No one is going to deny that Supernatural is a male dominated show despite the fact that the majority of the audience is female. There are few enough female characters that when we lose any of them - whether through death or through being written off - the loss is that much more pronounced. Any woman who’s had any kind of power in Supernatural will end up dying or be written out. Abaddon, one of the most interesting and compelling antagonists, died. So did April, Anna, Ava, Amelia, Bela, Eve, Ellen, Hannah, Jessica, Jo, Madison, Meg, Mary, Naomi, Sarah, and Tessa, just to name a few. Lisa was allowed to live but got demonized (literally and figuratively) before she departed - alive - from the show.

There are over 200 episodes, and the character who’s appeared the most is Meg, who appeared in seventeen different episodes. Rowena’s shown up in fourteen so far, Lisa had thirteen episodes, “Ruby 2.0 at twelve episodes, Ellen Harvelle with ten, Mary Winchester with eight, Jo with seven, and so on” (as noted by KMWW in Supernatural Is Sexist And Misogynistic. But It Doesn't Have To Be). The kicker, though, is that the latest villain in the show is Amara, and she’s had a total of nine episodes to be in. One would think the writers would have her spend more time onscreen.

Women who are given a backstory in the show are also given one of four roles: mother, daughter, love interest, or bitch (KMWW). There’s no space for them to exist as an equal to Sam and Dean. And, really, they tend to be either love interests (Amelia, Amy, Colette, Jessica, Lisa, Madison, and Sarah) or bitches (Abbadon, Anna, April, Bela, Eve, Hael, Hester, Isis, Lilith, Meg, Naomi, Rachel, Ruby, and Ruby 2.0). Some of them - Ellen and Mary - are mothers and defined as such, while others - Jo and Emma - are put into the daughter category. Then there are the women that the writers don’t seem to know what to do with: Ava, Astaroth, Constance Welch, Gwen, Jane, Jenna, Kate, Muriel, Olivia, Tara, and and Tessa. Despite the fact that they have varying levels of relevance and interest, the women are either put into a damsel in distress situation or begin to act coarse and rough (essentially, they act like a bitch) with one of the main characters before being killed permanently.

When a female character is introduced onto the show, you can pretty much determine her fate using just a few formulaic questions. Let’s use Abbadon and Ellen as examples.

The first question one asks is: Does she have a personality? Answer: Yes.

Second question: Is she fully human? Answer: No to Abbadon, yes to Ellen.

Third question: Is she evil? Answer: Yes to Abbadon, no to Ellen.

From there, we can conclude that Abbadon will die (and she did, at nearly the end of the ninth season). Since we’re left with just Ellen, the next question one needs to ask is her age in relation to the boys. She’s much older, so she won’t be a love interest (if she was a love interest, she would end up having sex with either Sam, Dean, or Cas, and then either die or disappear from the plot, never to be heard from again). Ellen is just as competent as the boys, which would be okay. But when combined with the fact that she’s a woman, one knows that she will die. And she does, in season five.

Now, suppose we’re talking about characters like Jody Mills and Claire Novak. They’re not as clear cut as the first two women mentioned.

Like Ellen and Mary, Jody is a mother. Unlike them, she isn’t dead yet. Also unlike them, Jody isn’t a hunter. She’s a sheriff in South Dakota who accidentally finds out about the supernatural world (no pun intended) when her child died and returned as a zombie, and ended up killing her husband. On occasion Jody will help Sam and Dean with cases they work on (she was affiliated with Bobby and helped him as well). Despite her losses, Jody doesn’t let revenge poison her to the point where she seeks out to obsessively kill monsters. She continues to have a (physically) stable life while being emotionally scattered. As far as we know, she doesn’t lose her job - whether she takes time off to grieve is unknown.

