s11 is really really good, i do love it but like. wheres the conflict why does everyone get along without questioning anything the doctor does iâm just ???????????¿¿¿¿
you ever think about how we are literally so starved for complex female characters with actual agency that itâs literally got to the point where every other post is like âDROWN THE DOCTOR!!!!!! PLEASE, CHIBBS, LET HER LOSE CONTROL AND HURT SOMEONE. LET HER TERRIFY HER COMPANIONS. JUST LET HER GO APE SHITTTTTâ
like, this is totally understandable. this is what we already know about the doctor as a character. they do have a dark side and they do get hurt. and yet because sheâs a woman now itâs like â this intrinsic part of their character feels almost out of reach. and to me itâs v clear why.
Here Is What Is Happening â the thing i think a lot of writers donât understand is that female pain within media isnât inherently reductive or a negative stereotype when it is being felt by a character who is strong and has agency. the perverted pain of the hollywood âdamselâ thatâs most obvious in horror films is only reductive because these characters only exist to suffer. their pain isnât for the audience to understand or relate to, itâs to be viewed from the outside voyeuristically and usually from a male POV.
hereâs a question. why do u think âheroâ archetype characters like sam/dean, sherlock, the doctor etc., are always suffering like every gd episode of their respective shows? itâs because theyâre seen as fundamentally strong, powerful (intellectually/physically/possessing extraordinary talents etc.,) and emotionally complex. weakness is then seen as interesting and subversive. you want to see characters behave in ways that are against type â thatâs storytelling. so what happens is that if you donât build up a female character so that sheâs got these elements (and nine times out of ten she wonât because women arenât written within the âheroâ archetype to begin with) her pain, if portrayed at all, will inevitably come across as redundant, and therefore depraved.
so thatâs how we end up with all these cookie cutter female characters who are strong and thatâs it â their whole personality is âstrongâ maybe with a few âflawsâ tossed in. often âflawsâ are whatâs pointed to as being what you need to write a good character â however theyâre not just supposed to be window dressing. story isnât about characters having flaws just because Good Characters Have Flawsâ˘Â â itâs about the psychology behind why people enjoy these specific narratives. the point is to see a heroic character vulnerable enough that they have the opportunity to grow. and the thing is, if you view all women as intrinsically vulnerable at a fundamental level the stories you tell about them are going to be incredibly limited.
Has anyone read any – positive or negative – takes on âRosaâ by black fans or black writers? Iâd be interested in reading posts or articles (or seeing twitter threads or youtube videos) that arenât just white people telling each other that the episode was great.
I thought it was a great episode, much more detailed and historically accurate than I expected. I do wish it had mentioned Claudette Colvinâs part of the story, as the one who ignighted the bus boycott with her previous, less peaceful, arrest and conviction.
Iâve read a lot of white criticism of the episode on Reddit and Twitter over the last couple days, and while many posts say they donât like being spoon fed a story, an equal amount missed major points that shouldnât have needed to have been even more spelled out. For example, Rosa was clearly portrayed as an activist in the inner circle of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr wasnât at her house randomly because all Black people know each other â they were meeting.
And yet I keep seeing people complaining that Rosa was âmisrepresentedâ because she was in reality an activist. Or that she was âchosenâ as the face of the movement, as if she was a puppet and not an active participant herself. (Which really goes to show how nonblack people will twist information in order to put it in a bad light â a lot of people seem to think that because she was an activist, the whole thing was faked. Thatâs misrepresentation).
Another pain point Iâve seen is the time traveling villain, whose name I donât even remember. Scruffy white guy sent back in time to stop the bus boycott. His motivation? Racism. So why are so many complaining he had no motivation? And why is racism considered a âboringâ trait for a sci-fi villain? Especially since when I post about racism in media and fandom, people act like itâs the most over the top suggestion (because racism is something only Evil People do)? Thereâs nothing worse when someone thinks theyâre being called racist, but when a mass murdering villain is openly racist, thatâs not a good reason to be a villain.
