MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

For four seasons sunny fangirl Charlie Bradbury served as a much-needed injection of female and queer into the hammerhead, heteronormative world of CW’s Supernatural. Charlie gained unprecedented popularity among the show’s predominantly female fanbase, was lauded for her representation of queerness, and became the first woman represented in show merchandise. These qualities marked the character as an exception not only within Supernatural—a series notorious for handing its female characters nasty fates—but, as Kristin Busse has noted, within popular culture writ large. This very status made Charlie’s sudden, violent death in the series’ tenth season a site of ferocious fan grief and anger—a reaction that seems to have taken the show’s creative team by surprise. The character’s demise also sparked a rare consensus within Supernatural’s contentious fandom: fans are united the belief that Charlie need not and should not, have been killed off. So why was she?

In this paper, we argue that Charlie’s death suggests the character had in some way become uncontrollable—a cardinal sin for a female character whose primary virtue, as we have argued elsewhere, was her status as a female fan Supernatural could control. Indeed, we contend that the steady surge of diagetic attempts to constrain Charlie’s agency and her independence from the Winchesters suggest that what truly marked Charlie Bradbury as queer was not her lack of sexual interest in the boys, but her ability to move in and through their story without it becoming her own. Ultimately, when read in the context of other female fan characters introduced within the series, including Becky, Marie, and Maeve, Charlie’s death—and more significantly, fans’ unified, univocal reaction to it—leads us to wonder: why the fuck do female fans (like us) continue to engage with Supernatural, a series seemingly hellbent on stuffing us into the Winchesters’ industrial-sized fridge?