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Entry tags:
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Doctor's Companions; Part 3
Donna:
I kicked as hard at the end of S4 as the next fan, but of all the storytelling choices I'd hold against Davies... it's obvious that Donna had even less reason to go back than Rose. The thought experiment I'm punting around now is, What if Donna and Stutter Guy had found each other, or for that matter if she'd met and fallen for someone else during her travels with the Doctor. The "Mary Morstan" in other words. XD; Would she have stayed behind elsewhere? It would be a closer call than for Rose or Martha (their feelings for the Doctor aside). Donna never got enough positive feedback from the world to grasp her own strength, and meeting the Doctor didn't so much change that as gave her the impetus to charge outward even in the absence of feedback (which she isn't equipped to recognize when she gets it - oh-so-realistic that the Doctor doesn't understand this until they're very close friends: for people with that healthy an ego, lack of self-esteem is hard to grok). If the Racnoss hadn't been, Donna would have manhunted until she got married and had kids and been a Mom, and that would have been the moment her life found focus.* One of these paths of potential self-realization is "cooler" than the other, for what that's worth, but for the rest of us on Earth an encounter with the Doctor is a matter of metaphor. Donna scoffs at herself at the start of S4: when push comes to shove, she's still treading water until a man saves her from her life.
I like Donna most because she's less impressed, really. XD I identify much more with her knee-jerk responses. I mean, the time machine is impressive? The need to impress chicks with one's time machine is not as impressive, and it's important to differentiate. Similarly, exotic ice planets are awesome, but fuck going out on the surface unless one is properly dressed. That sort of thing. As far as I can tell, the reason she doesn't fall for the Doctor is because he is mundanely Not Her Type, which is also lulz. They make great besties,** though, not just in comedic timing. Donna is written with the upsides of the socio-emotionally perceptive (she zeroes in on the engagement ring, the unadmitted motive, the furtive shared glance in public), and what struck me about her convos vis the Doctor is that he tends to drop the BS. She asks a probing question, he answers without condescension or derailment or flippancy, by and large honestly, as if he's conversing with a grownup. Like it's okay for him to let her see that he can be a grownup. I wouldn't have believed it otherwise. XD
"Turn Left" I thought was ambiguous tbh - I mean, the thesis is that Donna is profoundly important, because she happens to save the Doctor. WELL BY THAT LOGIC ETC. It does suggest that if anyone went back on the timeline of eg. Space Titanic Maid Kylie that the universe would split like an amoeba. BTW did you notice "Astrid" is an anagram of "TARDIS" dun dun dun dun
Martha, Redux:
My first instinct was to WTF at Martha/Mickey - no rly, WTF? - Davies thinks like a fanficcer in a really fundamental way, I find, such that it comes out in his shortcuts rather than his thought-out bits. He would pair off characters just to shunt them off the OTP, you know it. I think it was on ILX someone repeated a rumour about Ten reincarnating as Rose and Ten 2.0's sparkly Time Lord baby and it was half-believed just because one wouldn't put it past him.
That being said, Martha/Mickey does make sense. She gets engaged to the other doctor dude, to be sure, but she rises meteorically in UNIT while he's in Doctors Without Borders or something (did I just make that up in my head?) and, I mean, normal real life issues-wise they would never see each other. Not ever. Also she must associate him with the events of the Year That Wasn't and he... doesn't remember, not even getting himself killed trying to save her. Ultimately Martha is a career girl, I think, and won't give up fighting aliens - with real guns at that, taking orders like a soldier, then thinking better of it after the whole nuclear key business and going freelance. How she reconciles that with her (former?) vocation as a doctor is her business. Good fic material, all of it; there's a tie-in novel for all I know. (They're v. cute! Hardcovers!)
