The Nest

Mary Winchester:

The show brought her back to show she has flaws and wasn't a perfect mother and people act like this was a stupid decision and dislike her character for being messy and not acting like a mother to her now adult sons when that is literally the point of her character.

The fandom largely adopts the show’s misogyny towards Mary and all of its female characters. I don’t actually see very much of this first hand because I am good at curating my online experience, but I do know that people tend to think she should have been a better mom and blame her for things that it makes no sense to blame her for. The vast majority of the fandom also just generally takes Dean’s/the show runners’ perceptions of all the events in the show to be accurate, and all of those views that they take to be accurate are misogynistic.

Mary is a fascinating part of the dead girl genre, especially in how similar to Laura Palmer she is. They both had men trying to solve/avenge their murder as the whole plot of their show, but they also were both entirely misunderstood by these men. Nobody knew about Laura’s sex life/drug use/etc. and nobody knew about Mary being a hunter. Considering that SPN drew some inspiration from Twin Peaks, I would almost think that this is on purpose, but the show itself is so misogynistic that I wonder if they could have done commentary on misogyny on purpose. Mary is the most interesting character in the show imo and I’m sad that the fandom at large doesn’t have more intelligent discussions about her.

Hated for her choices, for wanting to be her own person and not babying her adult children

She was a badass, who was thrown into an impossible situation and did the best she could with it

EVERYTHING she gets hate for is something sam and/or dean have also done or would do in the same scenario! she gets hate for making a demon deal to save her (not yet) husband. dean and john both made demon deals to save family members and they don't get hate regardless of the aftermath! (we also see what happened in a world where she didn't make the demon deal and she gets hate for it anyways.) she gets hate for joining the british men of letters, but sam (who was tortured by them) joins them too in the episode following her confession that she joined them! she hid the hunting life from john and sam did the same thing with EVERY PARTNER he had! she left her ADULT sons behind so that she could cope with being brought back to life 30 years in the future and the fandom acts like she's guilty of child neglect. you know who else repeatedly left family behind to deal with things on his own and doesn't get the same level of vitriol? SAM!

She was brought back into a world where everything she knew was gone, her sons were adults (and older than her at this point), after being violently killed, and somehow she’s the bad one for not immediately adjusting and wanting space? Dean throws several tantrums, giving her the cold shoulder and generally being passive aggressive the entire season and then blaming her for dying and his childhood as if that’s her fault. And Sam and the other characters support him and centre the brothers’ pain over hers when again she was brought back into this new scary world with these men who she doesn’t know. Both fandom and show punish her for not immediately wanting to baby these grown men. And she has to apologise and repent by sacrificing herself. And fandom ofc eats it up, at times even calling worse than their abusive father, blaming her for everything that happens in the show and ofc the million bashing fics where Dean gets to yell at her, because SPN fans and writers love when men get to yell at women. Also they shame her a lot for having casual sex with one of the characters, because mothers aren’t supposed to have sexual relationships 🙄

Okay, so there's a scene in Supernatural where Mary tells Dean, her son, "I am not just your mother and you are no longer a child." This is a perfectly reasonable sentiment, as Dean is, literally, 38 years old at this point. It's also an interesting statement for Mary to make imo, because it suggests that both Mary and Dean should grapple with the idea that she was never the perfect wife/mother that her husband and children thought of her as. Dean responds to her statement with, "I never was." And there's many analyses of this scene out there written by people who use this as evidence of Dean's manpain, and his sad childhood, and how Mary was actually a bad mother all along - instead of engaging with the implications of her original statement and how that makes HER character more complex. She's a nuanced character! She's been through a lot, and that informs the complicated, sometimes good-sometimes bad decisions she makes!! Except many SPN fans are obsessed with hating Mary for "being a bad mother" (read: dying and not getting to raise her children, then coming back to life and not fitting into the perfect motherly ideal her children have constructed of her). And the thing is: SPN is famously bad with women, right? SPN is like, the Misogyny Show, and the show kind of has a Madonna/whore complex about the female characters where they're either perfect or irredeemable. But I would actually consider Mary to be one of the better-handled female characters on the show? The show starts with her dying, and her husband going on this quest to avenge her death and find her killer, etc etc, and there's this idea that Mary was this beautiful, perfect wife/mother. But the show actually works to deconstruct this idea somewhat, and late in the show we start to see that Mary was never a perfect wife, and she had her own life, and her own secrets, and real interiority. And this really nuances her character! It's interesting! And yet, even though the writers actually did want (for once) the audience to view Mary as a complicated character, lots of fans STILL refuse to engage with this idea. People want her to be a bad mother to act as fuel for Sam and Dean's (mostly Dean) manpain. It drives me fucking crazy.

