@horsemotifs R.e. the title, yes, in part. "Yellow fever" is slang for having a fetish for East Asian women. And "yellow" is also slang for "cowardly". So the title is a pun about Dean both literally having an illness that makes him a coward and also having a fetish for Asian women.
"Yellow fever" as a term for fetishizing Asian women is racist for obvious reasons. And "yellow" as a term for cowardice has a complicated etymological history, but it was all over the place in the cowboy movies that were popular when I was growing up, and that piece of the etymology at least is also racist, but against a different group.
x So that's layer one.
Dean catches "ghost sickness" in Yellow Fever from the corpse of Frank O'Brien, the first person infected, who Dean calls "the Outbreak monkey", in reference to Outbreak, which was a movie about a fictionalized version of ebola, an extremely contagious and often fatal real illness most often seen in African nations. O'Brien murdered a presumably developmentally disabled guy named Luther, who then became the ghost that gave O'Brien, and hence Dean, ghost sickness.
Luther was apparently so (completely justifiably!) afraid during his murder that--unlike literally every other ghost we ever see on spn--he became a special kind of Japanese ghost called a buruburu. A buruburu spreads and can be killed by fear. To save Dean, Sam and Bobby tragically have to recreate his murder and subject him to the exact same circumstances again.
To be clear, this was all white on white on white violence. There is no reference to Dean's taste in porn in this episode. There are no victims in the episode that aren't white. But the murder in the episode wasn't just a murder; it was a lynching. Specifically, it was this lynching:
Which is to say that to solve the case, Sam and Bobby "have to" reenact one of the US's most famous lynchings. So that's layer two. It's not much of a leap on spn's best day to the comparison between hunting and extrajudicial racially based revenge killings--which in the US historically means lynching--but on the day this episode aired it wasn't a leap AT ALL. It was the text of the show if you have the context. Most fans, through no fault of their own, don't. But tptb apparently did, and decided to write an episode about it and have the title be a joke about fetish porn.
I don't want to oversell some of the details; the racist joke in the title, the ebola monkey joke, the inexplicably Japanese category name for a white American "yellow" ghost, the fact that the ghost's/victim's name was also the middle name of the US's single most famous civil rights activist. Some of that could be coincidental or unconscious bias or trying to work through real feelings of horror at a really, truly horrific part of US history (that is still going on to this day). But it sure is an awful lot of racism in one episode.
And I don't want to state for a fact-- because the internet sucks now, so I can't find posts old enough to prove it--that tptb were aware of fandom complaints about Busty Asian Beauties prior to penning this episode and giving it this title. But I have to be honest. I feel like it's reasonable to conclude they were. And that's the third layer of why I especially hate this episode.
Fandom has been critical of spn's treatment of gender and race from the very beginning, and we know from cons and from Spn Then and Now that tptb read the forums about the show and made decisions based on what they read there. And we also know from cons and dvd commentaries and interviews that their response to being told not to do things was often to double down.
And while the racism+misogyny competition was sometimes steep in the writers' room, Dabb and Loflin, who wrote Yellow Fever, weren't falling behind in the pack. They had Dean call a ghost possession victim who was an Asian-American high school girl "Hello Kitty" the next episode they wrote after Yellow Fever (and Yellow Fever was their first episode! Batting 1000 there for a while). They wrote Season Seven; Time for a Date Rape. In s15, Dabb canonized the real world antisemitic lizard people conspiracy theory as true in the spn universe. He equated being a Syrian refugee to cheating on your spouse.
In short: I don't like him and I don't like this episode.
I think back in hell ruby was the demon equivalent of weirdo christian girl and all the other demons talked about her behind her back like yeah ruby genuinely believes lucifer's return is nigh. lmao get a life lucifer's not gonna fuck you dude.
areudirty
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turnnoffyourmind
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