another thing that annoys me abt moffat writing, now dr who is a Thing again: his naming. amelia pond. clara oswald. river fucking song. its like the names id give my quirky mary sues and gary stus when i was 12 – except he only does it to the girls
its really? just? idk annoying. and is part of his panic pixie dream girl this woman is ~speshul thing that i loathe. like donna nobles name was specifically chosen; noble, as a trait – and obvs everyones name is chosen to suit them and even say smth abt them but moffat likes peculiar, creative names and its fucking annoying
Amy Pond and River Song are fairy tale names, yes. Both of their storylines are about them navigating the idealism of fairy tales with the reality of their lives, foregrounding their agency and choices. The names are apt and the stories extremely relatable for me, thanks.
Clara Oswald is in no way a weird or unusual or “quirky” name. Clara is a name as a tribute to Elisabeth Sladen, the sadly deceased actress who played Sarah Jane. It was her middle name. And Oswald is a perfectly real surname, which a bit of Googling tells me dates back quite a ways in Scotland among other things. You’re right, however, that her character interacts with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. Series 7 leans into it as a critique and rejection of that trope. To quote Moffat, “The idea of ‘the Impossible Girl’ is because that name in no way applies to her properly. The Doctor thinks she’s impossible and then discovers she’s a perfectly real person, a perfectly ordinary person. His disposition is to treat people like puzzles to be deconstructed and what he learns in dealing with Clara is he was dealing with a real human being and if he’d picked up on that earlier they would have been better friends quicker. So that’s what ‘the Impossible girl’ is, it doesn’t exist, she’s just Clara Oswald.” Which is, I stress again, a perfectly ordinary name.
And, of course, Danny Pink is a perfectly ordinary name for a bloke to have. Moffat definitely only gives women fairytale names.
That original post has a strange…. edge to it that really makes me uncomfortable, but I can’t put my finger on it.
Anyway, I did a Facebook search for “Clara Oswald” and removed everyone who had a Doctor Who avatar. There were well over a hundred of them.
