Baran Al-Hashimi (The Pitt) vs. Mary Winchester (Supernatural)
Baran Al-Hashimi
Mary Winchester
Remaining time: 4 days 9 hours
Propaganda below the cut:
Baran Al-Hashimi:
Hated by many fans for calling out the main character (Dr Robby) when he's being unkind to staff and patients
Dr Al Hashimi my beloved!!!
She shows up in s2 as the person who’ll be taking over running the emergency department while the previous head (Robby, a white man) goes on sabbatical. While the Pitt intentionally tries to portray complicated characters who have both high and low points, people were going “oh she’s the villain I guess” from minute one (Spoiler: she’s not. She’s just a lady who wants to do her job)
Like I usually stay out of the Pitt tags bc there’s so many bad takes there and I still saw so much “oh she needs to get taken down a peg, she’s going to have a horrific screw up to prove Robby is right about everything, she’s eeeeevil and wants to take over the ED forever” type shit
And she is a very cool and complex character! She’s always watching out for people in vulnerable positions, which includes both her patients and her subordinates; she’s largely a rule follower for better and worse; she’s a very good doctor; she has a really interesting plot wrt her seizure disorder
I Just Think She’s Neat
First of all. I love her. I love her SO MUCH. Second of all let's think about how her day went: she spent months preparing for a new job as an ED head, came up with proposals, emailed current ED head to try and get his take on the proposals and see if they would work since she's never been head of an ED before. He does not read the emails. He does not get back to her. She comes in early on her first day with bagels and to run a practice code to see where the med students are at and get a feel for the place. She politely but firmly guides everyone. She doesn't play favorites and is interested in both patient care and making sure her staff can have a life outside of work. She can do a procedure to save a child's life that nobody else in the ED has even heard of. She worked with MSF (Drs without borders) at a maternity ward in Kabul. (It is implied she witnessed a massacre there). Throughout all this, Dr Robby (WHO IS CHOOSING TO GO ON SABBATICAL! did he just not want anyone running the dept while he was gone??) belittles her, ignores her, doesn't want to discuss suggestions, leaves out crucial information about one of the residents having a history of stealing meds from the dept, tells her TO HER FACE he thinks the place will fall apart without him, literally makes her cry, and she handles it with grace.
But SO MANY people in the fandom are like "wow she's a bitch" or "ugh she's pro AI" (first of all, it's a transcription service so that's on the writers for calling it AI, second of all fan favorite Dr Robby goes on an emotional rampage and yells at a resident having a panic attack and he's still beloved but God forbid she have a flaw) (which comes from a place of wanting her patients to be seen more quickly and her staff to spend less time charting and more time at home! I'm not pro AI but it's not like she's just being lazy!)
Dr Al Hashimi is better than me because if I went through all that on my FIRST DAY of work I would go after Dr Robby with a scalpel. And instead she continues to treat him with respect even when she openly acknowledges he is treating her like a resident, not a fellow attending.
In season 1, a male doctor steals drugs from the ED. A female doctor reports him to the ED chief (also male) and, rather than report him to admin, the chief covers it up. Season 2 begins with the guy returning from rehab. Not knowing the full story, Al-Hashimi is supportive of him and his decision to get help. She asks about his tension with the woman who reported him and he says she doesn’t like him because he was a dick to her (he was and still is in season 2). He makes it sound like she has a petty grudge against him and he’s the bigger person.
Al-Hashimi is angry upon finding out the truth and treats him differently (i.e. doesn’t let him talk over students and the like, but she’s not a raging asshole). I can’t stress enough how she’s still cordial and appropriate with him, she’s just acting in light of new information. She knows he stole drugs, got away with it, and lied to her which made the woman who reported him look bad.
This made her the devil incarnate to his fans. They woobified him and acted like he was an innocent victim in all this. They called her an ableist addict hater (mind you she’s disabled and was kind about his addiction). People were loud and vile about it and I’m sure that if she was the white man and he was the brown woman it would’ve been crickets.
Mary Winchester:
The show brought her back to show she has flaws and wasn't a perfect mother and people act like this was a stupid decision and dislike her character for being messy and not acting like a mother to her now adult sons when that is literally the point of her character.
The fandom largely adopts the show’s misogyny towards Mary and all of its female characters. I don’t actually see very much of this first hand because I am good at curating my online experience, but I do know that people tend to think she should have been a better mom and blame her for things that it makes no sense to blame her for. The vast majority of the fandom also just generally takes Dean’s/the show runners’ perceptions of all the events in the show to be accurate, and all of those views that they take to be accurate are misogynistic.
