how you write a female character in unrequited love with a man who doesn’t love her back: martha jones💯👌
how you NOT write a female character in unrequited love with a man who doesn’t love her back: molly hooper🚨👎👎👎martha jones wouldnt shut up about how the doctor doesnt love her, her entire character arc centered around that, her entire relationship with the doctor was about that. she was an awful character
No it wasn’t. (And she wasn’t.)
Martha’s arc is about the battle between being the Doctor and being… a doctor. When she walks the earth to save the world, she’s the Doctor. When she helps the Hath and mourns his death, she’s a regular helpless human doctor. When she tells the German woman at the Oesterhagen station to kill her so she won’t have to choose to use the Key, she’s both. It’s a great conflict and it’s there. It’s there when she holds her head up high and leaves the TARDIS, deciding her own self-respect and her own family are more important than what the Doctor has to offer her. It’s there when she starts defending the earth on her own terms rather than the Doctor’s. It’s there when she calls out the racism around her, something the Doctor has never had to face.
She’s a great character. Clever, compassionate (she bears no ill will towards Rose, her love rival for ages, when she meets her!) and full of life. She’s important. I love her.
And that’s a very unsettling definition of ‘never shuts up about’ considering she kept her love for the Doctor quite under wraps for the most part and never once let it get in the way of things she had to do.
okay, i appreciate your description and thats something i didnt consider, but while that sounds really interesting and complex i never saw it, any strong memories of martha are about her feelings towards the doctor and rose. and as for “keeping it under wraps” she told people about it all the time, just not the doctor
She really doesn’t, though. She introduces the Doctor as “a friend” to her mother, and her sister just assumes he’s her date. When Tallulah refers to the Doctor as “[Martha’s] bloke” Martha corrects her with “We’re not together” and it’s Tallulah who presses the issue. She tells John Smith, but it’s in a moment of high stress and she tries to take it back soon after. She doesn’t tell Jack, although he’s able to guess pretty easily. She doesn’t tell her father or brother.
Lots of people guess, based on how Martha interacts with the Doctor, that she’s in love with him. But that’s very different from never shutting up about it.