comments on SPN S3
May. 16th, 2008 01:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaznettiLook at the tags. Consider what you know about me. Move on if all you want is squee and flail.
Reading my friends list this morning, I felt out of step with the fandom. It's not that I didn't enjoy the episode. The things everyone is pointing to -- singing in the car, everything about Bobby, the callbacks to IMToD and earlier -- also filled me with glee. But I was left completely unmoved by the ending.
Part of the reason is that it was exactly the ending I expected, and have expected for the past few weeks. Part of it is that once you show the torments of Hell, they seem a lot less scary. Most of it, though, is that I just don't have much sympathy left for Dean as a character.
It's no secret that I've found the misogyny this season hard to take, although I haven't written about it all that much. What I didn't realize was how strongly it had affected my view of the characters, and especially of Dean. I can't think of the last time Dean said something nice to a female character. I'm sure he must have (OK, it was the virgin in the episode with Henriksen, what was her name?) but it's been drowned out by the torrent of sexist abuse he's been hurling around. Obviously, there are reasons for that abuse -- his adversarial relationship with both Bela and Ruby -- but there hasn't been enough to balance it out. I think that this is a real change in Dean's character, and it's a change that makes him a lot less likable for me.
In most of S1 and S2 I felt I could say with some confidence that Dean likes and respects women. "Wendigo" does a great job in establishing this -- of showing Dean as a guy who flirts a lot and is kind of a jerk but who, on a basic level, sees women as people who are like him. It helps that Haley was set up by the story as a Dean-analogue, but it mattered more that I got the sense that Dean himself saw the similarity, and that his interactions with her were based on a kind of instinctive liking and respect (which, because it's Dean, also includes halfhearted flirtation). That's the kind of episode I think of when I think bout Dean and girls in S1 -- Wendigo, Faith, Route 666, Providence, The Benders -- episodes where Dean interacts with female characters as people, not as things. This may start to change in S2, but I see the same Dean with Ellen, and at least some of the time even with Jo.
I can't even recognize that guy in the Dean who punched Ruby in last night's episode. Sure, she's a demon, and not technically a girl (although she's in the body of a girl, and enough people have talked about the change from their concern for Meg-the-girl in S1 to where they are now, with possessed people), and she's capable of hitting back and doing some damage. And I was very happy to see her doing that. But I didn't see Dean hitting a demon. I saw him hitting a girl. I think that the reason for this is that the insults Dean has been hurling at Ruby are so often so strongly gendered. He calls her a bitch and a slut -- he sees her as female as well as demonic -- and then he hits her.
The misogyny in the text this season has gotten so strong that I now look at Dean and think, "yeah, he'd definitely smack a woman around." I had no idea I'd reached such an explicit point, and when I think back to the character I liked in S1, it seems a real shame. So yeah, Dean's in Hell. But when I look at him, that's what's in the back of my mind, so really, I can't bring myself to care.
Reading my friends list this morning, I felt out of step with the fandom. It's not that I didn't enjoy the episode. The things everyone is pointing to -- singing in the car, everything about Bobby, the callbacks to IMToD and earlier -- also filled me with glee. But I was left completely unmoved by the ending.
Part of the reason is that it was exactly the ending I expected, and have expected for the past few weeks. Part of it is that once you show the torments of Hell, they seem a lot less scary. Most of it, though, is that I just don't have much sympathy left for Dean as a character.
It's no secret that I've found the misogyny this season hard to take, although I haven't written about it all that much. What I didn't realize was how strongly it had affected my view of the characters, and especially of Dean. I can't think of the last time Dean said something nice to a female character. I'm sure he must have (OK, it was the virgin in the episode with Henriksen, what was her name?) but it's been drowned out by the torrent of sexist abuse he's been hurling around. Obviously, there are reasons for that abuse -- his adversarial relationship with both Bela and Ruby -- but there hasn't been enough to balance it out. I think that this is a real change in Dean's character, and it's a change that makes him a lot less likable for me.
