Steven Moffat: time lords are the most civilised civilisation in the galaxy, they’re billions of years beyond humanity’s petty obsession with gender and it’s associated stereotypes.
Steven Moffat: *turns the master into a misogynistic arsehole, who fixates and obsesses over gender for the entirety of THE VERY SAME STORY*
Steven Moffat: I am Progressive Person™
The Master has always been sexist. In Classic Who. In RTD Who. Missy’s basically the first time the character isn’t.
In Davies’ first Master story, for example, the Master laments that he was “Killed by an insect. A girl. How inappropriate.” Because getting killed by a woman is more shameful, somehow, in the sexist PoV.
Personally, I’m all for using a historically misogynistic character as an embodiment of the sexist/transphobic side of the fandom opposed to gender change in the show, particularly in a story that’s otherwise all for gender change and femininity as the future.
… also I love how OP seems to think the Master should somehow be representative of the Time Lords as a civilization.
i mean
seriously??
i never said he had to be representative of the timelords. (i mean the timelords are a p corrupt and arrogant species anyway. they were never the wise guardians of the universe that tennant remembered them to be.) but ANYWAY.
if the timelords are genderfluid then the master shouldnt rlly even acknowledge gender. He still grew up on gallifrey. I couldn’t imagine him going out into the universe and seeing that humans can be sexist and going oh yeh that sounds right. Cause I like to think that sexism is an issue specific to the human race. Other planets will have their own social issues. So y would the master adopt ours and no one else’s? He’s not representative of time lord society but he’s still a product of it.
sadly, both the master and the doctor have acknowledged gender in the past. but honeslty the gender politics of even william hartnells era were 1000 times better than matt smith and peter capaldis. steven moffat is incapable of not being sexist. but never has it been so blatant that a charcater truly HATES women as simm!master was in The Doctor Falls.
i never took “an insect. A mere girl” to refer specifically to her gender, more the fact that she was a mere child by timelord standards. but i can c ur point. I had issues with the way Russell T Davies portrayed the master tbh. I know the master is evil but domestic abuse is a whole new level that I never thought he was capable of. But in the Russell T Davies canon he was. But even then it was treated as a deep routed evil that the master held within him and the capacity to cause others great harm. It wasn’t just an excuse for some “funny” one liners about hating women. It was the portrayal of a truly evil character.
as for classic who i always took the dismissal of women by the master to be a dismissiveness for humanity in general. cause lets face it he has no respect for anyone who isnt a timelord tbh. Ik that’s not how the script writers probably meant it but that’s how I choose to look at it.
i never intrpreted the master as a misogynyst before. i always liked to imagine that to even the most diabolical timelords, smthn like gender just doesn’t really occur to them. I always thought of his negativity as a dismissal for anything that wasn’t time lord. that snobbiness is very timelord of him.
But maybe Moffat wasn’t responsible for turning the master into a sexist. But he certainly had a lot more fun with it than he should’ve done. He enjoys the men and women hating eachother thing way too much. He seems to find it hilarious. No writer has ever done that before with the master.
But my initial point was simply moffat and the BBC (like p much everyone atm) are using the whole discussion of social politics and the like as a marketing strategy, whilst failing to actually commit to it. i mean…:
and its also very hypocritical of steven moffat to be pretending to support women and lgbtq+ ppl given his histroy on the subjects, lol.
honeslty the gender politics of even william hartnells era were 1000 times better than matt smith and peter capaldis
There’s not a single woman of colour or gay or bi woman with a substantial role in the Hartnell era. That alone puts it way behind the the modern-day one.
but never has it been so blatant that a charcater truly HATES women as simm!master was in The Doctor Falls.
I dunno, I’d say the bruises on Lucy’s face and the dead look in her eyes sort of solidified ‘the master = violent misogynist” for me.
It wasn’t just an excuse for some "funny” one liners about hating women.
The stuff the Master comes out with in TDF isn’t funny! Surely not? A guy tormenting a woman he spent ten years with for no reason other than his own amusement?
and its also very hypocritical of steven moffat to be pretending to
support women and lgbtq+ ppl given his histroy on the subjects, lol.
Can he not have just changed? It’s been what, seven years since he took over Who. In that time he’s cast the only female Master, said out loud in front of an audience “Yes, there will be a female Doctor” (compare to RTD’s “no, best not have a female Doctor because genitals” line), made a black, working-class lesbian the star of the show, and had two finales in a row where a WLW becomes functionally immortal and flies away to have her own Doctor-like adventures. (And no woman gets her memory wiped against her will! Hooray!) I mean, he’s said some shit in the past that I find very hard to forgive, too (specifically, that throwaway nonsense from years ago about how you’re not really married if you don’t have children) but this whole concept of “No-one gets an evolution, no-one gets to reevaluate their viewpoints, and any effort to change is a lie.” …..It scares me. (RTD’s probably gone back on his rather ridiculous genitalia comments too. I’d be surprised if he hasn’t.)
A note on the BBC: the
discussion of social politics is what the BBC does. It’s what we pay them the license fee for. Saying “the whole discussion of social politics and the like as a marketing strategy
[for the BBC]” is about on the same level as saying “the whole making and distributing burgers and the like is a marketing strategy for McDonalds.” I mean….I GUESS? It’s a big corporation, the BBC, it’s never going to be anything approaching perfect. But I’d say, casting an unknown black actress as the co-lead of one of their biggest global successes is committing to it, and showing a lesbian kiss before the watershed (the cutoff point for ‘adult programming’) is committing to it, and not commissioning shows “unless they employ a representative amount of ethnic minorities, the disabled and LGBT people” is committing to it. (At the moment the BBC are running Gay Britannia across most of their major channels for a season.) We’re lucky. Damn. We’re really lucky we’re able to argue about this.
