I feel like they had a missed opportunity with really developing Amy Pond’s character from Doctor Who. They could have made her so much more badass (like the way they made Rose) but instead put her in short skirts and made her have this silly crush on the Doctor the whole time.
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But Amy Pond isn’t a badass, nor should she be.
Not a badass in the traditional way, anyway – she has tremendous strength of character, a great deal of intelligence, and it can’t be denied that she likes to hit things. But this is just one more example of the bizarre faux-feminist Strong Female Character argument that leaks into so much of online discourse- Rose isn’t some generic ‘badass’ either, nor Martha, nor River, because ‘badass’ isn’t a description of someone’s character. If we’re judging women to be missed opportunities or not based soley on the amount of Cool Stuff they do, we’ve set the bar incredibly low.
No-one put Amy in short skirts apart from Karen Gillan, and she talks about that here. Which actually brings me neatly round to my next point: Amy shouldn’t have to be more more like Rose, either. Female characters, just like female people, are not one-size-fits-all. I can’t help but notice that on that fakegeeksgirlslikeus website, they’ve grouped three very different women – Martha, Amy, Tauriel from The Hobbit – under the banner of, basically, ‘could have been more interesting if they hadn’t crushed on the Doctor/been part of a love triangle.’ Well, why? Nothing about their love lives cancels out what they actually achieve, which is plenty. Going back to Amy-
-like, I relate to Amy. I did as far back as The Beast Below. She’s immature in her attitude to sex and relationships (hence the ‘silly crush’). She’s abrasive and insulting even to her loved ones, she’s afraid of abandonment, she has complete mental breakdowns in bad situations (Like me!), she likes history and storytelling and art. I honestly don’t think these are things that are easy to miss, either: I don’t buy the ‘not developed enough as a person’ argument.
I found some of the little details of her character – her strength in the face of lack of support, her doubting her own mind sometimes (again, like me!) to be affirming. I know I’m not the only one who thinks that, either. But, yeah-
-I suppose she could have been badass in the way none of the Doctor Who companions actually are. When her husband is dying in her arms, she could have yelled ‘DON’T YOU DIE ON ME!’ and brought him back with a punch to the chest. When being sucked into the earth, she could have made a sarcastic quip about it. When told to hand over her baby daughter, she could have blown Kovarian and her soldiers up with a big gun and walked in slo-mo away from the explosion-
–or she could have cried, panicked, pleaded, and acquiesced. Which is what she actually did. Rose (to give just one example) probably wouldn’t have done. But that’s alright too, because female characters should represent the entire spectrum of women. And we’re not all strong, and we’re not all badasses, and we shouldn’t have to be to gain respect.