It's things like this that make me wish I could like Supernatural, but the amount of racism and sexism (at least in the later seasons when I tried to watch) wow. It's never a trope I liked, given how gendered it is, and also how much of a bullshit excuse it almost always is.
An abusive mother comes across as a betrayal of their expected role as a nurturer. This. Because we don't have the same expectation of the nurturing, safe father that we do of the mother, characters like Gothel don't work quite as well as fathers. They are almost betrayal of the audience.
You know, as much as I hate the I Did What I Had To Do excuse, I'm using it with the main character's mother in my novel, but for her, it's more immediate. She's no trying to toughen her up, just keep her family from killing her child. I'm worried that the fact that she's a mother and not a father will be held against her. didn't think about that before.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2012-09-03 11:33 pm (UTC)An abusive mother comes across as a betrayal of their expected role as a nurturer. This. Because we don't have the same expectation of the nurturing, safe father that we do of the mother, characters like Gothel don't work quite as well as fathers. They are almost betrayal of the audience.
You know, as much as I hate the I Did What I Had To Do excuse, I'm using it with the main character's mother in my novel, but for her, it's more immediate. She's no trying to toughen her up, just keep her family from killing her child. I'm worried that the fact that she's a mother and not a father will be held against her. didn't think about that before.