Flutiebear: Rambling My Way Through Thedas

denim-wrapped-nightmares:

[Made rebloggable by request. :D]

Well, the thing you have to remember is, Supernatural very much caters to the Male Gaze. When a female character is presented like this:

The viewer is meant to see her as a sexual object, and not much else. The script writer and director of the episode Simon Said deliberately chose to set up the scene so that the viewer would jump to the assumption that Andy had slept with her, because Andy’s entire intro is about juxtaposing Andy’s surprising success with his apparent status as a slacker/pot-head/man-child (as suggested by his clothes and lack of hygiene). His intro frequently cuts to Sam’s surprised and confused expression, which helps inform our opinion of Andy as someone who does not belong, someone who is breaking social rules, someone who is defying conventional expectations of men like Andy. One of those assumptions is that men like Andy don’t get to be with women like the one seen in Simon Said.

If the director and writer had intended the viewer to see her as a non-sexual friend, they would not have sexualized her so deliberately, period. They knew what they were doing when they had the actress dressed in lacy black underwear and hang out of an open window. 

As for how we know Andy used his powers, again, we as the viewer are meant to assume that in the natural order of things, a beautiful woman who has her choice of men would not pick a man who smokes weed in a painted van and walks around in a robe in public. The scene is then immediately followed by a demonstration of Andy’s powers, when he takes the cup of coffee from the man. The writer and director put these scenes immediately next to each other for a reason; they want the viewer to associate these two scenes, and to remember them when Andy is revealed to have mind control powers that he uses to get what he wants. 

Everything you suggested is perfectly possible, but that is not what the director and writer were attempting to tell their viewers. They wanted us to assume that he slept with that woman, and that he used his powers to do so.

And honestly, what makes it even worse, to me? Is that Andy knows it’s wrong. He says he’s never used his powers on the woman he has a crush on, because he knows it’s wrong and doing so would destroy her trust in him. So yes, I believe Andy Gallagher raped that woman, and that he raped other women too, and that he knew what he was doing when he did it, even if he managed to justify it to himself or somehow minimize the psychological trauma to those women. 

Thanks for making this rebloggable! You put it so well, it deserves to be shared.

If you’ll allow me to piggyback on your post, I also discussed Andy here for those interested in more discussion on the matter.