Has anyone made a gifset comparing Twelfth Doctor reading an apology off of cue cards to the thousands of times Ten said “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry”?
Because I feel like that’s just the perfect embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the show these days
A new incarnation of the Doctor having a different personality from previous incarnations? You’re right, in the fifty year history of the show that never happens…
may i also add something to this?
the twelfth doctor is extremely autistic coded. he can’t read faces or ages, he has special interests and hyperfocusses on particular issues or problems he finds interesting. i’m not autistic myself but my partner and several friends are, and we all agree that we see twelve as autistic coded, even if he’s not canonically acknowledged as such.
but one thing in particular about twelve is that he has low empathy. he doesn’t understand why clara is upset in kill the moon, he doesn’t understand why the crew in under the lake and before the floor are scared of the ghosts and grieving their friend. to him, the ghosts are an adventure and something new that he doesn’t understand. he needs help understanding appropriate ways to interact with and understand humans and their social cues, especially when they’re very upset.
and here’s the thing: this does not make him a bad person. clara simply helps him relate to humanity better by reminding him how to interact with upset and emotional people – as he must often do in his role as a protector and saviour. one of the ways is with the cue cards. it’s of note that he almost certainly wrote these cards with her help – she didn’t write them for him. the evidence i have for this is the card we briefly see that says “it was my fault, i should have known you didn’t live in aberdeen.” this is a reference to sarah jane, who he abandoned in aberdeen.
why am i bringing this up? because it’s evidence that the doctor does care. twelve doesn’t understand how to interact with people and can’t empathise well with them, but he understands morality very, very well and with clara’s help he’s clearly been trying to find ways to get through to people he’s just met that he really does care but can’t show it the way they want.
and to use another example of twelve still understanding morality even if he can’t empathise well from under the lake/before the flood: he specifically tells the fisher king that what he has done to the crewmembers is a horrific crime that violated their deaths, the one thing that each and every creature in the universe should be guaranteed. he is fully aware of what has been done and he condemns it.
twelve has low empathy but that does not make him a bad person. it’s ok for different regenerations to have different levels of empathy and different personalities – at the end of the day they are still the same person with a moral code that they may stray from but never abandon.
completely agreed about Twelve being autistic coded. from the very first moment. and Capaldi is genius at portraying ND characters, so i was immediately attached to Twelve for these reasons…
now, just a note about autistics and empathy: i can’t remember the terminology (because, guess what, “names are not my area”!) but there’s the kind of empathy where you can figure out what other people are feeling based on majority socially accepted clues, and there’s the kind where you have a lot of feelings because of other people’s feelings. they are completely different skills/ instincts/ whatever.
many autistics (unless they’ve specifically trained themselves or been trained to analyse this) lack the
reading-others’-feelings
kind of empathy. i would be one of these who needs to be told what people are feeling. i can vaguely notice negative or positive faces, maybe. it will likely take me days to work out the reason, if nobody tells me. we also may not express our own feelings in socially acceptable ways that non-autistics can interpret.
but you know who does have the mind-reading type of empathy? those (usually non-autistic) people who are good at figuring out others’ feelings in order to use it against them in abusive ways…
(i don’t want to use those other words, you know, those ones ending in “-path”, because i’ve heard they’re potentially neurologically inaccurate as well as sanist/ableist)many autistics have extremely a lot of the feeling-others’-feelings kind of empathy. where once you figure out (or someone tells you) what’s going on, you feel it almost too much. some autistics are even empaths, and for them the pressure or weight of others’ personalities and feelings can almost be too heavy to bear (a kind of sensory overload, but psychological or emotional). i’m not this kind, but i know some people who are.
i’d like to think that the Doctor has the feeling kind of empathy in spades. again, things may not be expressed in the most socially acceptable way (and not always because of uneven writing at an outside-universe level), but the weight of losing people, worry about the “duty of care” in general, not just for Clara… concern about being a good person… i’d like to think this is related.
PS: the sincerity (or lack thereof) of Ten’s apologies is something i think about a lot… and have a lot of feelings about. maybe for a later post…