I'm pretty sure that last week's "LARP and the Real Girl" was the first time in a long time that a massive majority of the fandom made it out of an episode happy and not emotionally destroyed. As a follow-up to the absolute clusterfuck that was "Torn and Frayed," it could scarce have been better to soothe our destroyed hearts and querulous minds.
As pure, beautiful filler, it doesn't speak to the overarching plot of the season except in parallelisms, which is entirely fine by me, especially when it's this gorgeously executed.
This episode brings back web geek icon Felicia Day (from Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, among other Internet phenomena) as lesbian hacker extraordinaire Charlie Bradbury from Season Seven's "The Girl With the Dungeons and Dragons Tattoo." Charlie won the heart of a large part of the online fanbase, a heavily female, heavily geeky demographic, so there was a lot of excitement over her return.
And boy, did it not disappoint!
Robbie Thompson wrote this excellent episode, which revolves on someone using real magic to harm players of the Live-Action Roleplaying game "Moondoor," where Charlie is the Queen of Moons. Charlie, despite wanting nothing to do with the investigation and at first trying to disappear, even manages to be the episodes real hero -- and, better even than just that, she gets the girl.
That's right, guys.
Lesbians on my Supernatural, and not just treated as titillation for the male gaze -- after all, when Dean and Sam walk in on Charlie and Gilda kissing, the first thing the two women do is spring apart, and for Charlie to express her frustration by saying, "If the tent's rockin', don't come a-knockin'!" -- but as an incidental part of a minor character's character arc.
It's probably the best thing ever.
The episode also features geeky!Dean, which is only played as a joke to a small extent (if at all, some days it feels like it and some days it doesn't), and the rest of the nerds we see in the episode are only othered, really, by the Sheriff at the beginning of the episode. The Winchesters, even, symbolically join the nerd subculture for a little while by helping Charlie win her game after the Monster of the Week is dealt with. We don't see the usual stereotyping of nerds that we get so often in other media -- in this episode, different nerds have different levels of social ability and ability within the game, and it makes me all too happy to see.
I mentioned earlier, also, about beautiful parallelisms, and I'd like to expound upon them a little more now.
Gilda, Charlie's love interest, is a fairy who loses her agency to the episode's real villain -- a rather pathetic squire of Charlie's kingdom with designs of becoming her king (obviously, he missed the memo that his queen is a raging lesbian both in and out of character) -- when he binds her to his will with a spellbook he bought off of eBay. Charlie destroys the book, freeing Gilda, who normally would never be killing people the way the villain forced her to.
This loss of agency directly mirrors Castiel's character arc this season. For Cas, the villain is Naomi, who has lobotomized away his free will and forced him to kill Samandriel in defense of the angel tablet -- though as I said in the Torn and Frayed post, that doesn't make any sense. The main difference between Cas and Gilda's stories is that the queerness in Charlie and Gilda's relationship is textually explicit, whereas the rampant subtext between Dean and Castiel remains just that, subtext.
I dare to hope that Charlie and Gilda's story is a sign that good things are coming in on the textual queerness front in terms of Dean and Castiel -- because canon male queerness of the protagonistic sort in a show like this would be utterly and beautifully new on this side of the pond.
Anyway, I adore this episode more than is probably reasonable, but can you really blame me?
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