You can be the King, but watch the Queen conquer.
-- "Monster" by Kanye West
I know, I usually don't open these reviews with song lyrics, but I feel like this quote is particularly apt for Charlie Bradbury, the central figure to last week's "Pac-Man Fever."
Charlie is, once again, everything I could ever want. She's a queer female character treated with respect and dignity. She's a strong female character whose moments of "weakness" are still utterly relatable. She has her own demons to face, and they're all pretty much metaphorical, but they are in the end the center of the episode.
It's been a long time since SPN focused on people, in the sense that we dealt with humans and their human problems.
But in this episode, that's central to the plot's resolution.
Charlie, in this episode, gets a backstory. In it, her parents get into a car wreck when they come to pick her up early from a sleepover she was too afraid to stay at. Her father died, but her mother wound up in a coma for years. Charlie blames herself for the tragedy, and she has to learn how to let go in order to defeat the monster of the week.
I love that Charlie's backstory has nothing to do with (a) the supernatural, and (b) her queerness. We finally have a fully-realized queer character on Supernatural, and I will lover her until I die.
Of course, there are bound to be people who disagree. I've seen allegations on Tumblr of Charlie being a "Mary Sue." Because she's competent, because she's "unrealistic," and she's beautiful and heroic and gets the girl in one of her episodes. Because she wins. Because the narrative doesn't treat her the way it treats the Winchesters, and she can get good things instead of just a massive variety of bad.
And goddamnit, so what?
She's not the protagonist? She doesn't have to struggle so hard to survive in the Winchesters' world? The boys genuinely like her?
That's fucking awesome.
People cry out "Mary Sue!" but, really? What's the problem here?
Mary Sues have been defined as female (almost invariably; there's debate on if it's even possible for the male equivalent to exist) character added to the narrative who is beautiful and competent and doesn't have too much of a struggle to get the things she wants -- or that the writer (who is always a girl, and usually young and new at writing fiction) wants.
Essentially, Mary Sue is a female power fantasy.
Considering that the narrative for pretty much all of Western history is all male power fantasies, I think it's only fair that women get to have our own. I'm a writer, have been for nine years now. My first fic, and I won't be ashamed of it, was a self-insert Silmarillion Mary Sue. Her name was Filithrentithiel or Saicel, and she was crafted to be the perfect love interest for my fictional crush at the time, Maedhros the eldest son of Feanor.
Without her, I wouldn't be a writer. The fic was, objectively, bad.
But she did what I had always wanted to do. Through her, I got to protect and support a character I dearly loved, and I got to pretend that he would love me back.
Is there really anything wrong with a ten year old girl getting to put her daydreams out on paper?
Because that's what that was for me.
And even when we define Mary Sue, we find that there is one big reason that Charlie can't be one, though we can still appropriate her as a power fantasy.
1) She was created by, and is always written by, a man.
The Mary Sue is a female-created phenomenon. She exists to be created by us so we can change the narrative we're presented with. Robbie Thompson giving us Charlie is not the creation of a Mary Sue, because Robbie Thompson cannot put himself into Charlie's shoes the way we can; he is not creating a power fantasy for himself. He's not.
We have to lay claim to Charlie as our power fantasy for her to be effective.
And I do. As a queer geek girl, I lay claim to Charlie Bradbury as a queen who conquers, as the woman who I can aspire to be, through whom I can write a character finally calling Dean out on missing Cas, who'll do it for the reasons that I would. I can relate to the text through Charlie in a way that I could back when I was ten and writing Filithrentithiel.
I refuse to be ashamed of that.
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