Their Importance: She's a confident and powerful warrior princess who wants to protect her people, and the hero of a prophecy who's meant to defeat the god of war Lord Mictlan. While brave, selfless and loyal, Maya also has to grow out of her arrogance and she's forced to confront her own flaws and admit to mistakes multiple times throughout the show.
She's a well-rounded character overall, and her kindness and loyalty especially shows in her friendship with the other protagonists- Maya bonds with them and slowly becomes a better and more responsible leader, even referring to them as her chosen family. This doesn't happen immediately, though, and the team needs to take some time to learn to work together despite their very different personalities.
Issues: For a cartoon, Maya and the Three has a LOT of violence and multiple character deaths, with some being rather disturbing despite no blood shown. There are also references to human sacrifice, as Lord Mictlan's main goal is to kill Maya to become stronger.
Their Importance: This horror web series is an extensive abuse metaphor. Daisy is initially presented as the cutely quirky guardian of a freaky-looking but harmless monster Allen. It’s quickly revealed that Daisy’s mysterious absent father was violently abusive and her “endearing naivety” is actually the realistic result of being completely isolated from the world to the point where trying to leave the house during the day causes her to panic. Alan, a creation of her father, quickly turns out to be a malicious and violent presence. As he becomes an increasing threat Daisy, with the help of her in-universe audience. Slowly gains the courage to enter the world. She goes from learning to walk around her neighbourhood without fear to realising just how horrifyingly warped her household is and finally battling to free herself from her family’s terrible legacy.
There are also strong hints from early on that Daisy is a lesbian such as a caption conversation where her childhood self asks her father if women can marry each other and a bracelet tutorial where she uses the colours of the lesbian flag. Its implied that fiding a place she can freely express her identity os one of the factors that inspire her to enter te outside world.
Issues: On top of being an artistic yet realistic depiction of abuse Daisy Brown is also simply a terrifying watch.
Their Importance: Ennis and Jack’s story of navigating their complex relationship over the course of 20 years is widely considered to be a major turning point in queer visibility on film. Jack and Ennis are shown to be flawed but ultimately caring lovers, something which makes their romance realistic and engaging. The film had box office and critical success and proved that there was a wider audience interested in queer stories.
Issues: Content-wise, both characters have to deal with homophobia and the story depicts a homophobic hate crime.
Their Importance: Dean and Cas are two characters that many in fandom viewed as LGBTQIA+, with the common belief being that Dean Winchester is bisexual.
There’s a lot about Supernatural and Destiel, and Dean in general, which I’ll go over in the “issues” section, but I think many people in fandom didn’t expect for the show to actually go anywhere with them - until 15x18, when Cas confesses his love to Dean. It’s riddled with issues, yes, but just speaking as a bi girl who’s been watching Supernatural for a decade now, watching Cas confess his love for Dean was just so incredibly validating. It validated that I - and other fans - weren’t delusional when looking for representation from Cas (and Dean). Cas is a wonderful character and gave a new life to the show, and has been a fixture of the show for 10 years. While like with every character he has his ups and downs, he is a kind, loving character, and the only main character who actually survives the show. Despite the issues on the show, knowing that Cas is canonically LGBT+ is something that’s comforting and validating to me, and continues to be so even as Supernatural kind of trainwrecks around everything else.
For myself, watching the show, I saw a lot of myself and my journey in Dean. Watching him grow and develop as a character, and try to experience happiness and find comfort in his found family was wonderful for me to see. I started this show when I was a young closeted kid, and I clung to Dean in a way that I didn’t fully understand until years later. I didn’t actually expect him to be explicitly mlm in the show, and for the most part, that didn’t happen - until the Spanish dub. There, we see the romantic reciprocation to Cas, and that’s something that is real and cannot be taken away. In fact, although it was said that it was a “rogue” translator, the episode will not be redubbed, so it is canon in a version of the show. Despite the fact that he didn’t get canonized in a way I expected or would have ever hoped, it still does give me some joy to know that he is canonically LGBT+ (and in my opinion, bi, although there is no actual label given to Dean). Even if it’s not in the version of the show I watched, I can go back and watch the Spanish dub of the episode and see that representation happen onscreen, and that means something to me.
Issues: The issues list for this show is a mile long, so I’ve split it up into sections and put most of it under a read more:
Dean + Canon Rep: Trying to wade through if Dean is actually canonically LGBTQ+ was....a struggle, to say the least, and I almost didn’t put him into this submission. If you watch the show in English, Dean never once actually reciprocates feelings for Cas, states that he’s into men, or is even confirmed to be in a relationship with other men. Although for many, it is implied, the average audience member may not see Dean as canonically LGBTQ+. However, in the Spanish dub of the show, when Castiel confesses his love to Dean (which is an explicit romantic “I love you”), Dean says “y yo a ti”, which is a reciprocation of Cas’s romantic confession. This post is very long as it is, so I want to link to @destielintheimpala’s timeline of events that occurred for Supernatural and I think it best lays out all the issues about 15x18-20, why it’s been so difficult trying to figure out Dean’s sexuality in canon, why fandom is upset, and can clear up any misinformation. This situation also goes into queerbaiting quite a bit (something Supernatural is infamously known for), which you can read in this article from @thecoolestfreakyouknow.
