The Supernatural Fandom and Gender

Supernatural has a fan base that tends to mostly identify as female. Oddly enough, the vocal majority of the fanbase tends to largely concentrate around writing about gay couples which do not exist within the story and overly analyzing “subtext” that exists in their imagination concerning said couples.

Most fans that write romance themed fanfiction between characters typically tend to either write about existing relationships within their favorite story's universe; create their own original characters for said romances; or invent couples that do not exist within the universe of the story they are writing about. Members of Supernatural's fan base who write about existing romantic relationships aside from that of John and Mary Winchester or create their own original characters for romantic relationships are rare. Instead, this is a fan base that tends to invent couples that have no basis in Supernatural and claim they are “canon,” or existing within the story itself.

The vocal majority of Supernatural's fan base tends to demonize female characters in order to write gay couples together. Said fans will claim that their couple is “canon” and fail to see that the characters they are writing about are textually straight.

I have no idea why Supernatural's fan base does this, as the vast majority of said fans identify as female; most fan communities I have been involved in that are female-dominated don't have such a huge bias towards writing gay couples. Typically, the self-insert story written by a female fan is a way for her to get involved with the character she can't be with in real life. These stories exist within the Supernatural fan community, but they are rare and relatively hard to find in comparison to a story that pairs two male characters together.

Some of the textual couples that have existed in Supernatural:

1. John and Mary Winchester.  Dean and Sam's parents.  Mary's death drives John to try and gain revenge on the yellow-eyed demon that killed her; because of her, he becomes a monster hunter and deprives the family of a normal life.
2. Mary's parents, Samuel and Deanna Campbell.  They were the ones who got Mary into the monster hunting business, and Mary later on made a deal with the yellow-eyed demon to save her father's life.
3. Sam Winchester and Amelia.  Amelia was Sam's girlfriend, and they dated while Sam attempted to get his life back together.  She finds out that he's hunting monsters and that Dean is back in his life, and Sam chooses hunting monsters over her.
4. Sam Winchester and Ruby the demoness.  Ruby manipulated Sam into drinking her blood, and she got him addicted.  This addiction made him and his powers stronger, but it also had negative psychological consequences and caused him to have an extremely hard time quitting demon blood.  They snuck around behind Dean's back, but the relationship ended when Sam, again, chose hunting monsters over a woman.  Though this case may have been justified.
5. Ruby the demoness and Castiel the angel.  They have had flirtations, and Castiel kissed her once after watching a pornographic film because it was on and mistakenly thinking a kiss was a greeting.  
6. Dean Winchester and Anna the angel.  They slept together, and then Anna rediscovered that she was an angel.  She chose Heaven over him, and tried to kill his parents before they could get together.  The relationship ended with Anna's death, though at that point it couldn't really be called a relationship anymore.
7. Charlie Bradbury and Gilda the fairy.  Charlie, an avid roleplaying geek, found herself drawn into a real version of the game.  She found Gilda, and found out that the fairy was being controlled by another geek who wanted power in the real world.  Charlie saved Gilda, and while they fell in love, Gilda had to return to her dimension and will not be in Charlie's life for a while.
8. Dean Winchester and Lisa Braeden.  Lisa was Dean's girlfriend, and she and Dean lived a fairly normal life for a year until Dean took up hunting monsters again.  The relationship soon became strained, and Dean and Lisa stopped being in a relationship because Dean chose hunting monsters over her.  At the end of season 6, she was kidnapped, and she and Ben no longer remember Dean or his job.

Couples that a large majority of the Supernatural fan base tend to focus on and are not remotely close to being textual:

