(A site note – some of the required reading links are locked – I don’t have permission to view them.)

I’m curious what – if any – the show’s horror genre affects it’s dealing with minorities. I am a white, female horror fan. It’s a known event in horror: minorities and women are scary to Hollywood. They die or are compartmentalized or are held on the pedestal (the better position for a tragic death).

I’m often left wondering if Kripke isn’t just so determined to kill EVERYONE that he isn’t aware of the repercussions. Following the horror trope so blindly he’s never stopped to look. (Which is one of the many reasons I love this post.) He’s heading for the “Rocks Fall. Everyone Dies.” build up.

You said you weren’t a spoiler follower – I have noticed that the casting calls have started specifically mentioning “submit all ethnicities” on the roles. I’m not sure if that’s awareness but it’s something.

And Cil, if you think that black people tend to compalin a little bit too much about their plight maybe you should read your black history again.

The most recent episode had a Latina maid and I was about to die, because somebody shoot me on that stereotype, but alas I think the point was to have a moment where Sam is a geek and speaks Spanish.

There needs to be more over weight characters too. Becky the fan girl should have totally been overweight! :)

There are/were positive Black men on the show like Hendrickson (who was also young and handsome) and Rufus. And how could I forget! The two doctors who tell Sam his brother isn’t going to make it? Both black! So I guess we can add that doctors with bad news are black men and doctors with good news (Croatoan and Faith) are white women.

I’m still looking for the boys to hook up with a non-white woman this season! But in general, I can’t complain about anyone dying. It is a well known fact that EVERYONE on Supernatural dies, that’s not a matter of any type of prejudice.

I definitely agree with you about the casting at CW. Most of the young men on that network have what started to call “CW face” a few years back. They just all kind of looked the same to me. And I agree with you that it’s a huge problem, not just with that network (although CW *does* seem especially culpable), but with the entertainment industry as a whole.

I haven’t seen any recent CW shows other than Supernatural, so I don’t know about the network as a whole, but the production values and acting on the show are not nearly as good as what I’ve seen on other networks. I love the show, but I can’t see it as deserving of an Emmy. And I really, really love the show.

There are casual viewers of Supernatural. I don’t know about the demographics in America, but here I know many of my students have watched the show, but aren’t “fans” in the hard core meaning of the word. That might have to do with the different distribution of media here.

and yes, I have to say. Sarah was actually a memorable character because she was well written.

I would just like to agree with you that YES there is nothing wrong with looking at attractive people. That’s why they go into so much trouble making themselves beutiful I guessLOL

But when the lines or for lack of a better word FORMS of beauty are dictated by the CW who decide they want to dictate who they think is beautiful, thus warping our kids even more, I draw the line.

When a person of color, an ordinary looking plain woman or normal looking white teenager is not sufficiently represented on TV and only a certain group is( in this case Dean and Sam), it gives the society at large a rather skewed and biased view of what beauty is. The result? A world where people that look like the stars are accepted completely, faults and all and everbody else is termed a bad actress or actor or get booed off the screens by their fans because their looks or general appearance or race don’t fly with the general public.

This is probably why the CW is generally ignored by the Emmy community while the world of HBO and the major four networks are accepted.

And even though I wish it wasn’t the case but in SPN, the loyal viewers are not only the target demographic, but they are the ONLY demoographic.

Thanks for the clarification. The main problem many fans (I’ve spoken to) have with some of the young female characters is that they were so poorly written. I think the young women the fans have reacted most positively to (e.g. Sarah in “Provenance”) have been the strongest and most capable of the bunch.

On a side note, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with wanting to look at attractive people. :)

I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on how much power fandom has over the creative direction of the show. I think these things are dictated much more by other factors. As fans, we aren’t the consumers in the marketplace. We’re the product. And the network often would rather try to appeal to a wide demographic that’s NOT already watching the show than cater to those who are loyal viewers, especially when those loyal viewers are not a target demographic.

Concerning the strong female that I mentioned, I do apologise. let me reiterate. Strong, YOUNG , female. Ellen is above 35 and thereofore in the SPN universe and CW land not a threat.Thus she is a Fan Favorite.

as for the overlap, at the time SPN came out, there was a dearth of young, urban sci-fi shows with their own special mytharc, so i’m assuming the same fans would be there and SPn with all its faults is the only show that comes close to Angel and Buffy and sometimse the occassional gem-like last thursday’s episode-makes you almost forgive the crap in between.It’s still ranks one of the best if not the best urban fantasy show on TV.

But I guess whet makes it even sadder that the fans that used to push for strong female xters, diversity and an accurate representation of reality have now become stuck-in -the-rut pretty boy watchers. maybe it has something to do with grwoing older. i done’t know.But it’s sad.

leverage…I’m not so sure about that info.

I am not absolving K of all his responsibilty, but if the truth to be told, I have to say, the man needs to get paid and if he doesn’t do what his fans tell him- which he has done time and time again for the reasons stated above-he’ll get cancelled. So he figures the smart thing is to listen to your fans-no matter who they are-and move on. Whedon probably just had more will power and belief that he could sway the fans.And it worked.He was lucky.

Again all I have to say is….Charles Gunn.

Coming back to the subject, maybe, unfortunately, many directors and producers are racist (and they could not really know it conscientiously) maybe because people who cast today are still from a time in which black people have no right at all. For example, we had one black slayer who was killed in Buffy. The only black man in the show up to season 7 was a vampire (Mr. Trick), and this in a show in which the main characters were at some level different from the mean, the ones who “didn’t belong”. Even after the activation of so many slayers, no black one is one of the main characters in the comics. I don’t know much about Pete in the Superman comics, but in Smallville, the only black man had to leave the show. Let’s not talk about Spiderman (series, movies, comics). How many romance movies do you watch in the last five years in which one of the main character was black? Someone saw the last Harry Potter movie? In the book, Dean and Ginny were the fountain of pain to Harry, but we barely saw the couple in the movie? That is something we can’t change, but hope that the new directors and producers in the time coming can do better. Let’s not forget that there are tests and the winner is the best actor (or we hope so). How much the racist view of the producer, director, casting person, or whatever, is influencing this view we won’t really now?