Jack:
The thing about shoujo, which this is, is that whom one roots for says something about one. (There are the ppl who don't root so much as they play a prediction game; I know. XD) Personally, I find it easier to go with the flow of Donna being platonic friends with the Doctor than that of Martha or Jack crushing on him unsuccessfully. With Jack, though, the fact is that at the moment of his introduction the shoujodom nexus was not the Doctor but Rose. The landscape was Our Heroine Rose, Rose's osananajimi boyfriend, Rose's charismatic stranger with the mysterious angst, which makes Jack the gay flirty one with the sparklies. Don't front kthx you know what I'm talking about. There was also that scientist kid but they booted him immediately. It took Jack coming back in S3 before I understood that he was meant to be seriously into the Doctor. I got that he wouldn't have kicked him out of bed, but I mean, Jack. Possibly I would have been more on the ball if I'd watched past S01E06 of Torchwood, but.
My Theory(tm) is that River Song is Moffat's run at what he couldn't get done with Jack, not because it was m/m but because it was Davies' show, and the relationship arcs were spoken for. To posit an emotional connection comparable to what Davies was doing you'd have to write a kind of intense male friendship, a la Vash/Wolfwood, and that would take a different, more complementary character (the Tenth Doctor does as much Wolfwood as he does Vash, so the example is orthogonal). River may well be Jack with a sex change, if not actually the Face of Boe. For one thing, she's some sort of Han Solo-esque freelancer, not an archaeologist; for two, this idea of 51st-century humans being cheerfully omnisexual, which makes the Doctor excessively grumpy when it's turned on him even though you'd think he wouldn't bat an eyelid. I dunno if Moffat intends to confront him with that the way Davies confronted the Doctor with his emotional isolation, but it's a thought... Possibly relatedly, Moffat seems to have an ideal model of "I show up, we do cool stuff, I drop you off til the next time" rather than "we travel together for a good while and then you never see me again", which... fair enough. XD;
The Master:
The Doctor's osananajimi boyfriend lol amirite look at least Mickey is not 1x MASSIVE YANDERE. (So tempted to just leave it at that, but I forge on.) I remember Tin once saying that she didn't so much ship as reiterate her perception of canon. For coherency's sake I gotta read this as canon, for usual value of what does that even mean... in Russell T. Davies' case it apparently means that he writes bondage slash in the exact same way he writes schmoop het. Id est, I can't always sift thoughtful characterization from plot mechanics crack. XD; Like in End of Time Pt.1 there's a scene where the Doctor shows up, promptly gets zapped, and falls down, and I was like Was there meant to be a plan??? And realized later that no, this was coherent, because he would have to be flat on his face for the Master to talk to him like a normal person, so may as well bite the bullet and skip to the conversation.
Lucy really interested me, and her character gets gypped in S4, but whatev. She's a warped mirror image of Rose: posh not chavvy, submissive not feisty, morally vacuous not morally grounded. Blonde, though. XD; AND DADDY ISSUES. The kicker is that this isn't my-screwdriver-is-cooler-than-your-screwdriver oneupsmanship***, because AFAIK the Master doesn't know Rose exists (or indeed, vice versa). In fact, short of Donna who doesn't remember anyone sob, they're the only two who don't know about each other. Unless Jack or the Doctor let something slip, which I hope they won't have, intelligent beings that they are. XD;;; Would make an elegant "Turn Left" AU, though: what would have happened if Jack had been fast enough to grab onto the TARDIS as it dematerialized at the end of "The Parting of the Ways"?
