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For the commentary meme, skalja asked for a scene from Things They Talked About In The Playground. Which is easily the most disturbing, triggering thing I’ve ever written, so it’s under the cut.

Warnings: discussion of rape and victim blaming.

From the personal diary of H.M. KOVARIAN, 50/15/5145

At some point I went through all the Doctor Who wiki to try and work out when exactly A Good Man Goes To War was set and if I had any leeway with the timelines and whatnot. I think I got the year either right or not overly wrong.

The ceremony was a stupid idea.

Manton gave a little speech, directed at his soldiers, about how it is the highest honour for a woman to be a mother. About how marriage isn’t marriage without kids (that directed, I know, at me- he knows what I did),

Hey, Moffat, I stole your line! A year or so back, in your intro to the Good Man Goes To War bit of the Guide To The 2011 Series, you talked about how marriage can’t be considered real marriage unless you’ve had a kid. And really pissed me off. So…er…congrats. More on you later.

about how we must show Amy the utmost respect now. And her husband, too, if he arrives and proves to be an ally. (There has been talk about this possibility- it seems incredibly unlikely even to me, but we do not know what sort of man Rory Williams is.)

I really like the Legend Of The Last Centurion thingy they played with a bit in Series Six. I like the idea of Rory pretending to be an ancient, vengeful creature when he’s really…not.

Anyway. He dreams of a new Mary and Joseph with a little female Jesus- a dream soon to be dashed, I fear. More so than they have been already, for things did not go as planned. Manton gave his speech, and then he gestured to Amy Pond, up above them all in her prison with her baby. She was dressed in white, like a ghost, and she looked so small with the crowd beneath her.

If this fic had a subtitle, it would be, simply, ‘Who undressed Amy’? Because when she was kidnapped, there’s no way she was wearing that white gown thing she gave birth in. Someone must have undressed her while she was unconcious. (Fun fact: That maaaaay be why I reacted so strongly to this.) Even before we knew that other stuff happened at Demon’s Run – something that left Amy barren – we knew they stripped her.

They raised their hands to her. Some of them clapped. Amy looked down on them. I have read Manton’s primitive fairytales- the ones with which he controls his lackeys- and Amy Pond looked in that moment much more like a warrior of god than any of the soldiers down below.

With a thousand men and women staring up at her, she raised her hand to her chest. She undid the buttons on her gown, one by one, with her sleeping baby in her other hand- and slowly but surely she disrobed entirely, stood naked before us.

We all of us saw it, the scars and the stitches crisscrossing on her skin. We were all of us forced, for less than half a minute, to see. Her body altered by childbirth, legs unshaven, breasts limp- eyes cold and calculating. She stared at me.

I got chills when I wrote that. Amy really does have no agency, no hope whatsoever here, and yet she still finds a way to fight back against her captors, even if it’s just by showing them the true price they’re all paying. It’s just…it just seemed so in-character for her. Amy Pond knows a lot of things, but mostly I think she knows how people’s minds work. She knew Kovarian would see her and be ashamed. It was the only triumph she was gonna get, and she took it without a second thought.

I looked back, of course, at the thick red lines. I could not be ashamed of my own handiwork, of the collateral damage, of the egg I broke. But eventually, like almost all the others did, I turned away from Amy Pond. I have seen places on and in her that even her real own mother had not…

Madame Kovarian (who earlier in life, it is noted, gave up a daughter with red hair) slips up a little there.

it seemed obscene for her to be showing to men what only women had seen-

Madame Kovarian terrifies me in this because she geniunely believes she has a right to Amy’s body. Why? Because a) she needs it for a higher purpose and b) …the even more terrifying reason…she thought Amy had, through having sex, through being promiscuious, relinquished her own right to it. This is what Madame K says later to her: “Think of what you were before we found you. A vacant, pretty face who dressed like a slut and sold her mouth to men! You were a nothing then, and you are a nothing now. A human incubator.” Madame K is utterly and totally a misogynist and the worst kind of victim-blamer: Amy Pond is not the correct sort of woman, so she deserves everything she gets. It’s horrible…

…and I’d be lying if I said some tiny part of it wasn’t influenced by fandom. I love Amy. Adore her, and relate to her a lot. It stings when people call her things like “just a pretty face” “not a character” “ a wank fantasy” and so on. Some people say things like “Moffat obviously hates women, because he wrote Amy as a slut.” I shouldn’t even have to talk about what’s wrong with that, and yet…I did talk about it, because I think that might even be what the fanfic is about in some sense. Or at least what sparked it.

Who owns the body of a woman who’s not real?

I know the Amy I’m writing about in this fanfiction isn’t, can’t be, the exact same Amy Steven Moffat wrote into a glass tube. (Aside from anything else, I thought about the implications of her kidnapping and pregnancy, and he didn’t.) I mean, this Amy swears; original Amy is on a children’s show and can’t. The characers who surround this Amy can say the word ‘rape.’ And that’s just for starters.

But…characters are always real people to the people who love them. So I was writing Amy as if she was a real person: not created by Steven Moffat, not created by anyone, just a person who walked into my life with all those particular, horrible experiences. If someone had said those things to the real-life Amy, that woman who doesn’t exist, they would have been…a profoundly terrible person. Amy’s not real, so it’s all a moot point. But at the moment I wrote Kovarian’s dialogue, I wasn’t thinking any of that. I was thinking, “How dare you judge this person by what happened to her, instead of what she is.” Amy says almost that exact thing, at the end of the story.

Dr White reached for a control pad and turned the lights off in her cell. I do not know if he punished her- I don’t think he did, and certainly not in that way, I watched the security cameras even after dark. But she did not get her DVDs, I know that much.

The punishment MK was thinking of is exactly what you’re thinking, too. (I dunno if I went too far with that line. Maybe I did. I suppose this is at its core a story about misogyny, but I don’t know.)

Things They Talked About In The Playground is absolutely the most – important? – fanfic I’ve ever written: it influenced my original work massively. I’ve loved Doctor Who since I was sixteen, I’m twenty-six now, it’s been with me for a massive part of my life.

But mostly through my adulthood.

I used to work in a school playground; kids absolutely talked about Doctor Who. I hope they will for many years to come, but I am certain that some of them, especially the girls, will watch the Amy pregnancy arc later on and wonder – Who undressed her? Who spread her legs? My story gets a bit meta at the end. MK tells Amy children will talk of her in the playground, but there’s a real playground, real children, in real life. Amy herself sums up what was pretty much the reason I wrote this story:

“They still might talk about this in the playground,” she said. “When and if the story ever gets told. And they’ll wonder, eventually, they’ll wonder. They’ll wonder who stripped me. They’ll wonder who cut into me. They’ll wonder what went where, when that was done. They’ll wonder. And what will their parents tell them, when they ask?”

I want to teach my future kids to be critical of the media they consume. I’ll most likely be that parent. I may not – beyond “judge people by what they do, not by what was done to them” – know what to tell them.

But I’ll be so glad that I taught them to ask.