Mary is a fascinating part of the dead girl genre, especially in how similar to Laura Palmer she is. They both had men trying to solve/avenge their murder as the whole plot of their show, but they also were both entirely misunderstood by these men. Nobody knew about Laura’s sex life/drug use/etc. and nobody knew about Mary being a hunter. Considering that SPN drew some inspiration from Twin Peaks, I would almost think that this is on purpose, but the show itself is so misogynistic that I wonder if they could have done commentary on misogyny on purpose. Mary is the most interesting character in the show imo and I’m sad that the fandom at large doesn’t have more intelligent discussions about her.
Hated for her choices, for wanting to be her own person and not babying her adult children
She was a badass, who was thrown into an impossible situation and did the best she could with it
EVERYTHING she gets hate for is something sam and/or dean have also done or would do in the same scenario! she gets hate for making a demon deal to save her (not yet) husband. dean and john both made demon deals to save family members and they don't get hate regardless of the aftermath! (we also see what happened in a world where she didn't make the demon deal and she gets hate for it anyways.) she gets hate for joining the british men of letters, but sam (who was tortured by them) joins them too in the episode following her confession that she joined them! she hid the hunting life from john and sam did the same thing with EVERY PARTNER he had! she left her ADULT sons behind so that she could cope with being brought back to life 30 years in the future and the fandom acts like she's guilty of child neglect. you know who else repeatedly left family behind to deal with things on his own and doesn't get the same level of vitriol? SAM!
She was brought back into a world where everything she knew was gone, her sons were adults (and older than her at this point), after being violently killed, and somehow she’s the bad one for not immediately adjusting and wanting space? Dean throws several tantrums, giving her the cold shoulder and generally being passive aggressive the entire season and then blaming her for dying and his childhood as if that’s her fault. And Sam and the other characters support him and centre the brothers’ pain over hers when again she was brought back into this new scary world with these men who she doesn’t know. Both fandom and show punish her for not immediately wanting to baby these grown men. And she has to apologise and repent by sacrificing herself. And fandom ofc eats it up, at times even calling worse than their abusive father, blaming her for everything that happens in the show and ofc the million bashing fics where Dean gets to yell at her, because SPN fans and writers love when men get to yell at women. Also they shame her a lot for having casual sex with one of the characters, because mothers aren’t supposed to have sexual relationships 🙄
Okay, so there's a scene in Supernatural where Mary tells Dean, her son, "I am not just your mother and you are no longer a child." This is a perfectly reasonable sentiment, as Dean is, literally, 38 years old at this point. It's also an interesting statement for Mary to make imo, because it suggests that both Mary and Dean should grapple with the idea that she was never the perfect wife/mother that her husband and children thought of her as.
Dean responds to her statement with, "I never was." And there's many analyses of this scene out there written by people who use this as evidence of Dean's manpain, and his sad childhood, and how Mary was actually a bad mother all along - instead of engaging with the implications of her original statement and how that makes HER character more complex. She's a nuanced character! She's been through a lot, and that informs the complicated, sometimes good-sometimes bad decisions she makes!! Except many SPN fans are obsessed with hating Mary for "being a bad mother" (read: dying and not getting to raise her children, then coming back to life and not fitting into the perfect motherly ideal her children have constructed of her).
And the thing is: SPN is famously bad with women, right? SPN is like, the Misogyny Show, and the show kind of has a Madonna/whore complex about the female characters where they're either perfect or irredeemable. But I would actually consider Mary to be one of the better-handled female characters on the show? The show starts with her dying, and her husband going on this quest to avenge her death and find her killer, etc etc, and there's this idea that Mary was this beautiful, perfect wife/mother. But the show actually works to deconstruct this idea somewhat, and late in the show we start to see that Mary was never a perfect wife, and she had her own life, and her own secrets, and real interiority. And this really nuances her character! It's interesting!
And yet, even though the writers actually did want (for once) the audience to view Mary as a complicated character, lots of fans STILL refuse to engage with this idea. People want her to be a bad mother to act as fuel for Sam and Dean's (mostly Dean) manpain. It drives me fucking crazy.
God I could yap about Mary Winchester for HOURS. Like we all know that supernatural is misogynistic as fuck but usually it's the writers doing the heavy lifting. But in Mary's case the vast majority of the misogyny is coming straight from the fans.
Like Mary started out as a classic case of fridged woman to drive man pain. Then the writers gave her a little more depth and nuance and intrigue through time travel shenanigans but that was mostly just setting up convoluted parallels and backstory stuff rather than actually exploring her as a character. But then they did something genuinely interesting. They. Unfridged. Her. They plucked her straight out of that fridge, plonked her down into the narrative over 30 years after she initially died, then said have fun. And that is so cool!