Jody is only alive because she toes the line between being a hunter and being a sheriff while being someone who is categorized as A Mother. She helps with monster killing, but not enough to make it a full-time job, and she cares for Claire and Alex, but not enough to get established in the Mother Trope that Supernatural has established. As long as she doesn’t cross over fully into being a hunter, she will be allowed to live and flourish within her own life, but any potential and interesting storylines surrounding her will be ignored.

Claire is alive because while she is an orphaned woman, she’s also only eighteen years old and has had her life already significantly fucked up by Team Free Will. She has nothing in the sense that she doesn’t have any family members alive. There’s nowhere for her to go except jail or Jody’s home. The significant thing about Claire, though, is that she’s more like the target audience that the writers are trying to reach. It’s one thing to kill adult women who are 30+ years old, but killing young children has tended to be a territory that even the writers don’t touch (the only exceptions are the characters Owen, Peter, and Ryan).

She isn’t old enough to be a love interest to Sam or Dean, and she’s not been in enough episodes for her to be killed or written off. Claire is relatable enough to the audience because she’s a young woman, and the audience has a lot of women who are around her age. She has enough fan support to make it a bad to move to kill or write her off just yet.

There are exceptions like Jody and Claire, but I think they’re held to a very high standard. The women have to be competent and level-headed enough to survive multiple supernatural interactions, stable enough to not turn into revenge driven people afterward a potential traumatic incident, likable enough that the fandom response overall isn’t a vilifying one, and harmless enough that they aren’t a threat to Sam and Dean.

But I digress.

Most of the women whose appearance was significant were vilified by either the writers or the fandom. One of the worst cases, I think, was how Bela Talbot was treated by the characters within the show. She was a morally ambiguous, complex female character introduced in season three. While she was never evil the way Ruby 2.0 or Metatron were, she also couldn’t be put on the same bench as the “good” female characters, like Pamela and Charlie. We finally learn, in the episode Time Is on My Side (3.15) that Bela is scared because she made a demon deal with Lilith ten years ago and hellhounds are coming for her now that her ten years are up. It’s implied in a flashback that she was being sexually abused by her father, and unknowingly sold her soul to Lilith in order to make it stop.

Bela’s characterization meant that while she was an interesting character, she was constantly shamed and demeaned. Dean once makes the comment, “What, didn’t daddy love you enough?” in-between other things he’s said to her. He even refuses to help her stop the hellhounds when she calls him tearfully, wanting help. Bela is shamed and demeaned once more before she dies.

Women on the show can’t really get a break. If each character is isolated from the show, they are interesting, complex women who, if put together, would make for an interesting and different show. As it isn’t the case, at the very least, they could contribute a lot to the show they’re on, and that’s what most people would expect. But that’s not what happens. All of the women are sidelined or killed (sometimes after they’ve become evil).

There’s the rare character like Jody or Meg who show up in multiple seasons, but not regularly enough to be a main character. There are characters like Kali and Cassie, who appear for one episode and then are forgotten about. When combined with the rest of Supernatural’s history, you have one of the problem’s with the show. There is no consistent female narrative. We see females on the show, but out of the 200+ episodes, women are (very) lucky if they’re like Rowena and show up in fourteen episodes total. Women might get a story arc within the show, but it’s short. They show up for most of one season, and then get killed or written off. Sometimes they’ll get referenced again, sometimes they’ll appear again the show through a flashback and be fleshed out more, but that’s all we, as an audience, get to see of them.

A woman in the show tends to be defined by her relevance towards the male leads and by whatever category she falls into: mother, daughter, love interest, bitch. Charlie is one of the only exceptions to the categorizing because of her sexuality, and one could argue that Donna is also exempt from it - she isn’t evil, she isn’t a mother, and she isn’t a daughter. In fact, when it comes to her personal life, all we know is that she is incredibly insecure about her weight and divorced her (awful) husband in 2013. Donna is not a love interest because of her divorce and her age.

When the women in Supernatural get the same kind of narrative as the men, the plot could be taken in so many new directions and provide a more interesting, diverse cast.