In most of S1 and S2 I felt I could say with some confidence that Dean likes and respects women. "Wendigo" does a great job in establishing this -- of showing Dean as a guy who flirts a lot and is kind of a jerk but who, on a basic level, sees women as people who are like him. It helps that Haley was set up by the story as a Dean-analogue, but it mattered more that I got the sense that Dean himself saw the similarity, and that his interactions with her were based on a kind of instinctive liking and respect (which, because it's Dean, also includes halfhearted flirtation). That's the kind of episode I think of when I think bout Dean and girls in S1 -- Wendigo, Faith, Route 666, Providence, The Benders -- episodes where Dean interacts with female characters as people, not as things. This may start to change in S2, but I see the same Dean with Ellen, and at least some of the time even with Jo.
I can't even recognize that guy in the Dean who punched Ruby in last night's episode. Sure, she's a demon, and not technically a girl (although she's in the body of a girl, and enough people have talked about the change from their concern for Meg-the-girl in S1 to where they are now, with possessed people), and she's capable of hitting back and doing some damage. And I was very happy to see her doing that. But I didn't see Dean hitting a demon. I saw him hitting a girl. I think that the reason for this is that the insults Dean has been hurling at Ruby are so often so strongly gendered. He calls her a bitch and a slut -- he sees her as female as well as demonic -- and then he hits her.
The misogyny in the text this season has gotten so strong that I now look at Dean and think, "yeah, he'd definitely smack a woman around." I had no idea I'd reached such an explicit point, and when I think back to the character I liked in S1, it seems a real shame. So yeah, Dean's in Hell. But when I look at him, that's what's in the back of my mind, so really, I can't bring myself to care.
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-16 05:18 pm (UTC)i'm not sure that it's intentional, though, so much as it is trying to make the show darker and show how far the chars have come (like your point about the treatment of the meg-host vs the ruby-host) by showing how they care less about people, but the underlying point is that they're demonstrating that by using the they-don't-even-care-about-girls-and-girls-are-weak line, so... yeah, annoying.
as you said, i was not remotely surprised by this ending and have been expecting it since about halfway through the season, so yes, big let-down for me.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-16 05:28 pm (UTC)But Bela's arc was very badly handled. She had great potential and I quite liked the character concept. She was also very well acted. There could have been great explorations of class issues and the Winchester mission vs. self-interest that were totally ignored by the writers. What a waste.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-16 05:39 pm (UTC)i hated the ending they gave bella. i didn't actually like her, but i still think she deserved better than that, and that a lot more could have been done with her than to make her sexy foil for dean early in the season and then just used as a contemptible plot device later on. i liked the actress, too, and really... like you said, a waste. :/
i'll still watch s4 of course, to see how they're going to bring dean back (which i am assuming they will and i'm assuming will have something to do with sam's new powers) but i'm a lot less invested in it than i was last season. so much of this season was bitching and random emo, i just didn't enjoy it as much as the last two.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-16 06:08 pm (UTC)It sounds like there were plans to do this, but they had to throw out almost all of it to get to the Dean's Deal storyline when they lost six episodes because of the writer's strike. There was supposed to be an episode where Bela and Ruby actually interacted, and we lost that. I'm wondering if there's a chance the missing six might find their way into a comic book series, or perhaps script summaries on the DVDs, so we can know what stories should have been in there.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-16 07:08 pm (UTC)What we GOT was what was on screen and that was not satisfying.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-16 08:18 pm (UTC)I think that the writers strike was definitely a problem for them, but it was a problem for pretty much every show out there. Some of them did better than others in creating a good product in the end.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-16 08:16 pm (UTC)I totally agree about Bela and her arc. She was an interesting character and they really never made anything of her, and I thought her interactions with both Dean and Sam were great. She did sometimes feel like she came from an entirely different show, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-16 07:47 pm (UTC)I'm sure you're right about the smackdown between near-equals -- except that being a demon, Ruby is actually a lot stronger than Dean -- but for some reason I just found it really jarring, and found myself wishing that more women would call Dean on his shit.
I think it's even more worrying if the misogyny is unintentional, in way -- as if the writers and the whole staff were totally comfortable with "women are sluts and they are evil and must be put down," as a way of thinking. But I don't like it either way.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-16 08:06 pm (UTC)that's what i meant, only i didn't explain it very well. i don't like the fact that they're using gender as a plot device because it's quite revealing about their attitudes.