I wonât even get into the people who wanted to âunderstandâ the white space villain better. Or the ones who call him a dumb villain because heâs from the far future, and obviously racism wouldnât be a thing in his time (or maybe racism is something that isnât exclusive to the US in the â50s? Maybe itâs not just going to go away by itself over time?). Like, no stopping and thinking about the implications, just, no, thereâs no racism in whatever future world this villain we just met came from.
Which, of course, goes hand in hand with complaints that Ryan and Yazâs talk about the racism theyâve experienced in the present day UK was unnecessary and âheavy handed.â It was absolutely necessary for a British show exploring an American civil rights event to do that.
Anyway. Episode was great. A lot of the reactions, not so much.
anyone who thinks thirteen wouldnt just gonna sit there grinning and repeatedly pressing the custard creme button until theyve either accumulated a massive hoard of cookies or the tardis cuts them off is dead wrong
The TARDIS just straight up conditions the Doctor to fly her correctly lmao. They get a cookie when they donât leave the brakes on or drag her through a temporal displacement they caused.
sadfghj positive reinforce ur time lord into half way decent driving
season 11 of dw is kind of mincing it’s morals so far i think.
in âthe woman who fell to earthâ, the villain kills about 6 people. he’s trying to kill one randomly selected person. that random person tries to push the Bad Guy Alien off a crane, and the doctor scolds him for trying to kill. nobody should take a life, that’s very clear. the doctor then tricks him into killing himself with his own bombs things. i guess there’s the plausible deniability that he pressed the button himself, but that’s if you ignore that it was the doctor’s one plan to stop him. they asked nicely to get him to leave the planet, and then, there was no backup plan except for that plausible deniability murder. which they had to have been planning for nearly half the episode, since before the data transfer.
in âthe ghost monumentâ, episode 2, we get reintroduced to why the doctor never carries a gun. but the scene is about surviving the killer robots. the message here isn’t about Not Taking A Life, it’s just. guns are bad, even as a tool, even in a situation with no life to be taken. t isnât about the importance of life at all. i get that self defence isnât a real excuse for murder, but, theyâre robots. the show was very clear that these were robots. i kind of just wish the doctor would be honest and say ‘guns don’t work on this show for plot reasons’, because that’s what really happens. or even something like âguns arenât effective hereâ because it wasnât about morality here. no one could argue that ryan is a bad person for trying to protect everyone from killer robots, but thatâs kind of what the doctor tried to do.
and later in the episode, the set of Bad Guy Aliens this time are killed in a gas explosion that the doctor planned out. it gave us a clear Life Is Sacred message in front of the mindless drones, and then pulled out on that message for the evil ribbon things, who seemed to be pretty alive. they could talk, and they seemed very intelligent. did their lives matter? did they not count because they were engineered to be evil? and is using a gun really worse than burning something to death? itâs kind of assumed the ribbon things are irredeemable, that they must die, but we arenât told that in any words at all. which in itself is strange, because already this season weâve heard so much about the importance of not taking a life, except now itâs okay when the doctor forgets to mention it.
it really feels like so far the message that All Life Is Important has a clock set on it, to run out in the last few minutes of the episode. because the Bad Guy Alien still has to die to wrap up everything neatly. thatâs been the only resolution these episodes have had yet.
iâm of course not saying that any previous doctor had a totally consistent sense of morality. and the show has never been consistent with the rule of ânever carrying a gunâ, which was only really invented for the 10th doctor. but, i donât think itâs been so glaring to me before that the doctor was saying one thing and doing another. or even saying and doing things that donât make sense in the narrative at all. itâs like the show is telling us itâs about Always Finding Another Way, and then killing the bad guys anyway.Â
[id: a series of nine small pictures with one word of text on them, reading – in order, with word first and picture description second – THANK (rachel talalay) YOU (river song) FOR (the general from hell bent) PAVING (clara in her stolen TT capsule) NOT YOU (the cover of the unbound audio story âexilesâ) THE WAY (kate lethbridge-stewart) FOR A (the curse of fatal death thirteenth doctor) FEMALE (missy) DOCTOR (jodie whittaker). end id.]
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