1. Dean and Sam Winchester. This tends to be focused on quite often due to the Winchester brothers sharing the names of Mary's parents. In the first season, the Winchester brothers were the only two main characters, so people who wanted to write romance tended to gravitate towards the idea of the brothers being “lovers” despite them having a purely sibling-like relationship.
2. Dean and Castiel the angel. Castiel has a lot of screen time, and he and Dean are close friends. Dean helped Castiel learn what it was like to have free will. Fans of this couple tend to focus on that and not Dean's heterosexuality or Castiel having no sense of personal space with Dean because he's socially awkward for an angel and doesn't always understand human behaviors.
3. Sam and Gabriel the angel. Gabriel only has a bit of screen time, and yet for some reason many fans have latched onto the idea of Sam and Gabriel being a couple. This may be due to a need to give Sam someone to date in a fanfiction that features Dean and Castiel as a couple.
4. Dean and Benny the vampire. Fans of this couple tend to focus on the two meeting in Purgatory and fighting by one another's sides. They do not focus on how Dean and Benny are both heterosexual; Benny used to have a vampire girlfriend. In addition, there is apparently the idea that Dean Winchester cannot have a male friend who doesn't want sexual relations with him. Benny doesn't have a lot of screen time, and his last major appearance involved him killing someone despite Dean being convinced that they were blood brothers and Benny would never do that. After Benny killed, Dean essentially had to tell him that their friendship was over.
5. Bobby Singer and Crowley the demon. Bobby sold his soul to Crowley. Much is made of this when Bobby acted in a moment of desperation and wouldn't have done so otherwise.

I have no conclusive reason why the fan base tends to focus on these couples instead of the textual relationships. If I did, I would likely understand Supernatural's fan community much better. Instead, I have a theory that this has something to do with gender in the show.

The fan base tends to bash, or tear apart and demonize, female characters that “threaten” their preferred couples. Because Supernatural's writers are well aware of their fan base and the fan community, female characters tend to be shoved aside in favor of the male characters. They, in some ways, pander to the base when they kill off or otherwise demean female characters. However, they have not made one of the aforementioned four couples textual, despite all the alleged subtext fans cite as examples.

The character of Jo was bashed because she had a crush on Dean. It “threatened” the preferred couples of Dean/Sam and Dean/Castiel, so Jo tended to be demonized until she died and made the ultimate sacrifice. After that, Jo was treated with respect because she was dead and had “proven herself worthy” of being a good monster hunter.

The character of Lisa was bashed because she and Dean lived together and had an apparently happy life until Dean had to hunt monsters again. Again, this was because she “threatened” a preferred gay couple, which in this case was also Dean/Sam or Dean/Castiel. Apparently, incest or dating a male angel is preferable to Dean having a stable love life and female love interest who is actually worried about him when he goes off hunting monsters.

I don't entirely understand Supernatural's fan community, but its behavior towards couples is likely due to the show's attitudes on gender...and vice versa. The show's tendency to treat women poorly unless they're “guest characters” and not recurring influences the fan base. The fan community's tendency to portray all female characters as threats to gay couples influences the show's writers. It's a vicious cycle.

Gender in Supernatural

Supernatural, a show that has been long-running for 8 years, has a huge problem with gender representation. While a large number of fans identify themselves as female, the four major recurring characters in season 8 are male. The show has attempted to diversify itself by adding a villainous female character to the recurring cast and reviving a demoness who has long had a rather complicated relationship with the protagonists.

The plot of Supernatural revolves around the brothers Sam and Dean Winchester, who fight monsters because their father got them into the business at a young age after their mother was killed off by a demon. The mother, Mary Winchester (formerly Campbell), is not an active player for four seasons; in the fourth season, there is opportunity to see that Mary Campbell was an active player in a monster hunting family while the father, John Winchester, was a Vietnam veteran who knew nothing of that world. Mary actively abandons the relatively feminist lifestyle she had hunting monsters in order to experience a “typical” life with John. She tries to become a housewife and mother, in contrast to her former role as a monster hunter, and John is unaware of Mary's world until she is killed by the demon.

Instead of an active player, Mary becomes an object of why John Winchester wants revenge. He does everything for her and subjects his sons to a brutal childhood of fighting monsters so that he can find the demon that murdered Mary. Dean is four when Mary dies, and Sam is only a baby, so Dean has idealized memories of his mother while Sam doesn't remember her at all. Because of this, Supernatural falls into the trap of an idealized, conventionally feminine, female character being killed off and used as the driving force for male characters.

Ellen and Jo Harvelle are two major recurring female characters up until episode 10 of season 5. During this episode, Jo is attacked by hellhounds and sets up bombs made so that she can destroy them. She commits suicide instead of deciding to set up the bombs and escape. Her mother, Ellen, chooses to stay with Jo and hold her hand instead of helping Jo escape. Prior to this, they have helped fight off Horseman of the Apocalypse War and hunted monsters both off and on screen. Despite Jo's hellhound inflicted injuries, she still had a chance of escaping and getting to the hospital. Ellen could have taken her, but the two set off the bombs, and neither had any chance of survival.

