Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Are the Goodies the Baddies?
When a Fandom Gets Toxic
by Travis Hedge Coke
Debuting on the Hallmark Channel in January of 2008 with The Good Witch, the Good Witch franchise has lasted as a series of series of movies, and then a seven season television program punctuated, for all by the last season, by interrelated movies. Focused on Cassandra “Cassie” Nightingale as she moves into her ancestral home, called Grey House, in Middleton, generic small white-people town America, the show played light with Cassie’s in-story nature as maybe a witch and with the actor, Catherine Bell, being the one nonwhite routine presence in a very white series and very white town.
I saw the first movie, I believe on a rerun, specifically because no one in the room could agree on a program or tone so we chose one that none of us were particularly keen on. The first movie debuted the year the scholar Catherine Bell, author of Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice and other books, passed on, and I fully missed that it was starring Catherine Bell the actor and parsed a summary as if it was based on Bell the theorist’s work.
Our titular Good Witch, played by Catherine Bell.
Over the course of the original movies, Cassie Nightingale marries, taking on step-children, and having a baby, as she annoys bigots, helps abused children, makes treats, and solves many a problem, from the woman who could use an aphrodisiac to being town mayor.
It is a story of a woman who is both foreign and in her hometown, who is adjusting and even acclimating, while refusing to surrender what makes her unique and what she comes from.
I have never been able to shake the Bell/Bell happenstance, and have always watched the franchise through the lens of practice and acknowledgment. Even as the franchise moved away from even implying horniness occurs or jump scares, I watched with an eye towards Cassie Nightingale and her family living much closer spiritually religious friends or occult and magick heads, than Christmas-and-Easter-Christians and the social-aspect types from other faiths. I am not maligning the latter category, but what separates Nightingale or her sister, for example, from the normative Middleton, or even big city New Yorkers, et al, is their dedication to practice and ritual, both in a consistency of doing and of perceiving.
In terms of the show, being a witch is lineal as well as educative, but consists considerably more of being aware, being receptive, intuitive, appreciative, and willing to affect change, than flight or zappy-powers. For the majority of the franchise even whether or not magic is objectively real in a physics/continua-altering fashion and not a fancy term for appreciation and awareness is cheekily straddled. Magic is seeing the broom when you need to sweep. Knowing how to redirect toxic thoughts or when to trust in good behaviors. Magic is having a lot of jars filled with handy things and a lot of empty jars in which you can place new handy or interesting things.
A uniquely positive and subtle approach to magic and to spirituality in a television program, grounded in real life, intimate and social scenarios that only occasionally blew up into a century old treasure hunt or a gust of wind blows the doors open haunting.
As the movies transition to a television serial punctuated by season break movies, in 2015, the world of Good Witch shifts from an already deliberately family-friendly, safe as possible franchise, into furthering a very particular, conservative not Conservative soft femme domesticity presentation of Cassie Nightingale, who came to us in jeans and boots with a withering stare, so that she is dressing solely flowing clothes and softer materials that are never wrinkled or unpressed. Even the shawls suddenly have to have been ironed and the jewelry subdued.
While the movies could utilize young children’s perspective to enhance horror without blood or adult crisis, and might include angry dogs chasing at the heels of the innocent or creaks and groans in the dark, the movies also included Cassie inviting a homeless alcoholic stranger to come live with her as soon as she met him, Cassie setting up her shop in town and then setting it right back up again when it was trashed by locals trying to demonize her. The television series could play the slice of life defiance, but not the fearfulness and anxiety that directed most of the movies.
Catherine Disher, as Martha, performs tv’s greatest turn from villain to bonus hero.
The villain of the first movie, Martha Tinsdale (Gemini-winner Catherine Disher, who voiced Jean Grey for the 1990s X-Men tv series), grows/is adjusted from a petty, dangerous bigot to a humorous busybody, with the television series reintroducing one of her sons, last seen trashing the store of someone his mother disliked, now a respected and respectable young man. Most of the theme of small town bigotry is entirely dissolved by the time of season one of the television program.
Cassie is reintroduced to audiences as a recent widow in the first season of the tv show, and then even more of a stereotypical the married woman as the show progresses, than with her first marriage, in the original movies. There is, now, nothing even implicitly creepy or suspicious about Cassie. And, her baby from the latter of the original movies, Grace, is aged up without explanation to a high school student. Martha no longer has any guile or cruelty left in her. Words like “aphrodisiac” will never be uttered in the town of Middleton again.
I have always admired the Goodies for their ability to roll with continuity changes and discontinuities which might infuriate other fandoms. The age jump in Bailee Madison’s Grace Russell, the many incompatible histories of Grey House, continuity snags pose no threat to the tried and true Good Witch fan. The reality of the franchise’s world is malleable, shiftable, as befits a magic world.
The seventh and final season of Good Witch, which has just completed, has been met with incredulity in regards to its awkward plotting (fair) and some of its continuity flubs, but much more loudly and horribly for its inclusion of homosexuals, mixed race dating, and putting Cassie Nightingale back in her bluejeans. Letting her snap at men who are annoying her.
