Review recs

[ash48]

A great review of last night's episode. Supernatural: Mothers and Daughters

It starts like this:

Did the planet just backflip off its axis? Are pigs doing cartwheels across the sky? Did Michael Jackson moonwalk out of his grave and buy a ticket to Shrek 5? Because something impossible just happened: Supernatural based a whole episode around female characters. Three-dimensional ones, even! None of them love interests.

I think this might be an outsider review (not entirely sure if it's fan written), which I enjoy reading in order to get a different perspective. I think fan reviews are great because they come with the history and provide a personal response as a fan, but outsider reviews make me think more about how the wider audience might see the show. How it might appeal to viewers who aren't watching for the brother angst or potential shipping opportunities. In fact, I suspect the lack of brother angst might be more appealing to the general public (my torrent DL last week was titled "I would rather run my balls along a cheese grater than watch this show" - made me laugh out loud, but it also gave me insight to how some people (like my hubby!) see this show).

The ratings were up significantly as well - 2.2M compared to 1.6M last week. I'm so happy about that because it proves (maybe?) that "classic", MoTW, female strong episodes are popular with the general public (and fans too I would think).

It makes me wonder if fans got a bad rep early on for not liking females. SPN fans were almost "famous" for hating on females in the show. Looking back I think this was more to do with the women that were written (and how they were introduced) and not just a general dislike of seeing females on the show. I'm not sure. It seems to have taken them a while to work out that well-round (other) characters, whether male or female, are the most satisfying and interesting to watch.

ETA: Great post celebrating the women on SPN by milly_gal. There's been some great female characters over the years.

Comments

[hugemind.livejournal.com]

I think last week "Agents of Shield" aired in the same timeslot as Show; usually AoS airs an hour earlier so it doesn't clash with Show, and the drop in Show's rating was so sudden that I'd just chalk it up to AoS.

I wasn't in the fandom pre-S2/early S2 when Jo happened, but I do remember people going a bit nuts when the early info on Bela and Ruby hit the fandom. I think the way people found out that two females were about to be added to the show as series regulars but how they had absolutely no info on what the women would be doing in Show brought out a lot of fear and worst case scenarios (mostly about the women being love interests for the boys). And as Yoda teaches: fear -> anger -> hate. I'm not sure if the hate in the potential love interest case was due to the dynamic of the show possibly changing or to someone coming between the boys or possibly seeing less of the boys or something else, but the net result was that this colored the way the characters were received and gave the fandom a certain kind of reputation. There hasn't been a similar response since then (at least that I'm aware of), possibly because the fans learned to trust Kripke and the TPTPs learned that how you present information to fans is important. And that traditional WAHWAHDRAMA love interests just don't fit the show because they're really boring and do absolutely nothing for the story (e.g. the certain flashbacks in S8). The rep the fandom got back then has just stuck.

[ash48.livejournal.com]

usually AoS airs an hour earlier so it doesn't clash with Show, and the drop in Show's rating was so sudden that I'd just chalk it up to AoS.

Ah, that could explain it. It did seem like a drastic drop. I wondered if it was because it opened with Metatron addressing the viewers - that might have unnerved a few. But AoS would explain it (I assume it's doing well in the US...)

and *nods* to the second para. Jo was introduced as a potential love interest to Dean and wow - the backlash was massive. I don't think it was so much that she was a female on the show, but more that she seemed like such an ill-match for Dean. I'm not sure if the comments surrounding her changed the Show's approach to the relationship or if what we saw was their original plan. As it turned out, it worked really well (I thought). It was mostly the way it was announced that created such a stir. Just like Ruby and Bela's announcement did.

I think now they just bring in characters without saying too much about them (I think?). Though I know Amelia was announced as Sam's love interest. She's a good example of fans probably wanting to accept her but they wrote her so badly that it was extremely difficult to (I'd still love to know what their thinking was with her. Maybe it all sounded better on paper...).