Anna is an angel who had a one-night stand with Dean before realizing who she was. After that, Anna became dedicated to her job, and even attempted to prevent John and Mary from having children by traveling back in time. She thought the best thing to do was kill them, and died herself in that episode. She was originally intended to show up in more than six episodes, but she was eclipsed in popularity by male angel Castiel and thus killed off to appease the fans.

Ruby is a demoness who has a rather complicated relationship with the Winchester brothers. She gets Sam addicted to drinking her blood, and then the two essentially sneak around behind Dean's back to continue the relationship. Her role was fairly major as a symbol of temptation concerning Sam over their time in the series, and she was killed off once before being brought back in episode 17 of season 8.

Lisa is Dean's former girlfriend, and the mother of Ben. Dean lived with Lisa and Ben for a year, and the three of them attempted to be a family. Dean had told Lisa about what he hunted, and while Dean thought Sam was dead, he attempted to live a normal life with her. They soon broke things off after Dean kept having to choose between hunting and Lisa. He couldn't have both—or, rather, the fans wouldn't let him have both due to a perceived threat from Lisa. In one of the later episodes of season 6, Lisa got kidnapped by demons and then her memory and Ben's were altered so that they didn't remember the Winchesters or anything about hunting monsters.

Amelia is Sam's former girlfriend, who Sam had to leave during season 8 to hunt with Dean. She was the source of many “bros before hos” type of arguments between the two, and Sam soon had to abandon Amelia to continue hunting monsters. He couldn't settle down with her and be happy, nor could he hunt monsters while being her boyfriend.

Naomi is an angel who is one of Heaven's higher-ups. She brainwashed Castiel, a major recurring angel character, and manipulated him so that he would try to kill Dean. In this way, Supernatural has represented a woman in a position of power as being power-hungry and vicious, willing to not only do whatever it takes, but resort to unethical business practices and hurt her employees. She nearly manipulates Castiel to kill Sam and Dean in episode 17, particularly Dean due to Castiel and Dean having formed a friendship of sorts.

The most recent episode of Supernatural showed two young women and a young man whose parents were killed by the same vampire. They are manipulated by Victor, a monster hunter and the “master” of said vampire, and Victor uses them to kill new vampires so that the three are his pawns. He tells them lies about who killed their parents and points Chrissie, Josephine, and Aidan onto the path of hunting the wrong monster. He teaches them that hunting monsters is morally right because monsters are always the enemy.

While there are many things wrong with Victor's approach, gender representation in this episode is less problematic. Chrissie is a white girl who has appeared once before, when she was looking for her father and needed Dean to help her. Josephine is a black girl who is the oldest of the three and doesn't always have her temper under control; she doesn't think before she acts. Aidan, who is the most focused on their technology, is a white boy and flirts with Chrissie, who turns him down and acts more in solidarity with Josephine than Aidan.  None of the three teenage monster hunters is killed off in the episode. Rather, the three are given some help to gain a normal life, and the Winchester brothers leave them to the care of Josephine and recurring character Garth.

In general, the male characters are given more leeway to screw up without being killed. Dean and Sam have come back from the dead and Purgatory a multitude of times. Castiel's been a fallen angel, and he's also nearly destroyed Heaven due to his brief time as God after he attempted to act on his free will without realizing what he did was wrong. However, when the female characters screw up, they're usually permanently dead or written out of the story, and don't have any excuse that can amount for them being less than perfect.

Supernatural has a tendency to acknowledge the fan base, and the fact that many fans are female-identified could have something to do with the radically different ways that male and female characters are portrayed on the show.

Once Upon A Time

Oddly enough, while Once Upon A Time certainly has problematic gender representation just as any show would have problematic gender representation, this is a show that has a very balanced ratio of male and female characters. Women also tend to drive the main plot of Once Upon A Time just as much if not more often than men; this doesn't mean they will behave like men would in the same situation, but rather that women on Once Upon A Time don't often tend to be damsel in distress types.