The fans, who call themselves, Goodies, include a lot of good vibes, positive and kind responses to these shifts, but the squeaky wheel gets noticed. And, here, the squeaky wheels are not that much of a minority and they are atrociously homophobic. The fanbase, largely woman, talk of how two lesbians holding hands is destroying a family show, or how hard it is to explain someone’s backless dress to their husband or children – completely unironic and earnest – and yet will make transphobic jokes or refer to women who dress in ways they dislike with a variety of misogynist terms.
I was beyond amused when a new character would lock eyes and lean in when speaking with either of the witch cousins, Cassie and Abigail, only to discover her attraction to them is because she is, secretly and unbeknownst, their cousin. And, she’s a lesbian. (Sidenote: Disher was part of the Sailor Moon dub which gifted us the gag and phrase, “cousins,” meaning lesbians disguised by overactive media censorship.) I also knew what many other fans would say if I made any comment about that confluence of tv cousin and tv lesbian.
It is difficult not to draw comparisons between the Goodies and the way American politics have gone in the past several years. While to a queer eye, the show may seem subtly queer – as subtle as a show can be where a man straight asks, “What’s wrong with a man wanting to give another man his junk?” – and for a mixed audience, Bell’s Iranian ethnicity may stand in contrast to the waspish Middleton, but for a white-identifying audience who believe they are middle class while likely being as poor as the average American in a United States that has no middle class, it is easy to treat the town as a perfect place, a preserve of goodness and Americana, and to ignore the queer content until it becomes too prominent, to ignore the racial aspects for as long as they can. To borrow a phrase from another MENA actor, you can be white on television and ethnic enough to be told to leave the bar. This is a magic power of television, to be read as white.
This microcosm is false, this regressive bigotry has to be constantly maintained, continually reaffirmed. When white bigots feel threatened by minorities, by minority content, and when that minority content is simply bluejeans on woman or a backless dress to sapphics holding hands, it is only perceived as a threat because of how hard it is to maintain the facade that these things are not omnipresent and normal.
Normal is no more worse or better than abnormality. What is a danger, and what is toxic and festers, is enforced normality. Enforced normativity.
Actors and characters can be separated, but it is bizarre to believe that a nonwhite, feminist actor who has lived with another woman domestically for the past decade, raising mixed race children and expressing hobbies and interests that blur the ridiculously gendered lines of hobbies, would not at any point have racial or queer content in a franchise they have headed onscreen and behind the cameras for thirteen years.
The Goodies who are complaining have no concern about a kiss here, a held hand there, but to have a queer, interracial couple hold hands and to have kissed one whole time?
Could they also be cousins?
Getting there…
Wait for it…
We’ll let Janet, a Goodie, explain: “I canceled my subscription to the network when it turned out I couldn’t get away from the LGBTQ stuff even on a family network. I have nothing against it but like to have somewhere to watch shows not throwing it in my face all the time.”
Or, Mary Payne, who posted: “Once they added a SAME SEX RELATIONSHIP, THAT TOOK THE WHESOME FAMILY PART FROM.THE SHOW.”
Or, Beth, who lets us know, “I feel that same sex, transgender, interracial relationships are happening but I am so sick of it being forced down our throats.”
As the show closed, characters who had teased being witches with a wink and joke for over a decade began to admit it aloud, and one new romance hinged on the other person accepting a witch for all of her, witchness included. This went over with some loud fans, as much as you would expect. Like bluejeans, saying you are a witch (meaning, in the show, that you were born with magic powers), somehow crossed a line into demanding acceptance and if there is one thing these fans are not going to stand for, it is acceptance.
Honestly, she’s judging some of you.
Not a minority in the fandom, the rest of the Goodies community seems legitimately predicated on tolerating the bigots and their bigotry, softly muting it when it gets too extreme, but so long as they use terms like “family values” and “small town,” and “my husband and children,” the objective is to just let them be, to let them be part of the fabric and pattern. And, ain’t that America.
Still, I did not learn from Cassie and Abigail and even Martha and her own learning curve to sit quietly forever and let my soul get beat up. I took inspiration from the characters and from the actors, from Catherine Disher and Bailee Madison to Sarah Power, Gabrielle Miller, Peter MacNeill, Hannah Endicott-Douglas, Kyana Teresa, and Kat Barrell, who I hope spins off into something fun with her character and Teresa’s, as the series’ finale offers plenty room to dive of from.
I decided to delay the release of this article by a few months, and to do my best to reach out to fan groups and discussion fora, hoping for some hard statements against racism or homophobia, some support for diversity and the right to choose your own name, live your own life, love who you love.
Several admins deleted my entreaties immediately after they were posted, some refused to allow them to be posted, and one group removed me without comment after several years in good, if quiet, standing. The supportive statements that did come were not posted publicly and included requests for anonymity, which is absurd. It is 2021 and it is a television show. It is absurd. But that is not simply the Good Witch fandom. That is too much all fandoms.