This Was 'Supernatural's Biggest Problem
Supernatural has always been a different kind of beast. Its 15-season run was certainly nothing to sneeze at, but its entire history was riddled with controversy, fan disappointment, and a convoluted story that, unlike its female characters, just couldn’t seem to stay dead. Supernatural is known for weird episodes and its glaring shortcomings.
What other show would affirm over a decade's worth of fan theories by revealing a character's love for another before immediately sending them to turbohell? What other show kills and revives its characters so frequently? What other show has made you completely incapable of listening to “Carry on Wayward Son” by Kansas? It's a show known for its problems but perhaps the biggest was the abysmal way it treated its female characters.
Female Characters on 'Supernatural' Have It Rough From the Start
The early seasons of Supernatural are definitely the roughest for its female characters (and that says a lot because it doesn’t really get much better). For starters, there are barely any female characters that aren't love interests. It makes sense to an extent. This was back before the show's demographics had shifted so heavily in the teen girl direction, so it was still leaning more into male-wish-fulfillment territory.
And we get characters like Jo (Alona Tal) and Ellen (Samantha Farris) who actually get to be involved in demon hunting and the plot, but they still meet the most common fate for any Supernatural character: they die. The same with Sam’s (Jared Padalecki) love interest, the demon Ruby (Genevieve Padalecki) who similarly gets to hang out and do plot things for a little bit before biting the dust. Of the few memorable women from the first 5 years of the show, all of them are dead.
As Supernatural reached its middle years, it struggled with a lot of growing pains. The show was originally supposed to end after 5 seasons, but when it kept going, they had to keep thinking of new plots and new characters to fill it with. By this point, it was leaning more into the family and adventure aspects than the horror that had defined the early seasons. Here we start to meet and get to know characters like Meg Masters (Rachel Miner) or Charlie (Felicia Day). Meg's mostly there as a potential love interest for Castiel.
Charlie was a runaway fan favorite for her nerdy tendencies and easy banter with the boys (and the fact she couldn’t be a potential love interest didn’t hurt). Meg still dies and Charlie still dies, but they got a bit more of their own personalities and stories before they met an untimely end. At least some improvement was made.
'Supernatural' Only Uses the Female Characters as a Plot Device
You’d think by the final few seasons of Supernatural they’d be doing a bit better with it, and in some ways, they did. Claire Novak (Kathryn Newton) gets a whole arc and becomes part of the family. (They even tried to give her a backdoor pilot with the episode "Wayward Sisters," but nothing became of it.) She slowly becomes less and less relevant to the show. We get Rowena (Ruth Connell) who’s a powerful witch, Crowley’s (Mark Sheppard) mother, and basically unkillable throughout the show until she dies to save the world. The female characters are finally getting a little more to do, a little more plot relevance, and a little more effort, but it's too little too late.
So, if you’ve been paying any attention you might’ve noticed there are some patterns to the women who appear on Supernatural, which is that they usually fill one of a few predetermined and always supporting roles. While characters like Ruby, Meg, and Bela all had their own plot-relevant reasons for being there, their biggest purposes were all to be love interests to one of the Winchester brothers (usually Dean). This isn’t bad on its own, but the fact that all of these characters die most definitely is. They show up, they fall in love, they die. That’s been the standard with women on this show for so long that it became a joke and the joke went on long enough that it stopped being funny.
If you’re not a lover, you’re probably family. Mary Winchester, despite dying before the story starts, is a massive presence throughout the show (even appearing in the spin-off The Winchesters). Claire gets to take on the daughter role for a while and gain some plot relevance for it, but she too is eventually written off.
Sam gets a wife in the finale, a hunter we'd met earlier in the show, but we never see her in those closing moments. These women are not made tools by the narrative as easily as a love interest is, but they still often meet the same fate of being underutilized, under-recognized, and probably dead.
Okay, ‘Supernatural’ Has a Few Exceptions to the Rule
If you’re the rare exception to being a lover or a mother, it means you’ve got something about you that excludes you from one of the previous two categories and are therefore allowed to have a little bit more personality. This is where some of the fan-favorite women on the show like Charlie and Sheriff Jody (Kim Rhodes) come in.
Charlie is a lesbian and therefore can’t be a love interest to any of our leading men, so we get to see more of her being funny, quirky, and useful. Jody is a friend and never a love interest, perhaps because she’s a bit older than the boys, and so gets to be another fun and cool friend to occasionally help on adventures.
Unfortunately, their exclusion from being family or girlfriend does not exclude a woman from meeting the fate of seemingly nearly every significant woman on the show: death. (Except for Jody, she gets better).
It’s almost comical how there are 15 seasons of Supernatural, a massive fanbase, and multiple attempted spin-offs, and it's still hard to name more than a handful of women that appeared on the show. Supernatural is well-known for its flaws and with the queerbaiting, the bad wigs, and the "superhell" of it all, so it's easy to see why its female characters got totally lost in the mix. This show will be remembered for its epic run, but mostly its problems, with the way it treated its female characters being the most upsetting.
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