#CharlieBradburyAW

[flyingfish1]

Charlie’s swords

There’s a great amount of character development packed into Charlie’s use of swords, starting right in her very first episode.

The first time we see Charlie using a sword (in 7x20), it’s a fake sword, and she breaks it. Her life is falling apart. She’s just found out about the supernatural world, her workplace is infested with Leviathans, she just saw her boss get eaten, she’s completely freaking out, and now two hunters -- who she thinks are Leviathans too -- are pushing their way into her apartment. She grabs a plastic collectible replica sword and thwacks Sam in the side with it. It snaps in half.

It’s a comedy beat, a little laugh to break the tension. Yet even that little moment tells us a lot about her: She values stories about sword-wielding heroes, enough to keep a replica sword on display in her home. When push comes to shove, she’s willing to stop running and start fighting… even though, like that sword, she’s nowhere near ready for real combat yet.

Her next sword, from her next appearance in 8x11, is fake too.

It’s sturdier, made to stand up to play combat, and Charlie shows off some cool moves with it. She’s taking her “sword-wielding hero” fantasy a little farther, acting it out with fellow LARP-ers. She likes the fantasy of being the Queen of Moondoor, but she’s reluctant to believe that she could be a hero in real life.

This sword is only made for role-playing, not real fighting. Charlie can’t defeat any real-life bad guys with it, though she tries—at the climax of the episode, when the villain attacks Sam and Dean with a real sword, Charlie grabs her fake sword and rushes him. He easily parries the blow and shoves her away.

Her dagger is real, though. She grabs it and stabs Gerry’s book of spells, freeing Gilda and embracing her own heroic side.

She’s ready to start using real weapons now, just like she’s ready to start facing the real world. She’s not running away from the supernatural anymore. “No more replacement characters for me,” she says. “I got to face reality from now on. Sadly, reality actually includes monsters, but what are you gonna do? If I can ever be of help to you guys, let me know.”

In her next couple of episodes, she uses other weapons—guns and high heeled shoes—but no swords iirc.

Her next sword arrives in 10x11 when Dark!Charlie brings it home with her from the war in Oz. 

Dark!Charlie does some dark things—torture and murder—with that sword. “Facing reality” isn’t just kisses with fairies -- it’s darkness and awful violence too. Her time as a soldier in Oz has taught her how to fight for real.

Dean: What the hell happened to you in Oz?

Charlie: Everything I wanted. An adventure. Even got my own little sword.

Once her inner balance is restored, Charlie leaves to hunt down The Book of the Damned, and when she comes back in 10x18 she has a new sword, her last one. 

And looook :)

Look at that ambidextrous awesomeness! 

She’s come so far. Even though all of this mostly goes unmentioned in the dialogue, it’s such a good visual way of exploring her development as a hunter, and her development as a person too. She’s become a skilled fighter but -- much more than that -- she’s stopped running, she’s embraced her potential, and she’s finally become the sword-wielding hero she once only dreamed of being. <3

[cagetraumasam-archive]

charlie bradbury moodboard:

i was drunk! it was comic con!

[ladiesfromsupernatural]

Charlie Bradbury Appreciation Week!

To celebrate the wonderful women of Supernatural, at LfS we'll be hosting appreciation weeks starting with Charlie! From the 8th - 14th of January we will be celebrating all things Charlie - fics, fanart, graphics... anything you want so spread the word!

Ideas of what you could make include your favourite episode, a tribute to fanfiction, make something about Charlie's time in Oz! The possibilities are endless, so start making Charlie centric content now!

[benevolentsam]

Charlie Bradbury Appreciation Week - 8x20 Pac-Man Fever

[flyingfish1]

Charlie and Charlie: one character arc, two genres

AU as genre difference

Original Charlie is the (disillusioned) heroine of a quest/adventure story. AU Charlie is the (disillusioned) heroine of a romance novel.

“I was raised on Tolkien, man. … Where are my White Walkers and my volcano and magic ring to throw in the damn thing? Where -- where's my quest?” - 9x04

“Sam, before all this, I was just a programmer at Richard Roman Enterprises. I lived with the love of my life…. She owned a bakery outside of Chicago. Cupcakes. It was like something out of a storybook.” - 14x06

First of all, I am so, so happy that Steve Yockey seems to be picking up where Robbie Thompson left off. Almost all of Robbie Thompson’s Charlie episodes explored stories and storytelling to some degree, from one-off lines like 7x20’s “The really evil [villains] always need a special sword” to the fully-fledged Wizard of Oz fanfic of 9x04 and 10x11, and everything in between. Yockey taking up the “meta madness” storytelling theme in his first Charlie episode is a delight.

But the direction he takes it in is especially cool. It closely links the two Charlies and helps the audience (or at least me :p) understand how AU!Charlie relates to Original Charlie’s narrative. It also takes pains to differentiate the two characters, so we don’t feel like the show is pushing AU!Charlie as a replacement for the original Charlie we loved. AND it plays around with the AU worlds in an interesting way: alternate universes as different genres of stories!

So, our original Charlie’s story is all about exploring what it is to be a hero in an adventure story. First she runs from the idea, then she embraces it, and then she’s slapped with all the horrible downsides, and she has to grapple with what it all means for her. AU!Charlie’s story, meanwhile, seems to be focusing on what it is to be a romance heroine: at first she isn’t looking for love, then she finds it and embraces it, and then she loses it in the most horrific way, and now she has to figure out how to approach human connection. The same (or close enough) story beats filtered through two different genres.

