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sorry not sorry
I’ve seen this argument a lot and I’ve never quite understood it. Madame Kovarian isn’t sexy, she’s a cruel vicious fanatic who never once does, says or wears anything sexy. Miss Delphox is a servile clone. Miss Kizlet is a little girl in the body of an adult being controlled by the Great Intelligence, and she likewise (thankfully) never does anything sexy. And (apart from River, sort of) none of them are strong women at all? Just cruel, unpleasant, one-episode villains. I don’t even know why River’s there – she fits into the pattern of ‘woman wearing black’, but that’s because she was dressed like Kovarian (the eyepatch and all) for Plot Reasons.
I don’t get what that image is saying – I honestly, geniunely don’t. Of Steven Moffat’s female villains, a lot of them wear black? Is that the argument? All of them are sexy (except they’re really not, for the previous reasons) – is that the argument? They’re all -apart from River, and presumably whoever the ‘real’ little-girl Miss Kizlet is- cruel and sadistic? Well, that one’s true.
There’s not enough variety in the female villains, I think that’s probably it? Well, this image leaves some of them – Missy, Gillyflower, Karabroxos – out. And River’s not a villain! She’s a bit snarky and trigger-happy and (sigh) keeps having the word ‘psychopath’ used in relation to her for some ungodly reason – but once she’s broken her conditioning she’s a perfectly good person, certainly nothing like Kovarian.
You absolutely could make the argument that there’s perhaps not a lot of variety in the costumes– for a start I do think Delphox’s/Karabraxos’s borrowed a lot from Kovarian’s, probably literally (I’ve been looking at screencaps and it looks like Karabroxos’s jacket is a modified version of hers) – but you’d need to take that up with Barbara Kidd and Howard Burden. And even then, Tasha’s space princess look is nothing like Kovarian’s futuristic business suit or Kizlet’s very basic modern-day look.
I mean I think a fairer version of the image would look like this-
But even that’s barely scratching the surface, especially when it comes to River.