Moffat’s crappy parallels (aka rip offs)

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scriptscribbles:

elizahamiltonwrites:

Moffat has been trying to make Clara into his Rose. That’s something a lot of people agree on(not only in tumblr, I have actually found actual newspaper articles about this).

I was talking to a friend about the lack of POC’s in the show and we got into the subject of Danny Pink. And that’s when another thing clicked:

Danny is Clara’s Mickey.

A handsomer/more accomplished (in society’s eyes)/whiter version of Mickey.

And sure Mickey’s writing (and Noel’s acting, something he changed a little bit during the second season) was at points problematic, but he was more developed as a secondary character than Rory Williams. We saw going from an overgrown teenager whose main concern was football (but still smart and at that point more accomplished in life than Rose) and by the end of season four he had become a hero on his own right. 

As stated by Noel

Mickey went from being “a clown” into “someone with a bit more edge and a bit more stubble.”

Take Rose out of his story and he could have accomplished some of those things over time. He was curious (as shown by the fact he was into conspiracy theories) and as I stated before: Mickey Smith was fucking smart. He wasn’t mature when we met him, but that could have changed (without the Doctor’s involvement)

But if you take Clara out of Danny’s story you leave him with nothing. He had no purpose on the narrative.

 Parallels between Mickey and Danny

  • Dead parents
  • Soldiers
  • Black
  • In love with the Doctor’s companion
  • Not understanding at first of what’s happening
  • Jealousy
  • Being treated like crap by the Doctor 

The 9th Doctor always called Mickey Rickey

the 12th always says Danny as a PE teacher, not a maths teacher.

And the thing that gets me pissed is that he could have been a very interesting character due to his war story.  Hadn’t the writers treated him so terribly. 

Moffat stans are always pissy about the fact Rose (and by extension RTD) treated Mickey like crap. I think Clara and Moffat treated him even worse. 

She lied to him. she joked about something he clearly had problems with (the army). Also the fact she creepily imprinted on him a a child (a recurring theme in moffat’s storyline) and made him into the man she met.

Okay. That was a lot of rambling. I hope it made sense. And if a moffat stan finds this and tries to take it apart and complains about my writing (because it has happened before) english is not my first language. So don’t be a dick.

There’s many things I could take this apart for. Reducing Clara, Rose, Mickey, and Danny, for one thing. They have distinct arcs and attributes, and you’re totally ignoring them. Danny, who you claim was ignored, had one of the most prominent, beautiful character arcs in series 8, dealing respectfully with war and guilt. He and Danny are in no way a mere list of circumstantial traits. Mickey was about an ordinary guy becoming a hero. Danny was about a hurt man making up for his mistake.

And if you seriously think Rose would

  • betray the Doctor and threaten to get rid of all his TARDIS keys
  • call the Doctor her “hobby”
  • tell the Doctor to work to her schedule and drop her off at home between trips
  • constantly tell herself not to fall in love with the Doctor
  • actually follow the Doctor’s “don’t wander off” rule the first time she’s told it
  • tell off an alien species while forgetting about the viking girl who just lost half her village and thus hurting her and inadvertently causing a war
  • consider her travelling with the Doctor an addiction

I’m afraid you don’t have a very good grasp of Rose’s character.

Was Clara not very good with Danny? Yeah. She even admits it in Death in Heaven. Clara is a very flawed character. She can be selfish, callous, and flat-out wrong at times, but is not condemned as a person for it. For many of her fans, that’s one of her most important traits. And you know what? Rose treated Mickey poorly, too. He called her out on it in Boom Town. Both criticisms of Rose and Clara there are spot-on, but that’s okay, characters shouldn’t be perfect people.

So I’ll leave your English alone (I didn’t notice any errors, if that helps), but your critical perspectives? No. Those are horrible.

I hate that Twelve treated Danny just as crappily as Nine treated Mickey. Hate it, hate it, hate it. It might be my single biggest problem with Series 8, actually, much as I love it otherwise. HOW DID THEY MANAGE TO BE SO CLUELESS ABOUT THAT? Sigh.

But as a massive Mickey fan (he’s not only one of my favourite characters in Doctor Who but one of my favourite characters ever) and a pretty big Danny fan as well, I too have some nitpicks with this –

Mickey and Danny are nothing alike. Honestly, beyond skin colour and the fact that at some point in their lives both were soldiers (a professional one in Danny’s case, a ‘freelancer’ in Mickey’s) that’s…it. Mickey’s parents aren’t  dead; we hear in Rise of the Cybermen what happened to them. Danny isn’t jealous of the Doctor, he’s just concerned for Clara’s safety while she’s with him and unimpressed with his arrogant personality. ‘Not understanding at first what’s happening’ applies to virtually all the companions. Honestly, you could get a better set of parallels out of Mickey and Rory (hey, both got turned into an Auton at some point.) But no-one ever did that – from the minute Danny was announced it was “Hey look, it’s the new Mickey!” The poor bloke never stood a chance.

As for the bit about Danny having no purpose on the narrative without Clara – well, no, he didn’t have much impact on the narrative, but that was because he had his own narrative – man faces up to his greatest mistake; man dies putting it right. (I’ve noticed before that Danny has a lot in common with fandom’s fave tragic heroes – Boromir, Thorin, Tony Stark – but gets less than a quarter of the love they do: I Cannot Think As To Why). Danny’s story is quite beautiful I think – and very relevant to events in the world today and to the entire point of Doctor Who. I wish it got more attention.