When we first meet our Charlie in 7x20, she’s willing to do what she can to stop everyone around her from getting eaten (“What kind of douchebag stands by for that?”) but she wants nothing to do with the final boss battle or with monsters and hunting: “Never contact me again, like, ever,” she orders Sam and Dean. “Good luck saving the world.” When she comes back in 8x11, as soon as she realizes that monsters are involved, she plans to blow up her life and disappear again: “What I care about is not getting my other arm broken, or dying. So I'm dropping my sword and walking off the stage, bitches.” She’s purely in self-preservation mode until she realizes that she can’t just stand by and let people get killed “on [her] watch.” That’s when she starts to embrace the identity of “hero.” Dean reminds her that she’s already a hero for helping defeat Dick Roman, and then...

Gilda: I can't break free from the spell, myself. A hero must take my master's book of magic and destroy it, breaking the spell.

 Charlie: Gilda, my name is Charlie Bradbury, and I am here to rescue you.

After that, she’s all about seeking out adventures. She starts hunting and she yearns for a quest like the ones in the fantasy books she grew up reading. She leaps at the chance to hunt with Dorothy and journey to Oz (“Wicked Witch, a key, a quest? Let's do this”). But she turns herself into a killer during that quest, and she sustains a lot of psychological damage in the process, as represented by the spell that rips her into two halves of herself. Her dark side can only sneer about adventures, and her light side sums up, “It was awesome. Until not so much.” Once her whole self is back together again, she admits, “I think we have all the adventure we can handle right here.... I just got to keep moving forward (10x11).” 

She’s experienced both the wonderful and the awful sides of being a hero, and she has to think about what that means for her life as a hunter.

Charlie: You know, I haven’t been a hunter for very long, but it feels like this is the life. Mostly ends in Sophie’s choices, death, or tears. Usually, all of the above, huh? How did this become my life? I mean, I was gonna own my own start-up, marry ScarJo, invent something cool. Now I’m just… I’m just happy to be alive (10x18).

This is where we see the biggest overlap between the Charlies.

AU!Charlie: I hate hunting.

Sam: Really? ‘Cause I gotta say, you’re kinda awesome at it.

Charlie: Yeah, well, when it’s that or die by angel kill squad… [trails off suggestively]

Sam: Right.

Charlie: I mean, no offense, but who wants to be a hunter? This job—just a lot of tears and death.

Sam: Huh. Funny, you said something like that to me once long ago, about hunting—not you. Sorry. Our Charlie.

Charlie: Well, she was right (14x06).

And how did this Charlie get to that point? Well, in a pretty similar way, really. “I wasn’t looking for love,” she says, just like the original Charlie wasn’t originally looking for adventure. But then she met Kara and it changed everything. “She always smelled like peaches, and her smile was just....” They lived together blissfully in a life “like something out of a storybook” until the Apocalypse hit and it was all ripped away from her: “When the food ran out, people got mean. Mobs started forming, stealing whatever they could get their hands on. A lot of people died. Kara died.” 

She experienced the best and the worst of love and of interpersonal relationships. Her faith in society -- in people relating to people -- is deeply shaken: “People are always the same when things go wrong. They lose it. ... It’s a fact about society. It all falls apart.” And now she just wants to get “Away! From monsters, from—people. I’ll go live on a mountaintop or something.” She wants to run away from what she sees as the problem -- other people -- so she doesn’t have to deal with any of it anymore.

 But Sam insists, “People need people.... If we help people then maybe they’ll help people, and all that—and that’s worth it. Even with all the tears, and death. It’s worth it,” and Charlie concedes, “I’ll think about staying.” She’s still going to have to grapple with relationships. I’m really looking forward to seeing how she handles it :)

It’s a really interesting way of approaching the character -- of both characters -- and honestly, even speaking as somebody who was massively wary of AU!Charlie because I was worried about original Charlie being replaced or forgotten, I love it. And I like her. The genre difference is a clear dividing line between the two characters (along with the dialogue, obviously: “She ain’t me!” etc.) even as the similar story beats link them together.

The genre-bending also, imo, shows something interesting about the ways Supernatural itself has shifted genres over the years. In season eight, when Charlie’s ties to the heroic quest narrative were first established, the show was taking a lot of cues from action/adventure stories like Indiana Jones (Robert Singer said at the time that season eight was ‘our "Raiders of the Lost Ark" year’ [link]). All those tablets and Trials. Now, the show’s narrative seems to be leaning in a more relationship-centric direction. It isn’t a romance story -- Dreamhunter and Mary/Bobby subplots aside -- but it shares with romance stories an emphasis on interpersonal relationships as a primary source of drama. Feelings, too. For example, Cas’ deal with the Empty appears to hinge 100% upon his emotional state. TFW’s relationship with Jack is a big plot-mover in various ways. And so on. 

It’ll be fun to see how it all develops, for Charlie and for everyone else, too.

[ladiesfromsupernatural]

Charlie Bradbury Appreciation Week!

Celebrate Charlie with us! All this week (08/01-14/01) we want any and all Charlie content you have! Screencaps, Graphics, Fanart, Fics - We want it all!

Tag all your Charlie posts with #CharlieBradburyAW or #LfSAppreciations, or just out blog #LadiesfromSPN