Mary comes back to life and she gets to exist as an actual character! She gets to be more than a perfect mother and perfect wife placed on some fantasy pedestal that no one could ever live up to. She gets to be badass. She gets to be messy. She gets to be flawed and complex while still being a genuinely kind person trying to do the right thing in a terrible situation. I mean, from her perspective she literally just woke up one day and her 6 month and 4 year old sons were suddenly older than her! That is an insane situation to be in! Of course it takes her a little time to adjust.
And how does the fandom react to a genuinely complex character in a fairly unique and fascinating situation? Pure hatred of course. Her many "crimes" include: making a dodgy deal as a teenager immediately after her parents and (then) boyfriend were murdered, being dead so unable to raise her children, not magically knowing that her husband decided to neglect and abuse their children while she was dead, taking more than 5 minutes to adjust to suddenly being alive and 33 years in the future and younger than her children, not dropping everything to coddle her two FULL GROWN ADULT CHILDREN (mid & late 30s) WHO. ARE. OLDER. THAN. HER. And talking to the British (yeah that was a whole thing I'm not gonna get into just know that the writing was shit)
As punishment for those truly heinous crimes, the fandom consistently treats her with the same level of disdain as John Winchester (has several documented cases of canon child abuse and over 6000 AO3 fics dedicated to his terrible parenting) if not more. And they will only talk about her to complain.
Oh yeah. And then the writers decided to re-fridge her.
Free all the women in supernatural but most of all free my girl Mary.
"We played with this idea of, is she fully seeing through her own eyes what's happening and doesn't feel in control, or if it's kind of like teleportation where every time that she pops back in, it's from the moment that she popped back in before, which is why whenever she's in the house, she comes out and she's like, 'Wait, where am I?’ So we played with both of them, and now that I've watched the film back, I think that she does both. I think that in the very beginning, whenever she doesn't understand what's going on, she's teleporting, and once she realizes what's going on, Nikki’s a fighter, and so her urge to fight the wish just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and that’s why she has the grief at the end, because she's watched it happen. She's felt it. She has to deal with it. It wasn't her fault. Her life has completely changed. And she just lets it all go." — Inde Navarrette (x)
Nothing beats the experience of seeing some true tumblr discourse float by and reading like two paragraphs into a post and suddenly realizing “oh wait. I don’t care” and scrolling right past
Wilson adds: “Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”
This comment was left on a post about making the most of the Libby app. "Excessive use of generous lending policies" is the most absurd phrase I've ever seen anyone use to discuss libraries.
I was at a courthouse once, and saw an indigenous australian woman in a dressing gown very carefully and gingerly making her way down the steps outside the courthouse, surrounded by family who were helping her down the stairs. We asked if she was OK, because she looked awful. She looked like she should have been wrapped up in bed with blankets and hot soup, not on the steps of a courthouse.
One of her family told us that she had given birth yesterday evening, but that Child Protection services had taken her baby away with no warning, claiming that she wasnt prepared to look after him. What had happened, is that she'd literally only just given birth -- hadn't even passed the afterbirth yet, is holding her blood-coated, crying, newborn baby to her chest -- and a nurse asked what her feeding plan was. She was tired from the birth and distracted by the brand new baby in her arms and thrown off by the timing of the question, but still, she managed to answer, and said she planned to breastfeed him whenever he was hungry.
Well apparently that wasn't enough of a plan for the hospital staff, who reported her and claimed that she was unprepared to look after the child, and claimed that had no social supports, and that the baby was at risk if left with her. All because a brand new mother, 30 seconds after giving birth, didn't have a PowerPoint presentation ready to go that cited the timing cycle she would feed her kid on, and instead simply said that she would feed him when he was hungry.
Child Protection services showed up, took her kid, and she was told to show up to court the next day to contest custody if she wanted her baby back.
So a woman who had given birth less than 24 hours prior was forced to rally her family and show up to court to prove that she a) had a feeding plan for the child, and b) had enough social supports to justify reclaiming her baby.
It was one of the most appalling things I'd ever seen. I don't even know if she won her case. They didn't know at the time we saw them, and after that brief interaction on the stairs, i never saw them again. I sincerely hope she got her newborn baby back.
That was about 5 years ago. And the exact same kind of thing is still happening today.
News broke today from a South Australian whistle-blower of the appalling treatment new mothers frequently receive, including hospital staff taking the baby away from the mother "for medical tests," only for the mother to then be told, with absolutely no prior warning, that the baby was not going to be returned to her.
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