Possibly if Rose had spoken to Chantho instead of Martha the scene would've passed Bechdel, a la not!Gwen. Poor Chantho! If the Master had remained a Good Person (nothing to do with the drums necessarily, as Prof. Yana was still afflicted with them) one supposes he'd be trailing cute girl assistants in his wake too. As it is a good evil female minion is apparently hard to find. XD;; This you have to hand to the Doctor: his Companions never shoot him, let alone twice in three episodes. He doesn't slap them around which always helps. Then there's the ever-LOLeriffic "racism is evil, see how it is bad to force black ppl to be servants", mark II. And Jack's "freak" status of course... Whatever Didn't Technically Happen(tm) with Jack chained up for a year, when he said "But you can't trust him!" he was about five steps further along the thought process than I'd managed. My brain stalled out at BUT WHAT I DON'T EVEN didn't he just spend a year imprisoning you, see how well that turned out, can't you trap him for eternity in the heart of a dying star or smth lol
Sororial unit really loevs John Simm now which is unusual as she is so not a villain fangirl. So she sends me videos involving... New Order, OH GOD WORST CROSSOVER EVER
* Per Moffat. If I thought he meant this about all women I'd throw a fit, w/r/t Donna in particular I agree. (She even pushes the Doctor on this front: thinks fatherhood would do wonders for him. XD) It's unusual for a TV show to allow a character like Donna to exist in a role other than Mom - or hey, Best Friend! - but that's a separate gripe. I reckon I'd watch Donna Noble: Super Temp And Paranormal Investigator. That Miss-Marple-esque tapping-the-untapped-resource aspect.
** One could argue the signals coming off him are more mixed, but to flip an earlier question, what does "best friends" even mean in the Doctor's context anyway.
*** Derek Jacobi gets to interact with Tennant for like thirty minutes before deciding that he, too, can be young and kawaii and maniacal! Kawaii, like a Dalek. Or one of those Prince of Tennis chibi crack episodes.
Mmn one more post or rather I'll keep adding to this one. XD
I kicked as hard at the end of S4 as the next fan, but of all the storytelling choices I'd hold against Davies... it's obvious that Donna had even less reason to go back than Rose. The thought experiment I'm punting around now is, What if Donna and Stutter Guy had found each other, or for that matter if she'd met and fallen for someone else during her travels with the Doctor. The "Mary Morstan" in other words. XD; Would she have stayed behind elsewhere? It would be a closer call than for Rose or Martha (their feelings for the Doctor aside). Donna never got enough positive feedback from the world to grasp her own strength, and meeting the Doctor didn't so much change that as gave her the impetus to charge outward even in the absence of feedback (which she isn't equipped to recognize when she gets it - oh-so-realistic that the Doctor doesn't understand this until they're very close friends: for people with that healthy an ego, lack of self-esteem is hard to grok). If the Racnoss hadn't been, Donna would have manhunted until she got married and had kids and been a Mom, and that would have been the moment her life found focus.* One of these paths of potential self-realization is "cooler" than the other, for what that's worth, but for the rest of us on Earth an encounter with the Doctor is a matter of metaphor. Donna scoffs at herself at the start of S4: when push comes to shove, she's still treading water until a man saves her from her life.
I like Donna most because she's less impressed, really. XD I identify much more with her knee-jerk responses. I mean, the time machine is impressive? The need to impress chicks with one's time machine is not as impressive, and it's important to differentiate. Similarly, exotic ice planets are awesome, but fuck going out on the surface unless one is properly dressed. That sort of thing. As far as I can tell, the reason she doesn't fall for the Doctor is because he is mundanely Not Her Type, which is also lulz. They make great besties,** though, not just in comedic timing. Donna is written with the upsides of the socio-emotionally perceptive (she zeroes in on the engagement ring, the unadmitted motive, the furtive shared glance in public), and what struck me about her convos vis the Doctor is that he tends to drop the BS. She asks a probing question, he answers without condescension or derailment or flippancy, by and large honestly, as if he's conversing with a grownup. Like it's okay for him to let her see that he can be a grownup. I wouldn't have believed it otherwise. XD
"Turn Left" I thought was ambiguous tbh - I mean, the thesis is that Donna is profoundly important, because she happens to save the Doctor. WELL BY THAT LOGIC ETC. It does suggest that if anyone went back on the timeline of eg. Space Titanic Maid Kylie that the universe would split like an amoeba. BTW did you notice "Astrid" is an anagram of "TARDIS" dun dun dun dun
Martha, Redux:
My first instinct was to WTF at Martha/Mickey - no rly, WTF? - Davies thinks like a fanficcer in a really fundamental way, I find, such that it comes out in his shortcuts rather than his thought-out bits. He would pair off characters just to shunt them off the OTP, you know it. I think it was on ILX someone repeated a rumour about Ten reincarnating as Rose and Ten 2.0's sparkly Time Lord baby and it was half-believed just because one wouldn't put it past him.
