Amy Ponds of the 99% (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
allchildren) wrote2012-03-27 01:22 am
allchildren) wrote2012-03-27 01:22 am
Entry tags:
I HAVE OPINIONS ABOUT FICTION
FILM! AT! ELEVEN!!!!
Pretty much everybody whose Doctor Who opinions I respect and agree with have come out in a strong voice to condemn... people who wanted the new companion to be a dude. Everything about the choice of new companion is uninspired and problematic and boring, they agree, but ~at least~ it's not a man! Y WOULD U EVEN ZOMG
I take issue with this.
Now (as I assume anyone reading this probably already knows), I am generally the last person to agitate for more men in fiction. I straight up will not watch or read most popular/nerd-popular stuff if it strikes me as a brodeo, and when I happen to consume something that is dudecentric I will still usually find a way to make it about chicks. Not that I don't have my share of favorite male characters and the occasional dudeslash ship and male-dominated media franchise or interest (baseball and too many teenage feelings about all the fucking boys in the fucking bands), but as a rule my investment in fiction (and uh... life) is incredibly femcentric.
But the reason for this is because I love women. I want women to rule the fucking universe and be happy and successful and appreciated and fulfilled. Just as I avoid stories about lots of dudes, I avoid stories that contain lots of women being exploited, attacked, derided, hated on, damaged, held down, and most of all narratively fucked over. (That awkward moment when everybody keeps mentioning The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo to me and I just have to blink politely and try to change the subject.) Or, at least, I try. Sometimes I'll get in on the ground floor with a story about a girl and fall in love with her and then I have to ride it out. That's a lot of pain and rage for me. And there's no greater (worse) example of this than Doctor Who.
feelings collage
IT'S DOCTOR WHO
angry pukefest '11
(also basically just all my who tags for all websites)
I mean, the best understanding I have of the Doctor is to conceive of him as a serial killer of women. I made up this macabre story once about his victims: Rose he suffocated, Martha's heart was cut right from her chest, and Donna was left alive after a lobotomy. Amy, pushed to her limit, hanged herself before he could do the honors (then ghost!Amy and bloody-handed Doctor could be friends). And it feels like this is what really happened, on a narrative level. People call it a kid's show and it's the fucking Rake's Song.
So there's that. But even when I put aside my own Raxacoricofallapatorious-sized issues with what happens to every goddamn woman on the show (and let's be real here the four main companions are just the tip of the iceberg), I just cannot understand how people don't get why someone would pick up an inescapably patriarchal overtone in "900 year old genius god star MAN picks out his latest necessarily-much-younger woman and gives her a ride in his sexy space ship and opens her eyes [and odds are she'll be attracted to him but let's not get into that] and becomes the most important amazing person imaginable in her life and then goes on to the next one." Like, maybe it's just my personal squick re: relationships with power differentials resting on the male side. But it's a hard earned squick based on, er, my experience of reality and sexism. Individually, in a perfect everything-is-s1-and-nothing-hurts world the Doctor and Companion might have somewhat even footing in their respective relationships because she is smart and resourceful and brings perspectives the Doctor doesn't have, but a pattern of five of these relationships in a row seems really fucking obviously intent on perpetuating and in fact cementing a patriarchal this-year's-girl model.
Choose your own analogy about Henry VIII's wives.
YES, Moffat is the worst and his ability to craft male characters is in permanent doubt after the self-insert mess that is Rory Williams (which is like Xander as Joss Whedon's but scarily WITHOUT THE HUMILITY OR SELF-LOATHING) (and consider the fact that Xander Harris is comes just behind Derek Shepherd as Least Favorite Male Character of All Time), and YES, bromance in the TARDIS is the likely boring result of a male companion, and YES, the real solutions are to a) fire Moffat and retroactively destroy RTD and p much Ten's whole run and b) get a GODDAMN FEMALE REGENERATION and c) we wouldn't even be talking about this if Nasreen were the next companion as she should be and d) fuck this binary thinking anyway, like there aren't nineteen million ways to diversify the companion that Moffat will not do because he is the worst and has no imagination and also in two seasons Jenna will be just as narratively fucked over as Amy or River or Rita.
No really, let's break that last down a little more: e) STRAIGHT WHITE males are overrepresented in fiction; but women like Jenna are represented all over the place and still have a kyriarchical upper hand over men of color/trans men/disabled men and to act like it's a crime against feminist criticism to think that maybe a male character could also be progressive seems, intersectionally speaking, highly suspect to me.
I feel like I've entered some opposite dimension where I accidentally side with people who are all "writing dudeslash is the most feminist" and it's shit because lol no and also I'm frankly just happy to have an out from my Doctor Who cathexis. I did not intend to write all this. It's just... THE PRINCIPLE OF THE THINGGGGGGGGGGGGG.
whatttt is this post, I also have opinions about Korra worldbuilding + politics and lots of Hunger Games grump (STOP TALKING ABOUT BATTLE ROYALE is the logline there, plus my recurrent dissatisfaction that I never wrote a real review of all my issues but ranted them out loud at poor Carrie because she was... in my bedroom at the time) but I accidentally a whole post and now I need to sleep. Damn the wheel of the world. Goodbye 4ever.
