SPN thought

[alexseanchai]

Something I just noticed: Tricksters target the high and the mighty—the privileged, one might say. And the Trickster can take any appearance he damn well pleases.

So why, in all three of the human shapes we've seen him in, is he appearing as someone with white privilege, male privilege, ableist privilege, and (as far as I can tell) heterosexual privilege and cisgender privilege?

Dammit, show.

Comments

[grimsqueaker]

Simple: Ease of targetting.

People trust people like themselves more than "the other".

[alexseanchai]

Something tells me you haven't actually seen Supernatural. We've seen the Trickster in two episodes thus far, Tall Tales and Mystery Spot, both of which I'm about to spoil horribly for you. Three actors. The only one your point applies to is number three, Jim Beaver, who plays another SPN recurring character, who's probably the one person our leads trust most bar each other. Happens the character's a straight white male. (Why this most-trusted status goes to a white male, when somebody our leads have excellent reason to trust but who happens to be a black female appeared in one episode and hasn't even rated a mention since, is a related but separate rant.)

Actor number one, Richard Speight Jr, we saw him in Tall Tales. The victims in Tall Tales, one was pushed out a window by the ghost in the urban legend attached to the building, one was kidnapped by a Roswell alien on the building's grounds, and one was eaten by an alligator in the sewer under the building, and a lot of Supernatural episodes are premised on urban legends being real in SPNverse but what finally told our leads the Trickster was involved is that these particular urban legends didn't have any basis in fact. They only IDed the Trickster because he was pretending to be the janitor at the above building.

Mystery Spot was the Groundhog Day episode (except internal evidence suggests it was February 5), a lot of the scenes took place in a particular diner in which nothing ever changed except one of our leads, and our lead didn't clue in until this one customer he'd been thinking of as scenery had strawberry syrup on his pancakes instead of the maple he'd had in all of the previous hundred-odd iterations. This one customer being one of the few people in the ep who never that we heard of hit the reset button on the time loop, said button being our other lead's death. (This being actor number three, whose name I can't be bothered looking up, and he confirmed he was the Trickster by swapping out with Speight.)

The Trickster mostly doesn't do hands-on. He pretends to be background noise while he incites chaos around him. He doesn't need to pretend to be somebody with a boatload of demographic privilege in order to be background noise.

[grimsqueaker]

You'd be right, and fair enough except for one point.

Demographic privilege does help in fading into the background. Think about it; when fear and so on strike, the other and outsider is the first person/group targetted by the others. Having those privileges is therefore useful in inciting trouble - you're not the first person assumed to be inciting it.

Which doesn't justify it on the show, of course.