That being said, Martha/Mickey does make sense. She gets engaged to the other doctor dude, to be sure, but she rises meteorically in UNIT while he's in Doctors Without Borders or something (did I just make that up in my head?) and, I mean, normal real life issues-wise they would never see each other. Not ever. Also she must associate him with the events of the Year That Wasn't and he... doesn't remember, not even getting himself killed trying to save her. Ultimately Martha is a career girl, I think, and won't give up fighting aliens - with real guns at that, taking orders like a soldier, then thinking better of it after the whole nuclear key business and going freelance. How she reconciles that with her (former?) vocation as a doctor is her business. Good fic material, all of it; there's a tie-in novel for all I know. (They're v. cute! Hardcovers!)
Jack:
The thing about shoujo, which this is, is that whom one roots for says something about one. (There are the ppl who don't root so much as they play a prediction game; I know. XD) Personally, I find it easier to go with the flow of Donna being platonic friends with the Doctor than that of Martha or Jack crushing on him unsuccessfully. With Jack, though, the fact is that at the moment of his introduction the shoujodom nexus was not the Doctor but Rose. The landscape was Our Heroine Rose, Rose's osananajimi boyfriend, Rose's charismatic stranger with the mysterious angst, which makes Jack the gay flirty one with the sparklies. Don't front kthx you know what I'm talking about. There was also that scientist kid but they booted him immediately. It took Jack coming back in S3 before I understood that he was meant to be seriously into the Doctor. I got that he wouldn't have kicked him out of bed, but I mean, Jack. Possibly I would have been more on the ball if I'd watched past S01E06 of Torchwood, but.
My Theory(tm) is that River Song is Moffat's run at what he couldn't get done with Jack, not because it was m/m but because it was Davies' show, and the relationship arcs were spoken for. To posit an emotional connection comparable to what Davies was doing you'd have to write a kind of intense male friendship, a la Vash/Wolfwood, and that would take a different, more complementary character (the Tenth Doctor does as much Wolfwood as he does Vash, so the example is orthogonal). River may well be Jack with a sex change, if not actually the Face of Boe. For one thing, she's some sort of Han Solo-esque freelancer, not an archaeologist; for two, this idea of 51st-century humans being cheerfully omnisexual, which makes the Doctor excessively grumpy when it's turned on him even though you'd think he wouldn't bat an eyelid. I dunno if Moffat intends to confront him with that the way Davies confronted the Doctor with his emotional isolation, but it's a thought... Possibly relatedly, Moffat seems to have an ideal model of "I show up, we do cool stuff, I drop you off til the next time" rather than "we travel together for a good while and then you never see me again", which... fair enough. XD;
The Master:
The Doctor's osananajimi boyfriend lol amirite look at least Mickey is not 1x MASSIVE YANDERE. (So tempted to just leave it at that, but I forge on.) I remember Tin once saying that she didn't so much ship as reiterate her perception of canon. For coherency's sake I gotta read this as canon, for usual value of what does that even mean... in Russell T. Davies' case it apparently means that he writes bondage slash in the exact same way he writes schmoop het. Id est, I can't always sift thoughtful characterization from plot mechanics crack. XD; Like in End of Time Pt.1 there's a scene where the Doctor shows up, promptly gets zapped, and falls down, and I was like Was there meant to be a plan??? And realized later that no, this was coherent, because he would have to be flat on his face for the Master to talk to him like a normal person, so may as well bite the bullet and skip to the conversation.
