The Supernatural fandom has become notorious for its negative reaction to recurring young female characters for interfering with the Bro Yay between Dean and Sam or, in later seasons, the Ho Yay between Dean and Castiel. The male characters, on the other hand, are treated much better... mostly.
- The first female to be subjected to this trope was Cassie, a past girlfriend of Dean who he was shown to have been genuinely in love with until she broke up with him after he tried telling her about his hunter job. This is in spite of the episode she was in making it clear that their relationship had no chance of being rekindled and her not appearing again after that episode.
- Jo, who was set up as a female counterpart to and potential love interest for Dean in season 2, caused an uproar among the fans. The fans got their way and her character went through a humiliating experience before getting Put on a Bus in "Born Under A Bad Sign". Tellingly, fans started liking her more the moment she stopped being a threat to their slash pairings by turning down Dean when she came back in season 5 and then got Killed Off for Real to many fans' genuine sadness.
- Before Season 3 even began, fandom was already wanking about the introduction of Bela and Ruby which died down only after they were killed off. Although in Ruby's case, the hate for her was more justified than most examples of this trope as she was revealed to have been manipulating Sam from the start to trick him into starting the Apocalypse and their entire relationship thus had been based on her conning him.
- Anna, a fallen angel introduced in season 4, got instant hate for getting Ship Tease and a kiss with Dean until she was brainwashed into turning against the heroes and then killed off.
- Lisa came under fire from both Sam/Dean and Dean/Castiel fans for being the woman Dean temporarily settled down with after season 5 especially since, unlike Dean's usual casual flings, his relationship with her was fairly serious and fics written during the hiatus between seasons 5 and 6 couldn't logically pair off Dean with someone else without finding some way to get Lisa out of the picture. Like with all of Dean's relationships on the show, though, it didn't last with them breaking up and her getting her memories of him wiped for her safety.
- After Lisa, the show pretty much stopped trying to give Dean female love interests... but it decided to try to give Castiel some instead, which predictably did not go over well with both Dean/Castiel fans and fans who headcanoned Castiel as asexual. The first attempt at this was with Meg, who had managed to largely avoid fan hate in earlier seasons where she was a sadistic demon who got off on torturing others but got missiles aimed at her the moment she kissed Castiel and he even kissed back. It didn't matter to these fans that she also underwent some major Character Development during the same season and became a more sympathetic character than she was in earlier seasons; they just wanted her gone for having the temerity to kiss Castiel, and they got their wish when she was killed off.
- The other major attempt by the show to give Castiel a female love interest was Hannah, an angel who developed a crush on him while working with him, although the hate didn't get quite as out of hand this time as the crush was shown to be one-sided on her part and she returned to Heaven after her story arc was over. And then she got killed off (noticing a trend here?).
- April also got a lot of hate for being the one Castiel lost his virginity to. Although in her case, she turned out to be a reaper who killed him the morning after, so fans did have more justified reasons to hate her.
- Amelia, Sam's love interest in season 8, fared no better than any of the male leads' past love interests. It didn't help that her romance with Sam was the main reason he didn't concentrate on finding a way to rescue Dean from Purgatory which many fans felt was majorly Out of Character for him.
- In stark contrast to the long list of female characters who got hated on for getting too close to any one of the male leads, pretty much the only male character who gets a noticeable amount of ship-related hatred is Castiel, from Sam/Dean fans who resent him for causing the majority of fandom to swing from supporting their ship to supporting Dean/Castiel instead and claim that he gets too much screentime at the expense of Sam and Dean's dynamic, or that he should have stayed dead after any of the numerous times he temporarily died, or even that the final season confirming him to be in love with Dean somehow retroactively ruins his character. Even then, though, the hatred he gets is nowhere near as virulent as the hatred for any of the above-mentioned female characters was with him being popular enough in the fandom at large to stay on the show for much, much longer than any of these female characters got to.
- Way back during seasons 4-6, Sam got villainized in some Dean/Castiel fics based on him being on bad terms with Dean for a good chunk of season 5 after he got tricked into starting the Apocalypse and then being soulless and amoral for a good chunk of season 6 (even though he made up for his season 4-5 actions by sacrificing himself to seal away Lucifer and being soulless in season 6 was hardly his fault). This trend was common enough that at least one Dean/Castiel shipper criticized it in a meta fic
. However, the Sam hate died out after he got his soul back and the interpretation of him as a Shipper on Deck for Dean and Castiel who cottons on to their UST long before they do became popular during later seasons where he got more friendly scenes with Castiel. Nowadays, while Dean/Castiel fans are still locked in Ship-to-Ship Combat with Sam/Dean fans, they don't mind Sam on his own and are happy to portray him in their fics as a good brother/friend to Dean and Castiel who often gets paired off with Gabriel, Jess, or Eileen.- However, after the series finale a very Vocal Minority of Dean/Cas shippers became convinced Sam is the main reason Dean and Cas never got together, and in the time since then some of this hostility has even spilled over to Sam's actor, Jared Padalecki, who they perceive as somehow "blocking" the ship for his own purposes. In other corners of fandom, this has become known as "QFanon", as there is no evidence Jared ever had the ability, let alone the inclination, to alter the plot in that way.
- A notable aversion of this trope came when Eileen was introduced in later seasons as Sam's love interest. Fans were considerably less hostile towards her than they had been to other past female love interests and she became relatively well-liked as a capable hunter who also gave the show some rare disabled representation as a deaf person who used ASL. Many fans even got upset on her behalf when the series finale showed Sam marrying a generic unnamed woman, with them collectively choosing to headcanon that Eileen was the one he married. Sam's first girlfriend Jess was also pretty well-liked by fans, although it helped her case significantly that she died in the very first episode and thus was never a true threat to any other Sam pairing.