Reading Dean as a queer character as well - having a character who is queer (or queercoded) and an abuse survivor and then immediately killing him off is also a huge problem. As mentioned in the link above, Jensen Ackles himself felt uneasy about Dean’s ending, and many Dean fans felt the same way. To have a character suffer through abuse and traumas for 15 seasons, imply or straight out have him be LGBT+ (depending on the canon), and then immediately killing him off in the finale is needless to say, an odd choice.
Also, with Dean being an abuse survivor - his father, John Winchester, is commonly shown to be neglectful throughout the show, and Dean has to raise his younger brother Sam by himself most times. He expresses trauma from the experiences he’s had growing up with their father and being forced to hunt at a young age. However, the show weirdly seems to flip flop on their portrayal of John, despite also specifically stating that what he put his children through was child abuse. They have Sam telling John that he did the best he could, they have characters excusing away John’s actions, etc. - it was like the writers themselves couldn’t figure out if they wanted John to have been an abusive parent or not. The show ends with John in Heaven with Mary - thus absolving John of his actions and putting him in the same Heaven with the children he abused.
Castiel: Cas confesses his love for Dean in 15x18, but gets dragged away to a void called “The Empty” immediately afterwards, where he’s meant to be suffering for all of eternity. Cas does get out of The Empty, and even helps to rebuild Heaven - he’s actually one of the few characters to survive the finale - but he never appears onscreen again after 15x18, so fans’ last image of him is getting dragged away to The Empty. Dean never has a follow-up conversation, and there was only one line referencing Cas’s fate, so many fans believed he was still in The Empty suffering.
As the timeline linked above shows, the situation around Destiel is an odd one - the Spanish dub, cast’s overall silence, the lack of Misha Collins in the finale all led fans to believe that something was switched around last minute in terms of Dean’s sexuality and Destiel as a general ship. Obviously, this is speculation unless someone from the show explicitly comes out and says that fans are correct, but it’s included in the issues section because - regardless of it it turns out to be true or not - it’s such a big part of the issues currently surrounding Supernatural and canon representation. In any case, however, Castiel’s confession in 15x18 gave fans hope where they may not have had hope before, and then it was unceremoniously dropped with no real follow up - from a writing standpoint, it isn’t good writing to confirm a major character as queer via a love confession and then never go back to that plot point. While I’m happy that Cas is canonically queer and I’m not trying to say that I would rather not have more representation, I do look back on the show and wonder, with the story that made it to screen, what the actual point of writing that in was.
As mentioned before, Castiel was a main character on the show for 10 years - while I’m glad that his character survives the series, to not have him show up in the final two episodes (particularly the finale, and especially after canonically making him LGBTQ+) felt like a slap in the face to both the character and the audience who loved him.
Miscellaneous treatment of characters: In general, Supernatural has many problems in its treatment of female, characters of color, and LGBTQ+ characters. Alongside being incredibly underrepresented in the show, if they do show up, they are commonly tortured, treated poorly, and/or killed off (if not all of the above). Even thinking about their recurring characters who are also representative - Kevin, their only recurring Asian character, is killed off and appears as a ghost multiple times, Charlie, who is a lesbian, gets killed off and replaced in the show with an Alternate Universe version of herself, Eileen, a Deaf woman, gets killed off and then is brought back and is implied to survive the show, but like Cas, never actually shows up in the final two episodes even though she’s Sam’s girlfriend. I can think of very few minority characters in the show in general, much less those who got any type of happy ending.
Their Importance: Jay is a veteran of the Korean War and he’s seen some very dark stuff. He’s probably the first character with PTSD on screen that modern day vets can relate to. He uses coke and sometimes alcohol to keep his PTSD at bay so his reputation as a reporter has been ruined because of badly his mind is messed up. His flashbacks are told in this almost surreal style that’s really scary
Issues: This is not an issue with the representation as it is the show, because it’s really dark and gory.
Their Importance: Castle is a valuable defender, keeping the objectives safe and secure. He's a good person to have on your team, providing support and defence.
Issues: Out of all the base operators in the games, before they added more, he was the only black one. He's also the only one of the base operators who's mentioned as having only one friend.
Their Importance: Kaid is the most authorative figure in the game, with many people respecting him upon first glance.
Issues: He's another character that has no friends/companions, losing everyone he loves when he dedicated his life to restoring the fortress from the game.