A form of irony can be found in the way women are depicted on Once Upon A Time. The majority of female characters, with the exceptions of Emma and Tamara, are fairy tale characters. Yet Snow White is skilled at archery and would serve as “the brains” of the resistance to evil Queen Regina in the Enchanted Forest. Red Riding Hood is a werewolf who needs to wear a magical red cloak so that she doesn't turn, and she possesses enhanced senses and tracking abilities which have been shown off more than once; whenever someone needs to track an object or person down, they go to Red because nobody else is more reliable. Belle, while being extremely bookish, actually puts her book knowledge to practical use when tracking down a monster and helping Mulan slay it. Cinderella helps put together a plan to thwart Rumpelstiltskin. Mulan fights monsters and helps Prince Philip search for Aurora while she's under an enchanted sleep. Queen Regina is the main antagonist for much of the series, and is treated as a credible, serious threat to Storybrooke.

Male fairy tale characters tend to be as strong as they're depicted in the original tale, but it appears as though the writers wanted to apply twenty-first century sensibilities to the characters. This is just as well; Once Upon A Time would likely be less well received by modern viewers if women were treated true to the pseudo-medieval time period that the Enchanted Forest was presumably set in. Prince Charming rescues Snow White, but she rescues him just as often. The Seven Dwarves have individual personalities, but none of them is a joke and all of them should be taken seriously in a fight. In addition, the dwarves befriend a giant named Tiny in Storybrooke and adopt him as part of the dwarf group, and Tiny is initially bitter before he realizes there's a chance for redemption with new family and friends. Rumpelstiltskin taught the Evil Queen magic and was romantically involved with her mother before Cora spurned him. Neal was brave enough to escape when his father started to become ever more corrupted.

The series isn't without its problems, however. Recurring characters are predominantly white. Abortion and the idea of a woman's choice isn't brought up, even in the twenty-first century Storybrooke. Emma tries to bond with her son Henry despite having given him up for adoption 11 years prior to the start of the series, and wants Neal, his father, back in their lives despite having been independent prior to this. Neal has a black fiancee, who has straight hair and is revealed to be some sort of evil mastermind on the first episode she's introduced in. Nova, a fairy in training, couldn't earn her wings unless she gave up being in love with Grumpy, her dwarf boyfriend. Cora, originally a commoner woman, marries the king and promptly becomes evil after learning magic. Snow White is driven to suicidal behavior when she kills her worst enemy because she can't handle who she's become.

Overall, this series is rather progressive by modern standards concerning gender.  It's not so progressive about race, since the new recurring black character is evil, and depicts class during the pseudo-medieval era of the Enchanted Forest quite accurately.  Once Upon A Time still needs work, but gender representations are better than much of what is currently on television.

Disney Stereotypes

In general, people get their ideas about gender from a young age. Boys are told to be active and the sort of person who “rescues the princess” in media such as Disney movies and children's TV. Girls are told to be passive, rescued and treated like they're really only there to be “the token girl.” This is a societal problem, and Disney is one of the main perpetrators.

Female characters often show more skin than their male counterparts; in The Little Mermaid, Ariel and her sisters wear bikini tops instead of torso-covering shirts when they are mermaids, while Prince Eric is clad in shirt, trousers, and shoes during the movie. Ariel wears two long-sleeved dresses, a blue and black one and a pink one, and both of them seem to impair her movement because she's unused to them; there's also a scene where her nudity is implied when she's turned into a human, and she has to be put in a primitive form of a dress.

 

 Although King Triton, Ariel's father, is shirtless, we don't see other mermen in the movie. The male characters are either humans, talking sea creatures, or King Triton. The villain Ursula's shirt covers her stomach, though she's overweight and her shirt shows cleavage because she has a larger bust than Ariel. The wardrobes of King Triton, Ariel, and Ursula, however, don't improve the clothing situation in The Little Mermaid; rather, they highlight how the animators had a problematic view on the way female characters should dress.

 

Women also have incredibly tiny waists and other idealized body characteristics. This is a way of showing that the “good” characters are slender and the “bad” characters aren't. If a woman isn't slender with an impossibly tiny waist, she'll be presented as a slob or otherwise lacking.

