Mary, Fandom, and Consent

welkinalauda:

semirahrose:

So, like… We interrupt your regularly scheduled shrieking about Sam with utter confusion about all this Mary hate I’m seeing? Everyone out there is allowed to love who they love and hate who they hate because preferences are things we are allowed to have without reason or explanation, but…

The reasons I’m seeing for the hate don’t really compute? 

Because I mean… let’s say that, without someone’s knowledge, I just… run myself ragged for them. I work 80-hour weeks and chug energy drinks just to keep going. I prop my eyelids open with toothpicks to keep myself from toppling over at my back-breaking job, and I save up my money while sobbing into my ramen noodles. Then I go to this person—my sister, let’s say—and I tell her, “I’ve destroyed myself to save up all this money. Move to Alaska with me and let’s live a wild life in the mountains!”

And heck, Alaska is awesome, but maybe I haven’t seen my sister in years and I don’t really know her that well, and she has a job and a mission she’s passionate about, and I didn’t even ask her. I did all of this without her consent, and the effort I put in and the pain I endured was to make this possible. I did make it possible. Regardless, it in no way requires her consent.

It’s like people are taking the coercive Nice Guy™ tactics they hate and claiming Mary should consent to do what her boys ask because they’re good people and they tried so hard?

And it’s genuinely true. Her sons are good people and they tried so, so freaking hard to find her.

But she doesn’t owe them anything. They undertook the task of their own will, and sometimes the answer is no.

On top of that, I know we all love the Winchester boys, but they are grown men, even though their loss as young boys has hurt them. 

Mary is, in fact, younger than they are, and she died and ended up in an unfamiliar world decades later. She’s trying to find a place in it.

And I’ll be the first to say that I want so badly for Mary to hear stories of her sons’ heroism and feel pride and form strong relationships with her boys, but… Mary is an anachronism scrambling for meaning after being torn from heaven to find her infant sons are taller and older than she is.

I love them. And I love Mary. And no one else is required to like her, not even a bit. 

But there’s one thing that’s true regardless of whether people like Mary or not: she does not owe them consent to return to a world she no longer feels she has a home in. No one owes another person consent because they tried hard to get it, and they really want it, and it’ll just kill them to be without it. No one.

Sam understood that. Possibly because his life has been a litany of coercion and manipulation and violations of consent and assumptions about his choices, he is quicker to acknowledge that Mary’s choices are her own and she owes them nothing. But of course that doesn’t mean he and Dean can’t make a counter-offer. In an episode with some otherwise unsettling implications about consent, I really appreciated that scene.

This wasn’t, “Hey, I’m going to surprise you completely out of the blue by demanding you leave your peaceful suburban life and move to Alaska!” This was, “Your plane was shot down over a war zone, we parachuted in to get you, and we need to go before the occupying forces notice we’re here.” Last the boys knew, she was a non-combatant in a combat zone, who’d attached herself to the Resistance out of self-preservation.

I’d like Mary a lot better if she stopped trying to win arguments with, “I love you, but…” or, “I know what you’ve been through, but…”

She may or may not love the idea of the children she left behind. The two grown men in front of her? She barely knows them. And that’s because she’s made a point of being wherever they’re not and spending time with anyone but them. She has no clue what they’ve been through. She’s made a point of not finding out. 

So she starts with some bullshit about how ‘she knows’ anything about her sons, and then says, she’s sticking with these people, ‘cause she respects them; she can’t leave them. This is in marked contradistinction to her feelings about Sam and Dean. She’s calmly willing to desert ‘her’ boys and never see again. In fact, she would literally rather live through an apocalypse than return to the universe where they live.

Everyone saying that Mary doesn’t owe her sons obedience is absolutely right. She doesn’t have to go anywhere with them, and her reasons are her own.

What I do not get is the widespread condemnation of Dean for reacting badly to a person who keeps rejecting him and will not stop gaslighting him about it.