Remember when we used to review Supernatural on this blog? Remember how Supernatural does a terrible job with all its female characters (and characters of color)? Well, something weird happened this past season: Supernatural actually had some interesting female characters on screen. And some of them didn’t die. And word on the street is that the Supernatural creative team is looking to start another Supernatural spinoff, even after the last one failed in an extremely boring manner. Will their next attempt be just as boring? Or will the team take the internet up on its incredibly awesome idea: Wayward Daughters?
Shockingly enough, this past tenth (?!) season of Supernatural actually had some episodes that centered around women. Sheriff Jody Mills was revealed to be raising Alex, the teenage vampire victim whom we met in Season 9, as her own daughter. In another episode, Jody meets up with Sheriff Donna Hanscum, also from Season 9, and they work together on a case, after which Jody offers to teach Donna about hunting. Later on, Dean and Sam send Claire Novak to Jody, telling Claire that it’ll be a safe place to “get back on her feet”.
I desperately need more Claire Novak in my life.
Wayward Daughters Academy, otherwise known as Jody and Donna’s Home for Girls, is an idea that started after two Supernatural fans, Riley and Betty, watched all of this and latched on to the line that Claire was being sent to “some sort of halfway house for wayward girls”. Working off this idea, the two of them set up pages for Wayward Daughters online and reached out to Supernatural’s sizable fanbase; since the fourth wall is pretty much dead in Supernatural fandom, the actresses for Jody and Donna were two of the first to welcome the idea. As Riley and Betty say in their FAQ:
We kept Kim Rhodes [Jody Mills] and Briana Buckmaster [Donna Hanscum] in the loop during that first day, showing them just how much positive support the idea was getting. They were both so excited that they began tweeting a pitch for dialogue to the pilot episode to one another. At this past weekend’s Asylum 14 and SPN DePaul events, we found out that not only did a few of the other actors and writers were aware of the campaign. [sic] We also found out that Jim Michaels, one of the producers of Supernatural, had been made aware of it but was unsure of how the network would react to the show if it were pitched.
Simply put, Wayward Daughters would be awesome because it would finally be a Supernatural show that focused on women. Supernatural is notoriously sexist (and racist, and ableist…) and having a spinoff that was about women helping women, rather than a spinoff that was about another father-son tragedy, would be a welcome change for the show.
Krissy Chambers and Claire Novak: the dream team.
Furthermore, Supernatural already has a ton of great ladies that the show just doesn’t talk about, so why not expand on them here? Jody and Donna are a great start, and I’m a huge fan of Claire Novak, but there’s also Kate, the werewolf from “Bitten,” Tina, the de-aged woman from “About a Boy”, Krissy Chambers and her fantastic gang of junior hunters, and even, of course, Linda Tran, who went off with Kevin’s ghost back in Season 9. Most of Supernatural’s fans are women, and Wayward Daughters would finally be a show that was reflective of that. Considering Supernatural’s past track record with spinoffs, I can only be cautiously hopeful, but I want this to happen so much.
You can sign the petition to put Wayward Daughters on our TVs here! Then check out the campaign on Wayward Daughters‘s Tumblr and Twitter.
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It would be a welcome change, but I don’t have much hope that it would be less racist.