Supernatural

[louiselux]

Seeing as how new_kate sent me all of Supernatural (thank you!!) with instructions to watch it ready for connotations, I've begun my one-woman spn fest. I watched episodes 1-6 of season one last night. My deep thoughts so far ...

Dean Winchester is a huge woobie.

All the women love him, except the women seem essentially unimportant.

Everyone has fabulous hair.

There are not enough shots of Sam and Dean sleeping in their underwear, srsly.

Are Sam and Dean really brothers? I find this hard to believe. They don't act like brothers, exactly. I can't quite say what they are like though.

Dean has lots of delicious unresolved issues that we are left to guess at, whereas Sam is presented more straightforwardly angsting. I can see why Sam might be flipping out now that his girlfriend has died in the same way as his mother, but actually to me it doesn't feel real. It's something to do with the pacing and also because the writers should've developed Jessica as a person more effectively, rather than just dressing her in sexy clothes and letting us assume Sam must love her.

Sam really is a little bit spooky all by himself, having those pre-cognitive dreams about her death.

Coming back to the unimportant women thing, I dearly wish the scriptwriters would move on from women essentially being torture victims/evil/people to scream and be rescued. It's very boring.

Comments

[kintail.livejournal.com]

Ooo! Tav and I recently watched all of S1&2. And as others have said, season 1 is patchy, and it takes Sam a while to get past his Jessica angst and start to become a rounded and complex person. Season 2 is much stronger on lots of things, including characterization arcs.

Some very strong female characters become involved in later episodes, though the focus always remains on the brothers and most of them aren't recurring. In at least one episode they do kind of get indirectly called on their chivalrous sexism (which is annoying but plausible given the way they were raised without female role models who don't need any protecting, nevermind vengence). By which I mean, some of the writers do seem to be somewhat aware of the character's unintentional sexism in the show, and sometimes use an episode to comment on it.

There do continue to be some skanky race issues which left me very frustrated, because with very few exceptions the writers *don't* seem to be as aware of their racist casting as they are about the sexism. They do some cool things in the one episode where they do explicitly deal with racism, though!

I am still looking forward to season 3, and also to hearing more thoughts from you on the earlier episodes because I've actually seen them recently enough to comment on them, which is rarely the case with my brain and TV. ^_^

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

There are some good female characters in S1, or at least some of them get more developed. There is a very distasteful sort of torture porn going on at times, with loving shots of mutilated dead women. Ughh. I have no idea of the producers are aware they're doing this, but it's creepy.

But I do feel that the writers have developed from the standard 'skinny blonde screams and has to be rescued' sort of plot they pulled at the start. That said, for all of S1 if a woman displayed confidence and assertiveness she was also evil.

Yeah, skanky race issues - there is the Mystical Black Person early on and the girl in the racist truck episode, but apart from that there are only a scattering of people of colour and all in very minor roles. I really doubt that the writers are properly aware of this, nut I do hope someone hands them a large clue in the near future.