One of the ways people can tell Ursula is the villain of The Little Mermaid because she's overweight. Mermaids are expected to be attractive, and Western culture views being slender as attractive. Negative traits are piled on Ursula, and she's given no real motivation beyond simply being evil and disliking King Triton. She's not supposed to be viewed as sympathetic in any way, which is good when creating a children's villain, but because of her appearance, children will internalize the idea that being overweight means someone is inherently a bad person.

Gender representation is problematic for Disney in general, since the company is based on the ideal of a princess being saved by a prince and finding her happily ever after with him.

In Mulan, the titular character saves China and manages to become a renowned warrior...after she gets discovered. Her squad, a ragtag bunch, crossdresses in order to get to warn the emperor about General Shang attacking, and they use their disguises to great effect because Mulan manages to model female behavior. Men couldn't get through to the emperor, and while it seemed as though women had saved China, in the reality of Mulan, it was one woman and three crossdressing men.

However, despite Mulan needing the help of her fellow soldiers, she was the mastermind of the plan, and the emperor lauded her for saving China. This is problematic because Mulan wasn't able to succeed as a warrior who saved China. Rather, she had to be a woman instead of a warrior in order to pull off her plan. In a sense, while Mulan escaped the gender box she was thrust into at birth, she had to conform to the feminine gender role in order to succeed in the end.

 

In The Little Mermaid, Ariel is an exceptional singer. This proves to be a plot point not because she wants to sing, but rather because of the male characters in the movie. Her father, King Triton, wants free-spirited daydreamer Ariel to sing for him because she's the star of an orchestra performance that she tends to skip out on. Prince Eric, Ariel's love interest, falls in love with Ariel not for her free-spirited personality or tendency to daydream about the human world, but rather because she can sing. While he does show concern and attraction to Ariel, she can't speak, which lessens the appeal. Eric is only interested in the woman who saved his life. That woman has a beautiful voice and sang to him before he was rescued by his people. Ariel might seem familiar, but she isn't the woman who saved Eric before she regains her voice.

Ursula steals Ariel's voice, and disguises herself as a human woman who will appeal to Eric. Reinforcing the idea that slender is beautiful, her human body is as slender as Ariel's, and she introduces herself as “Vanessa.” Virtually none of Ursula's negative physical traits are given to “Vanessa,” and it's easy to understand why Eric would mistake “Vanessa” for the young woman who rescued him. She's elegant, slender, brunette, and possesses Ariel's voice. Eric falls in love with Ursula despite Ariel's attempts to the contrary, and the two are to be married. King Triton soon finds out about the deal and signs to protect Ariel—who could protect herself, but the movie has her acting because of men rather than out of her own agency beyond finding human objects she doesn't know the use of. After that, Ursula proves she's evil and starts to attack, taking King Triton's trident (which, apparently, was her motivation all along) and growing to titanic size before she's run through and destroyed by Eric.

Because apparently Eric is actually in love with Ariel after hearing her voice, Triton gives them his blessing to get married, and Ariel stays a human. Eric doesn't have to change a thing about his current princely lifestyle, but Ariel has to give up her entire life under the sea in order to marry him. This is treated as a good thing, since their love has won out against all odds, when in actuality the representation is problematic because Ariel's identity essentially becomes an extension of Eric's when she had her own identity prior to meeting him.

These aren't the only examples of problematic gender representation in Disney, but both Mulan and The Little Mermaid show how Disney interprets gender as the woman staying “in her box.” If Mulan had put her armor back on and rushed to battle the Huns after she saw they were planning something against the emperor, she'd have been punished in the movie for continuing to fight instead of “femininely” making a plan that relied on her actual gender. If Ariel had figured out human writing instruments and told Eric via writing that she saved his life and just lost her voice for a while, the drama with Ursula would have been removed; however, Ariel would have taken initiative when she's expected to wait to be rescued by a man instead of figure out how to rescue herself.

The Disney narrative is built on the prince rescuing the princess and them living happily ever after. There isn't room in the narrative for the princess rescuing the prince or the princess rescuing herself and the prince falling for her personality. There isn't room for princesses that don't fit modern Western standards of attractiveness, so even though plump women have been viewed as attractive for much of history, a Disney film set in fairy tale times won't reflect this and will instead show women that fit our standards of what is attractive.