#I love bloody weird women so much Mwah Mwah

[buried-freak]

Hahaha just a weird odd quirky girl hahahah (I’ve killed multiple people) hahahah so quirkyyyy

[monstermoviedean]

omg hiiiiii arden (sending this as a real ask instead of a message in case other people might find it interesting) did u notice a pattern during ur rewatch of season 3 in regards to specific writers and the misogyny of that season ??? (like how anti blackness often comes from sera gamble etc) or was it kinda the same all across the board ??? my friend who is watching for the first time just got to season 3 and if there IS a pattern i figure it would be a fun fact to share w her while we are discussing :)))) p.s. ily and i love all ur rewatch posts they’re always so interesting to read 💕💕💕 hope your day gets better MWAH

first off i am publishing this because i want everyone to know you are an exceptionally lovely and kind human and this is just one of many examples of you being just outstanding. ily thank you i'm crying a little 💖💖💖

short answer: no, i haven't noticed a specific pattern, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist! (much longer answer below, which was written during several work breaks and is probably incoherent. mostly about ruby and bela and how s3 goes out of its way to be shitty to them for being women. cw for brief mention of abuse)

long answer: i will fully admit that part of the reason i bully gamble so much is because of confirmation bias. i mean i also think she deserves it but i am actively watching her episodes through the lens of "what shit is she gonna pull this time." and then i feel vindicated when she pulls shit. i only say this because i think it informs my answer to your question, because i don't specifically watch spn and look for the misogyny. not because it's not important (it is!!!) or present (omnipresent!!!) but because i think a lot of what there is to say has already been said by others better than i can, and also out of self-preservation. the misogyny in spn is an endless shit mine and sometimes i feel like diving into it and sometimes i just can't.

all that being said! reflecting on s3 in the wake of this question is really really interesting. i think in terms of spn's standard misogyny, season 3 is pretty average. you can expect to see "pretty" young white women get brutally murdered and have little agency or substance, in the same way that all of that happened in. well. all the other seasons. i'm going to call that baseline misogyny. the baseline misogyny in s3 is pretty consistent within the season (between writers) and within the show (between s3 and other seasons). s3 is cool/weird because they only had a handful of writers, and i think they all make some contributions to baseline misogyny (kripke and gamble at the high end, edlund and humphris at the low end).

what's weird/interesting about s3 is it doesn't have just baseline misogyny, it also has special misogyny, reserved for special female characters. because s3 is the season where they started yelling LOOK we have GIRLS on the show about BOYS aren't we amazing??? and then they immediately invent a new type of misogyny for them. s3 has two (maybe 2.5?) special female characters who get special misogyny: ruby and bela, and possibly lilith.

special misogyny is when they go above and beyond to criticize and/or punish a female character for something that a male character would do and no one would bat an eye at. special misogyny is when women get condemned for very normal stuff. i think lilith being portrayed as extra special evil when she's just doing normal demon things counts as special misogyny, but since she's only in like 1.5 episodes i'm iffy on counting her.

the baseline misogyny for ruby and bela is that they both are called bitch way more than is necessary, both have their motives questioned above and beyond men, and both die bloody. standard spn fare, standard baseline misogyny.

ruby's special misogyny is that she's One Of The Boys But A Girl, and that makes her incontrovertibly evil and different and bad. obvs we know s4 ruby is evil but s3 ruby is actually shockingly helpful and doesn't do much to earn criticism apart from existing. ruby pitching the boys shit is treated as more irritating/less forgivable than when, say, bobby does it. she's sarcastic in a way that we are supposed to read as bitchy, because she's a woman. in jus in bello she's also portrayed as weak for being afraid of lilith, when fucking everyone is afraid of lilith. she's also an accessory to dean's death scene.

all of this would be pretty standard, except that ruby is super powerful and super helpful. she gives them the knife, makes them colt bullets, saves their lives repeatedly. it's very clear that she could kill them at any point if she wanted to. and yet! she still gets killed just like any other rando in bitch-on-bitch violence. we're not supposed to trust her because she's a demon but i feel very very strongly that if she was a male demon she'd be portrayed as more sympathetic.

the other thing with ruby is that there is this half a second at the end of malleus maleficarum where her humanity shines through and she and dean start to bond. she tells him she used to be human and that hell makes you forget and that's! fucking incredible!!!!!!! thank you bedlund! and then they never bring up her humanity again. and dean goes back to calling her a bitch. again i think if she were a man she would get more than that one split-second chance at a redemption arc.

bela's special misogyny is that she is Evil and not even for a "good" reason. i fucking love bela and i need to say that at the outset. i LOVE that she outsmarts them and makes them fail and shoots sam (sorry sam no offense). LOVE IT. but all of her actions after her first two episodes are framed as Morally Wrong. she's not just a thief she's a great thief and a proud thief and that is presented as bad and evil. how could a person do such a thing how can she live with herself etc etc. meanwhile dean and sam have an astronomical body count but that's fine because they're heroes!

i think ruby is fairly consistent through s3, but bela shifts dramatically. bela is introduced as a great thief having a great time and being great at everything. it's a little shallow but it's fun and it's different! and she really shines in red sky at morning where she has the impala towed, masterminds a brilliant scheme, and objectifies dean.

(tangent: red sky at morning is the only episode written by a one-off writer in season 3 and is also the ONLY episode to be written by a black writer. his name is laurence andries and i'm immensely grateful to him. and i wonder if he would have gotten more episodes if he'd 1) made bela a bitch or 2) been white. ANYWAY.)

and after those two episodes of bela being a fucking badass who beats the winchesters, the show just completely destroys her. in her last episode she's pathetic and desperate and alone and begging for help and crying. very damsel in distress, which is pretty fucking insulting. and we learn literally moments before she dies that she's a damsel in distress because she's about to go to hell for murdering her abusive parents, which had never been hinted at before in the show. they drop that bomb as an excuse to kill her and then they do kill her, and the tone is of satisfaction. dean hangs up on her as she cries as the hellhounds claw at her door. we're supposed to believe she's getting what she deserves.

it's the same with ruby! when ruby dies we're supposed to think "well she shouldn't have been a demon" when she said herself she used to be human and all her actions appeared to the audience to be helpful to the heroes. on a show where the tagline could be "since when do we get what we deserve?" these two are killed for no reason and we're supposed to think "yeah they deserved that. fuck them."

i think ruby is pretty consistent across her episodes, and kripke is probably responsible for the laying of her foundation. but bela...bela's first two episodes are written by edlund and andries and they're standard misogyny at worst. she takes such a turn in her last four episodes and you know who wrote or co-wrote all of them? you know who wrote in the weird inexplicable pointless scene where sam has a sex dream about her? you know who made her an abuse survivor and had the heroes mock her for that? and then killed her? yeah. yeah you do.

genuinely, truthfully, i didn't even realize that the bela turn can be attributed to one person until i'd written almost this entire post. i went to check bela's episode list to see if i was forgetting any Misogyny Moments and well. when you look at the episode list.

in conclusion.

(also i have no idea at this point if i answered your question so please let me know if i can be more clear/helpful! this was really fun for me to think about and i appreciate the prompt MWAH!)