[Image description: fan art of twelve and bill. Twelve’s arm is wrapped around bill’s shoulders. The image is all black and white except the rainbow text on 12’s shirt that read “i love my gay daughter”]
remember when you were young and impressionable and less capable of being critical of the media you consume than you are now and doctor who was a nice thing to distract yourself from the stresses of life so you loved it with all your heart until suddenly the familiar faces left and new ones came in with new ideas about doctor who about the same time you were learning how to be critical of media and growing up and cringe culture started lambasting those stupid superwholock kids from tumblr and you began to distance yourself from your former favourite things partially out of your new critical abilities and partially because you knew it wasn’t cool anymore and now you look back on the days you loved this stupid sci fi show with all your heart with nostalgia and a certain unwillingness to think about its flaws because it represents a happier and more naive time in your life so instead you scorn current fans for being shallower and less morally upright than you and now you see old videos and pictures and gifsets on tumblr and you reblog them just to say
As somebody who knows a blind-from-birth person, it’s kinda pissing me off that people are acting like the Doctor going blind is tragic. It might suck for him for awhile because he’s not used to living that way, but ffs if he’s taught how to do things the blind way as opposed to the sighted way and borrowed other people to be his eyes when vision is necessary then not much would have to change.
If the Doctor can memorize a map in a few seconds, I doubt it’d take him long to learn just about every form of Braille or raised reading material for blind people all over the universe.
Imagine if the TARDIS made him a sonic white cane that could do all the cool stuff his sonic screwdriver could do and more. Imagine it having a “homing” signal where the cane will gently tug him back to the TARDIS if there’s danger or if he gets ‘lost’ on an adventure. (And imagine him having to resist it and be all “be quiet, you!”)
Disability doesn’t have to be tragic, y’all.
–posted by an autistic person who headcanons the Doctor as autistic.
He’s already doing this, too. He flew the TARDIS to the stationworkers’ corporate office and then home to Earth without anyone (including any viewer who hadn’t been spoiled) realizing he was still sightless.
hi tacking onto this as a real life blind person and not just “i know a guy”–op i do appreciate where ur coming from, but also, like, chill–it’s actually gonna be disgustingly easy for dr.who to get used to being blind, because gallifreyans’ primary sense is telepathy; hell, they’re already prosopagnosic (link: x, x). dr.who is and was able to navigate the Tardis in part for the same reason why i dont use my cane in my apartment, but also in part because the Tardis, as a gallifreyan technology, is really fucking highkey telepathic and is/was thus more easily navigable than something designed by a generally psinull, generally sighted species, like, yknow, humans.
of course the problem that we’re probably going to run into is that the writers are either gonna get stuck on “this is terrible and horrible and awful and 12 will never be able to function” and it’ll be a super ableist pity party that’ll probably feed into some self-hatred of actual blind people… (link: x) or theyre gonna overuse gallifreyan telepathy so they can have a blind character, but not, like, a blind character who needs help with things
occassionally, or who needs to use assistive tech, or in any way can’t pass for sighted.
or both! there’s always both.
but like, listen, this is a fantastic opportunity for dr.who to be able to raise awareness of some things that actual, real life blind people do – things like the sonic white cane you mentioned already kind of partially exist (link: x), and oh man that’d be killer. i’d have comicon down this year let me fucking tell you. they could show dr.who working with the Tardis on the equivalent of JAWS or VoiceOver. they could also, though, pull a daredevil, and oh my god i am sick to death of daredevil. real people in real life have asked me if i can read a computer screen by touching it and feeling the heat of the pixels. that’s daredevil’s fault.
anyway the long and short of it is basically “dr.who could be really cool with this, but probably only if i was the one writing it, and im not, so it’s gonna be an ableist disaster”. regardless of how the show decides to take this, though,
@fandom be fucking respectful. going blind is not the end of the world. it doesn’t make you incapable. it definitely doesn’t make humans incapable but-oh-not-dr.who-theyre-fine.
and also, here’s a concept, put fucking image descriptions on your gifsets and fanart.
Friendly reminder that The Doctor needs you to put image descriptions on your gifsets and fanart. #DoItForTheDoctor
oh my fucking god dont do it for the doctor do it for real blind/vi people why the fuck is accessibility only important when it effects a fictional character i hate y’all
🍓🧀 (archive) 