Lucy really interested me, and her character gets gypped in S4, but whatev. She's a warped mirror image of Rose: posh not chavvy, submissive not feisty, morally vacuous not morally grounded. Blonde, though. XD; AND DADDY ISSUES. The kicker is that this isn't my-screwdriver-is-cooler-than-your-screwdriver oneupsmanship***, because AFAIK the Master doesn't know Rose exists (or indeed, vice versa). In fact, short of Donna who doesn't remember anyone sob, they're the only two who don't know about each other. Unless Jack or the Doctor let something slip, which I hope they won't have, intelligent beings that they are. XD;;; Would make an elegant "Turn Left" AU, though: what would have happened if Jack had been fast enough to grab onto the TARDIS as it dematerialized at the end of "The Parting of the Ways"?
Possibly if Rose had spoken to Chantho instead of Martha the scene would've passed Bechdel, a la not!Gwen. Poor Chantho! If the Master had remained a Good Person (nothing to do with the drums necessarily, as Prof. Yana was still afflicted with them) one supposes he'd be trailing cute girl assistants in his wake too. As it is a good evil female minion is apparently hard to find. XD;; This you have to hand to the Doctor: his Companions never shoot him, let alone twice in three episodes. He doesn't slap them around which always helps. Then there's the ever-LOLeriffic "racism is evil, see how it is bad to force black ppl to be servants", mark II. And Jack's "freak" status of course... Whatever Didn't Technically Happen(tm) with Jack chained up for a year, when he said "But you can't trust him!" he was about five steps further along the thought process than I'd managed. My brain stalled out at BUT WHAT I DON'T EVEN didn't he just spend a year imprisoning you, see how well that turned out, can't you trap him for eternity in the heart of a dying star or smth lol
Sororial unit really loevs John Simm now which is unusual as she is so not a villain fangirl. So she sends me videos involving... New Order, OH GOD WORST CROSSOVER EVER
* Per Moffat. If I thought he meant this about all women I'd throw a fit, w/r/t Donna in particular I agree. (She even pushes the Doctor on this front: thinks fatherhood would do wonders for him. XD) It's unusual for a TV show to allow a character like Donna to exist in a role other than Mom - or hey, Best Friend! - but that's a separate gripe. I reckon I'd watch Donna Noble: Super Temp And Paranormal Investigator. That Miss-Marple-esque tapping-the-untapped-resource aspect.
** One could argue the signals coming off him are more mixed, but to flip an earlier question, what does "best friends" even mean in the Doctor's context anyway.
*** Derek Jacobi gets to interact with Tennant for like thirty minutes before deciding that he, too, can be young and kawaii and maniacal! Kawaii, like a Dalek. Or one of those Prince of Tennis chibi crack episodes.
Mmn one more post or rather I'll keep adding to this one. XD
no subject
...Which is not necessarily what RTD was going for with Donna, especially as I've never figured out if asexual/asexual-with-humans Doctor is a valid reading; but...(and it works with Donna because the Doctor is so completely not her type that sexuality is a moot point.)
Per Moffat. If I thought he meant this about all women I'd throw a fit, w/r/t Donna in particular I agree.
...Evidence suggests he does think this about all women; he's said so in interviews, and he always writes them either finding love/having kids: River Song ends up in the library taking care of the eternal moppet; Sally Sparrow is settled with her new boyfriend. (Reinette dies childless, but that's history's fault.) ...Admittedly everyone ends up married off in RTD's finale as well, but then it reads to me more like shoujo-true-love then and less like baby-factory. But I may be biased :P
no subject
I intend to give Moffat a chance =_= (frankly I haven't read any interviews, with him or Davies). He did save Jenny from being fridged, is what I heard, and I wouldn't be surprised if River gets retconned in some way.
no subject
Ahaha oh man now I want every ep to be retitled in this style.
shoujo, which this is
Btw have you seen the dub where Rose is Sakamoto Maaya (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upLkHR5u7N4)
Yandere Master lololol. RE: shipping vs. reiterating perception of canon, idk I've always been suspicious of this claim, though, because what does that even mean? If "to ship" means not just "to perceive what's there" but also "to be enthused about what one perceives," which imo it does, to the extent that one is motivated to produce a response. I mean, I perceive Master/Doctor (duh, what is not to perceive) but, yanno, Not My Moe.
