Anonymous said: my problem is that the eleventh doctor only chose to ask amy and actual!clara to travel with him because of their mysteries. amy’s house was ‘too big with a crack in her wall’ and clara had echoes, they were the reasons he asked them aboard, he says so to amy in TPO and we know why he asked clara, that’s right there in the episodes. and i feel like the eleventh doctor wouldn’t ask ME, an ordinary girl to travel with him, it makes me feel like shit, that he wouldn’t be interested in me :(
I know this will appear profoundly odd to you, but Amy is actually the one companion who makes me feel like it could be me there. The Doctor took her with him because he realised, or had a suspicion, about what happened to her and her family – but there’s no need to see this in a literal manner of “you have to have a crack in your wall to make the Doctor travel with you”. A lot of Amy’s character and story works in metaphors and for me that’s one of those things.
Because, really, he saw someone who was strangely out of place. A big house, a small girl. Damaged even, a life being devoured, pieces being taken she didn’t know she was missing. Grieving losses she couldn’t remember. She can be brave, she can fall on her feet, but she’s still misunderstood, still afraid of being abandoned, still scared too trust. She’s the most intrinsically flawed of all the companions, because she can’t not be.
He didn’t “take the best”. He took the most lost.
And maybe that’s a little messed up, but that is way closer to me than all other companions combined.
I’m really sorry if it makes you feel sad that you can’t find yourself in this, but you really need to understand that what you should feel like is incredibly grateful that another companion can do that for you. And grant me Amy Pond.
(And grant others Clara Oswald, who actually is an ordinary girl and whose echo the Doctor offered to take travelling long before he realised her connection to the girl in the Dalek Asylum.)
I like Nine just fine, but he would never, ever have taken me as a companion. I’m not good in bad situations, I would’ve been a Julia, or a Penny, or at worst an Adam. I am not ‘the best’, and in truth I always rather deeply resented that only being ‘the best’ would win you travel and adventure and respect. (Because even then this wasn’t applied across the board: Martha does everything Rose did and then some, and for six episodes she’s still firmly told by the Doctor ‘nope, you’re just a passenger.’)
I was SO GLAD when that changed, I really was.