God I could yap about Mary Winchester for HOURS. Like we all know that supernatural is misogynistic as fuck but usually it's the writers doing the heavy lifting. But in Mary's case the vast majority of the misogyny is coming straight from the fans. Like Mary started out as a classic case of fridged woman to drive man pain. Then the writers gave her a little more depth and nuance and intrigue through time travel shenanigans but that was mostly just setting up convoluted parallels and backstory stuff rather than actually exploring her as a character. But then they did something genuinely interesting. They. Unfridged. Her. They plucked her straight out of that fridge, plonked her down into the narrative over 30 years after she initially died, then said have fun. And that is so cool! Mary comes back to life and she gets to exist as an actual character! She gets to be more than a perfect mother and perfect wife placed on some fantasy pedestal that no one could ever live up to. She gets to be badass. She gets to be messy. She gets to be flawed and complex while still being a genuinely kind person trying to do the right thing in a terrible situation. I mean, from her perspective she literally just woke up one day and her 6 month and 4 year old sons were suddenly older than her! That is an insane situation to be in! Of course it takes her a little time to adjust. And how does the fandom react to a genuinely complex character in a fairly unique and fascinating situation? Pure hatred of course. Her many "crimes" include: making a dodgy deal as a teenager immediately after her parents and (then) boyfriend were murdered, being dead so unable to raise her children, not magically knowing that her husband decided to neglect and abuse their children while she was dead, taking more than 5 minutes to adjust to suddenly being alive and 33 years in the future and younger than her children, not dropping everything to coddle her two FULL GROWN ADULT CHILDREN (mid & late 30s) WHO. ARE. OLDER. THAN. HER. And talking to the British (yeah that was a whole thing I'm not gonna get into just know that the writing was shit) As punishment for those truly heinous crimes, the fandom consistently treats her with the same level of disdain as John Winchester (has several documented cases of canon child abuse and over 6000 AO3 fics dedicated to his terrible parenting) if not more. And they will only talk about her to complain. Oh yeah. And then the writers decided to re-fridge her. Free all the women in supernatural but most of all free my girl Mary.

Abby Anderson:

Abby exhibits all the same flaws (incredibly central to the overall story of the game) as Joel and Ellie do, but Joel gets a pass 'cause he's the beloved man and Ellie barely gets a pass because she's at least at "our" side. Meanwhile Abby is afforded no such grace. Her being muscular only makes things worse because looking "unattractive" to a general boring male audience is a crime even worse than killing their blorbo (while said blorbo can surely kill whoever he wants and the theme of the narrative is just irrelevant I suppose). Plus those same muscles lead to any femininity she has (and she has notably more than Ellie) being denied to her, 'cause. Booo, muscles. Manly.

Abby starts as a traumatized revenge-obsessed girl much like Ellie then becomes in turn. As the plot goes on she displays actual compassion over and over. She shows that she's not a monster. The way she helps Lev and Yara, the way she takes Lev under her wing. (The way she's never transphobic to him either). The way she ends up sparing Dina despite narratively having every "right" to take that life(s) for a life(s). She does that growth before the other people in the narrative do. And she deserved so much more grace, if not love, than she got.

Death threats to the actress, massive temper tantrum online, endless debates about how her physique isn't realistic, compilations of her in-game deaths going viral with comments all saying how much they hate her….. People will straight up be so smug about how "wow the game is telling me revenge is bad I already knew that" and then bullied several actual human beings as revenge for a fictional character's death. Like maybe y'all do need to have someone sit you down pre-K style and explain that revenge is bad ¯_(ツ)_/¯

A) she's jacked as hell B) her gameplay is amazing C) yeah she killed everyone's favorite meow meow but I support women's wrongs ❤️ D) I don't even need to support women's wrongs she was kind of right

For Abby Anderson, they didn’t just send death threats to her actress, they also sent death threats to her husband AND HER INFANT SON. She literally had the company she worked for consult her on how to protect her in case the more aggressive “fans” wanted to approach her.

Katara:

Mischaracterizing her, complaining of her having traits they love in male characters, straight up ignoring her, villainizing her for getting in the way of M/M ships, blatant racism… Katara has seen it all.

She’s literally the last bender in her tribe… put some fucking respect on her name.

Within the fandom, she is frequently relegated to her relationships with male characters. Also, many people simply "do not like" her. I've seen people call her a bitch! I don't think she was ever bitchy. There is an added layer of racism; many people read her as first nations. Native women and girls are always seen as more aggressive by racists.

She is a badass

she's probably in here already but i gotta make sure she makes it. she better win this entire goddamn thing. people act like her being mean sometimes makes her an irredeemable bitch. Jesus christ like she's fourteen and her mom is dead and a war is going on. god forbid she processes trauma differently from sokka and zuko. Like Hello.

Reduced her to the Zutara (fake news) vs Kataang ship war, reducing her to the "mom friend," ignoring her complexity, refusing to let her character exist outside of her relationships with men and eroding it within her relationships with men, ragging on her for being traumatized by her mom's murder, flattening her character as much as possible.

This poor girl gets brutally flattened into either "mom friend takes care of everyone :)))" or "miserable spoilsport who is mean to the boys and always yelling :((("

Literally one of the most nuanced characters in all of tv, she WILL be recognized for her fantastic portrayal of complicated trauma and parentification!

shes a teen girl who has never had space to process her trauma and the one time she let herself be angry everyone decided shes a bitch

Is reduced to one of three things. Either "the mom", "the nag" or "flawless perfect angel" when being bounced back and forth in other people's shipping drama.

Katara is a character with so much complexity. Her kindness underpinned by a trauma, her caring instinct born from being placed into the role of adulthood WAY too early. Having to struggle to be seen as a fighter despite being one of the, if not THE< strongest bender in the group for huge chunks of the show. She has anger, she has bravery, she has purpose and she cares because she CHOOSES to and then has to struggle with the parts of that caring that hurt. Or simply don't come naturally to her. She doesn't grin while cleaning up the boys' messes, she dumps the half empty cooking pot directly on their head and tells them if they're gonna leave it yucky, THEY should wash it (metaphorical but something along those lines) She is more than just Aang's "prize", Zuko's "anchor" or Sokka's "babysitter".

Sally Donovan:

I was in the WEEDS of the Sherlock fandom back in the day in high school and the way Sally was treated by the fandom for being mean to the uwu baby grown man main character Sherlock when he was openly rude as fuck to her (making comments about her sex life while she was working etc) was weird as fuck - especially rewatching it as an adult. She’s also black, and I defs think that impacted the treatment of her unfortunately