Pretty much everybody whose Doctor Who opinions I respect and agree with have come out in a strong voice to condemn... people who wanted the new companion to be a dude. Everything about the choice of new companion is uninspired and problematic and boring, they agree, but ~at least~ it's not a man! Y WOULD U EVEN ZOMG
I take issue with this.
Now (as I assume anyone reading this probably already knows), I am generally the last person to agitate for more men in fiction. I straight up will not watch or read most popular/nerd-popular stuff if it strikes me as a brodeo, and when I happen to consume something that is dudecentric I will still usually find a way to make it about chicks. Not that I don't have my share of favorite male characters and the occasional dudeslash ship and male-dominated media franchise or interest (baseball and too many teenage feelings about all the fucking boys in the fucking bands), but as a rule my investment in fiction (and uh... life) is incredibly femcentric.
But the reason for this is because I love women. I want women to rule the fucking universe and be happy and successful and appreciated and fulfilled. Just as I avoid stories about lots of dudes, I avoid stories that contain lots of women being exploited, attacked, derided, hated on, damaged, held down, and most of all narratively fucked over. (That awkward moment when everybody keeps mentioning The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo to me and I just have to blink politely and try to change the subject.) Or, at least, I try. Sometimes I'll get in on the ground floor with a story about a girl and fall in love with her and then I have to ride it out. That's a lot of pain and rage for me. And there's no greater (worse) example of this than Doctor Who.
feelings collage
IT'S DOCTOR WHO
angry pukefest '11
(also basically just all my who tags for all websites)
I mean, the best understanding I have of the Doctor is to conceive of him as a serial killer of women. I made up this macabre story once about his victims: Rose he suffocated, Martha's heart was cut right from her chest, and Donna was left alive after a lobotomy. Amy, pushed to her limit, hanged herself before he could do the honors (then ghost!Amy and bloody-handed Doctor could be friends). And it feels like this is what really happened, on a narrative level. People call it a kid's show and it's the fucking Rake's Song.
So there's that. But even when I put aside my own Raxacoricofallapatorious-sized issues with what happens to every goddamn woman on the show (and let's be real here the four main companions are just the tip of the iceberg), I just cannot understand how people don't get why someone would pick up an inescapably patriarchal overtone in "900 year old genius god star MAN picks out his latest necessarily-much-younger woman and gives her a ride in his sexy space ship and opens her eyes [and odds are she'll be attracted to him but let's not get into that] and becomes the most important amazing person imaginable in her life and then goes on to the next one." Like, maybe it's just my personal squick re: relationships with power differentials resting on the male side. But it's a hard earned squick based on, er, my experience of reality and sexism. Individually, in a perfect everything-is-s1-and-nothing-hurts world the Doctor and Companion might have somewhat even footing in their respective relationships because she is smart and resourceful and brings perspectives the Doctor doesn't have, but a pattern of five of these relationships in a row seems really fucking obviously intent on perpetuating and in fact cementing a patriarchal this-year's-girl model.
Choose your own analogy about Henry VIII's wives.
YES, Moffat is the worst and his ability to craft male characters is in permanent doubt after the self-insert mess that is Rory Williams (which is like Xander as Joss Whedon's but scarily WITHOUT THE HUMILITY OR SELF-LOATHING) (and consider the fact that Xander Harris is comes just behind Derek Shepherd as Least Favorite Male Character of All Time), and YES, bromance in the TARDIS is the likely boring result of a male companion, and YES, the real solutions are to a) fire Moffat and retroactively destroy RTD and p much Ten's whole run and b) get a GODDAMN FEMALE REGENERATION and c) we wouldn't even be talking about this if Nasreen were the next companion as she should be and d) fuck this binary thinking anyway, like there aren't nineteen million ways to diversify the companion that Moffat will not do because he is the worst and has no imagination and also in two seasons Jenna will be just as narratively fucked over as Amy or River or Rita.
No really, let's break that last down a little more: e) STRAIGHT WHITE males are overrepresented in fiction; but women like Jenna are represented all over the place and still have a kyriarchical upper hand over men of color/trans men/disabled men and to act like it's a crime against feminist criticism to think that maybe a male character could also be progressive seems, intersectionally speaking, highly suspect to me.
I feel like I've entered some opposite dimension where I accidentally side with people who are all "writing dudeslash is the most feminist" and it's shit because lol no and also I'm frankly just happy to have an out from my Doctor Who cathexis. I did not intend to write all this. It's just... THE PRINCIPLE OF THE THINGGGGGGGGGGGGG.
whatttt is this post, I also have opinions about Korra worldbuilding + politics and lots of Hunger Games grump (STOP TALKING ABOUT BATTLE ROYALE is the logline there, plus my recurrent dissatisfaction that I never wrote a real review of all my issues but ranted them out loud at poor Carrie because she was... in my bedroom at the time) but I accidentally a whole post and now I need to sleep. Damn the wheel of the world. Goodbye 4ever.
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OH WAIT LOL NO THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
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