RE: Master and Rose never the twain shall meet, I've seen this done in fic for great lulz but didn't save links, alas.
Also ditto
no subject
Shipping vs etc. I do think are separate approaches/strategies, and for my part (if not Tin's) I adopt one or the other depending on the series? Often consciously. XD; And yes the latter means producing a response of some kind even if it's Not My Moe (eg. I have metaed about the Doctor-Martha relationship even though I clearly do not "ship" them), because the relational aspect of the series holds one's interest regardless. In DW's case I have enough to do just picking apart what RTD means canon to be, not to mention I simply refuse to let the dude jerk my chain. XD; Whereas w/ Harry Potter I "ship" even though my ships may actually be directly contradictory, and RowlJo's authorial intent can take a hike because my way is better.
Then again I often find character relationships fascinating even when they're terrible for each other, and from a Watsonian standpoint I would never want them to get together for real in the show and/or they would obviously fall apart after a week. Cf.
I have got to go wading for fic!
no subject
Ah, I felt like I nearly grokked the concept for a second when I thought about Nana. XD; ...I dunno, though, am still dubious when someone claims "not to ship" but nevertheless proceeds in practice to write a dozen fics about characters XY and only three about the rest of the alphabet. For instance. (This is also not in reference to TIn. XD;) I mean, I suppose it's possible to focus one's attention like that without being specially invested, but.
Obv since I only brake for the ones that strike me as capable of harmonious domestic bliss I don't face that XD;--but otoh plausibility of "getting together in canon" depends on genre, I mean, slashers may rant as they please but neither Hollywood action blockbusters nor Jump manga nor anything aimed in large part at a straight-male audience is quite at the point of casting heroes who happen to be gay and in relationships, yet. Idk, I've never understood the need to scrabble like slavering dogs over every subtextual bone that gets thrown. Just because Jude Law and RDJ make eyes at each other doesn't mean we all have to piss ourselves and write a thousand fics. If the wink/nudge is demeaning then ignore it, for heaven's sake, give it the finger and move to the other side of the bar, don't let it buy you a drink. But maybe I can only take this stance
because MY moe triggers are more eccentric, hahthanks to exposure to the BL industry, in which you can get all the outright text you want and it's still so skeevy.Amount of extant Who fic is redonkulous. Teaspoon (http://www.whofic.com/) at least lets you search by character, genre, rating, etc. I'm on
no subject
Well, the thing about
I thought about it for all of five minutes after the Holmes movie but like, could not be bothered. XD;; I just don't want to read Holmesian shippyfic, never have. Some sort of ridiculous multi-chapter gen Doctor Who historical crossover with Conan Doyle as Watson's long-suffering literary agent who believes in fairies that turn out to be malevolent aliens, that I would read.
Sorrrrrry, hit wrong button orz;
even though it would be CRRRRAZYBeing convinced by the subtext: again I think knowing thy genre and/or author is sort of paramount? I mean, if I'm convinced by the subtext in CLAMP (or RTD's big gay shoujo NuWho for that matter)...sometimes there really is there there and it's not just fangirl bait, but if you're expecting there-ness in Jump manga you're expecting in the wrong place. Idk I feel like a good part of bookshop's complaint is plain old "shipper wanting to have guessed right" sentiment, only because there's a socio-political component re: representations of Teh Gay in media it gets more traction.
RE: Holmesian shippyfic, I don't much care to read or write either but I do wish the goshdarned kids would put down their J.Law long enough to go and read the goshdarned book(s). For literacy's sake. /English teacher XD;
Re: Sorrrrrry, hit wrong button orz;
TBH Jude Law looks more like my mental image of Watson (which is of course the One True Watson just like my mental movie of The Return of the King is the One True RotK Movie) than most any other screen representation of him. XD; I've always figured he was good-looking, precisely because he never brings up his own appearance - that's the sort of guy he is.