding with in-universe events in such an explicit way hits with the force of a truck.
I’m really not trying to make some big normative statement or be a mindreader about authorial intent; however, I do think that SPN’s strong suit is the way it can use easily-recognizable symbols and metanarratives to provoke a powerful emotional response, and so I do worry that the angel-worldbuilding of the earlier seasons was on some level leaning on all these questionable-consent rape culture narratives. (That is not to say I think anyone’s endorsing it, or that not having meant anything by it makes the troubling implications go away. Just that it’s there.) But I think the show has gone to a really sophisticated place in interrogating its own metaphor.
Or at least, to a place where we can do so for it. la la la, I can't hear you.
(Though, Sera Gamble knows what's up, so I'm kind of not surprised that the change happened during the seasons she was in charge? I'm hoping this was an evolution in the show as a whole, rather than a weird idiosyncratic situation where the showrunner is the outlier.)
There’s been a really interesting evolution on the whole angel consent thing. I well knew to spend those first five seasons off in the Land of No Expectations, but if I hadn’t I’d have found it extremely questionable. Fine, angels have to ask permission. It distinguishes them from demons, which possess without consent. Demons, they’re the real enemy. Okay, neat little worldbuilding detail.
But then, we see that Castiel took sweet, naïve Jimmy’s vague, open offer of goodwill as an invitation. That he still knew that didn’t count as a yes, so he warped Jimmy’s sense of reality until the poor guy barely knew up from down. Sketchy as anything, but for the sake of argument, Castiel is incredibly literal even by angelic standards, even if “he didn’t get it” is cold comfort for the Novaks. And then threatening Jimmy’s daughter with the same brutal fate to get that “yes” counts as consent? For Castiel to do whatever he wants with Jimmy, forever? Jinkies.
Then we see Zachariah’s idea of consent, which includes ripping Dean out of his own reality against his will in order to create favorable conditions to a technical “yes,” reminding Dean more than once that he has the power of life or death over Dean and his brother, even torturing them to the brink of death. Consent is off the table at this point. Like the issues I talked about yesterday with the inherently exploitative crossroads (*wince*) deals, the pretense that humans have any meaningful power to refuse strikes me as a psychological fiction the characters are telling themselves.
What I worry about is the extremely delicate balance of showing Dean’s refusal as the logical outgrowth of some excellent character work (which I very much think it is, don’t get me wrong), and normativizing that. The principled thing to do, come hell or high….um, hell. There’s a whole chastity metaphor there with Dean, which okay is the funniest thing ever, but there it is. That he’s allowed this distance from sexualized abuse; that he’s the “good” brother who won’t let Michael in. And if he could say no, why can’t everyone else?
“Everyone else” being Sam. Sam, who lives in a world where Lucifer has methodically convinced him there is no other option; a world which Lucifer has altered until there is no other practicable option. Even if he’s out of his head smoking the fumes of his burning world, that still counts as yes. Anyway, once an addict and a screw-up, always teetering on the edge of presumptive consent, amirite?
Oh.
I’m not sure I want to put a value judgment on this, but it’s worth saying that the only significant female-presenting angel we see in S4&5 is Anna, whose human body is a body she came by as honestly as any one of us. Well, Castiel possessed Claire for a second, but it’s fairly clear Cas intended that to be a temporary ploy to get Jimmy to permanently sign on to vesseldom. By the time that happens, Cas is a “he” for the audience regardless. I’m not sure Anna’s outlier status was a conscious attempt to dodge the squickier implications, or a simple manifestation of the show’s male-default problem. But it does serve to gender the angel-as-invader role as masculine.
I’d be extraordinarily surprised if anyone were consciously aware of the strength of these parallels when the angel worldbuilding was happening in S4-5. The show has dealt with questions of agency, manipulation, and complicity since the beginning, and I’d expect similar topics to come up at some point or another.
But, as surprised as I’d be if it was ever intentional before, I’d be even more surprised if there weren’t at least some people on board now who are consciously considering the story they’re telling, in that it’s not metaphor any more. S7 shows Sam dealing with the fallout of abuse on an explicit, in-story level. With the fact that no matter what, this angel thing is a violation. Sam could not possibly have wanted the thing he said he’d do; Lucifer is the party responsible for the conditions in which he felt he had to do it. The power discrepancy in this relationship is such that free consent is impossible. That's how it shook out in Swan Dive, and then, more insidiously, in Repo Man. It’s different now. You let me in. You didn’t fight me once, Sam, with everything you had left inside you, after being worn down for months and months, and now you’ve given up your mind forever. That metaphor colliding with in-universe events in such an explicit way hits with the force of a truck.
I’m really not trying to make some big normative statement or be a mindreader about authorial intent; however, I do think that SPN’s strong suit is the way it can use easily-recognizable symbols and metanarratives to provoke a powerful emotional response, and so I do worry that the angel-worldbuilding of the earlier seasons was on some level leaning on all these questionable-consent rape culture narratives. (That is not to say I think anyone’s endorsing it, or that not having meant anything by it makes the troubling implications go away. Just that it’s there.) But I think the show has gone to a really sophisticated place in interrogating its own metaphor.
Or at least, to a place where we can do so for it. la la la, I can't hear you.
(Though, Sera Gamble knows what's up, so I'm kind of not surprised that the change happened during the seasons she was in charge? I'm hoping this was an evolution in the show as a whole, rather than a weird idiosyncratic situation where the showrunner is the outlier.)