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Maybe this speaks to tumblr’s bizarre ‘perfect pure progressive thing/trash awful anti-progressive thing’ dichotomy more than anything else (because a different more unknown white guy will be writing the new Doctor?) , but I’m sort of discouraged that the reaction to the 13th Doctor news from a lot of quarters has been “oh good, I can finally watch this show again, it is Progressive now”. And I don’t want to underplay the huge deal that a female Doctor is, it is a huge deal. But…

Bill Potts was a huge deal too. People who see themselves in her have written about her importance at length. She was (heck, is, she’ll almost definitely be back for the Christmas Special, Pearl Mackie’s been spotted on set) a black, lesbian, working-class co-lead on one of the biggest sci-fi shows ever. Bill beamed out from a lot of the posters and from the children’s tie-in magazines. Bill kissed a girl on television, a full-on passionate overjoyed kiss, during family viewing hour on the BBC. Bill had natural hair. Bill became immortal (by choice) in a world where TV producers almost seem to hate gay characters getting happy endings. Bill was an audience surrogate who represented a lot of Brits who don’t see themselves represented on British TV often. It’s just –

The companion’s the audience surrogate. Everyone was encouraged to see themselves in Bill Potts. And she was the co-lead. That bears repeating. The Doctor’s one lead of Doctor Who and the Companion’s the other one.

If a black, lesbian, working-class co-lead wasn’t enough to get you to Finally Watch The Show Again, why is a white female co-lead what eventually manages to do it?

If a black, lesbian, working-class co-lead wasn’t enough to get you to Finally Watch The Show Again, why is a white female co-lead what eventually manages to do it?

a more articulated version of what I was trying to say yesterday, thank you.
I loved Bill so deeply and was wounded by the way she was treated that all those “I can finally watch DW” messages that have been pouring from twitter and tumblr, mostly coming from white queer people, feel like a personal attack.

^^

oh holy shit, she’s a lesbian?

oh fuck i’d better watch this show

She is a lesbian, and not only that, her being gay is implied to, at least in part, be the REASON she gets to be immortal. It’s sort of a huge fuck-you to the bury your gays trope.

What the fuck is wrong with me?
Why haven’t I gotten back to it?

Okay this is a good post, I’m not arguing with the central message, but I would like to say the reason Bill didn’t get me back into the show immediately (and I’m sure it’s the same for a lot of people):

I don’t trust Moffat.

I started the show during Davies era (admittedly, the end of it, but I watched all of series 4 on the air). To me, Doctor Who is about a variety of things, but the big one is the Doctor shows that ordinary, every day people are Extraordinary BECAUSE of their ordinariness. That’s what Doctor Who was about for me, in addition to other things.

Moffat killed that. Amy and Clara were mysteries to be solved, not ordinary people to celebrate. In addition, the plots were… obvious (sure, a lot of the Davies era plot twists came out of left field, but at least they were a SURPRISE), the villains lacklustre, and the diversity punch lines. I mean seriously, he had the “Thin Fat Gay Anglican Marines, why would we need names?” line, basically making the fact that characters were Queer a punch line.

Plus he’s classist as Fuck. He’s said repeatedly he hates Rose as a character (bc she’s a chav, p much); had the Doctor “instantly fall in love” (which isn’t something the Doctor does) with Madame de Pompadore basically because she was upper class; and reduced Rose to a pretty face (which, no, the Doctor loved Rose for actual reasons) in the 50th.

Plus he says biphobic and aphobic stuff in real life – bisexual people are “too busy with other things” to watch his show, and asexual people are “too boring” to write about

He also, essentially, erased Davies era. I’m on mobile and too tired to explain how. But he did, and for a lot of show fans, that was extremely upsetting. Not only was the era we missed gone, but it wasn’t even… part of continuity anymore. Fuck you too, Moffat.

So when Bill Potts came out, I was excited, but I didn’t watch. Because I didn’t trust this classist, homophobic piece of shit to handle it. I pretty much figured he would “bury your gays,” or at least make her a terrible character.

I’m glad I’m wrong, but that doesn’t erase the other sins of Moffat. One good season doesn’t make up for how painful Moffat era is in general for a fan of Davies era. I’m still hesitant about watching the show, even with a new showrunner and a female Doctor. The wounds are deep.

It’s easy to dismiss this if you didn’t start watching the show during Davies era, I know, but it’s still important to think about.

God, I really didn’t want this post to become about Moffat, but I suppose every Doctor Who post becomes about Moffat eventually-

So:

I’m so, so tired of seeing Amy and Clara reduced to just “mysteries to be solved”. The Doctor/Clara arc ended in the Doctor realizing he’d been wrong to reduce her to just a mystery, and Amy – Amy was a mentally ill sexual assault survivor (as of The Almost People), yeah? You may not like her, hardly anyone seems to like her, but you must be able to see that’s relatable, that’s…. more than everyone reduces her to, huh? A survivor? Day after day I see this argument come up and I’ve never been able to understand it, not once, how so many female characters written by sexists come into existence and suffer on the page (Sansa Stark? Gwen Stacy?) and people grant them separation from the men who wrote them, but not Amy, never Amy, no matter how metaphorically dead her author is.

Plus he’s classist as Fuck. He’s said repeatedly he hates Rose as a
character (bc she’s a chav, p much); had the Doctor “instantly fall in
love” (which isn’t something the Doctor does) with Madame de Pompadore
basically because she was upper class; and reduced Rose to a pretty face
(which, no, the Doctor loved Rose for actual reasons) in the 50th.

Back in 2008, Moffat did say something shitty about Rose, namely
“You have to hand it to the Doctor for dumping a slightly needy
girlfriend by palming her off on a copy of himself. He tried leaving her
in a parallel universe, and that didn’t work.” But he didn’t mention anything to do with her class, I have combed and combed the internet and my piles of Doctor Who Magazines and I’ve never seen him mention anything to do with Rose’s working-class-ness? But I did uncover these snippets from 2013, as the 50th anniversary stuff was getting underway:

“I think those first two years, it was Billie Piper’s show.It was all about Billie and Billie as Rose. Russell T Davies was so clever in creating that character and casting that character so perfectly. She has a bigger status than most of those companions and really seriously, for the first two years, that was Billie Piper’s show and she was amazing. Let’s not forget how amazing she was.”

“I thought the story of Rose, which was beautiful, was done. I didn’t want to add to it, and I didn’t feel comfortable adding to it, really. That was always [former Doctor Who showrunner] Russell [T Davies]‘s story. But we did want Billie. And I liked the idea of bringing back the Bad Wolf version. The way Russell ended it in “The End of Time,” by just sort of looping it around, was perfect. I didn’t want to stick another bit of it in. That would be wrong. I just wanted to get Billie Piper, one of the absolute heroes of Doctor Who, back in the show, but without interfering with the story of Rose Tyler.”

And this quote from 2005/6-ish, it hasn’t got a source, only a mention list of quotes, but I think I actually remember it from one of the BBC Doctor Who website videos, long since gone-

“Obviously and quite overtly, really, the subtext of this show is that the Doctor is hopelessly in love with Rose.”

Any other specific classism not directed at Rose, I don’t know about, tell me if you’ve got a quote.

(Interestingly, back in 2008, Billie Piper said of Rose, “She’s a bit of a chav, god bless her” although that was probably just on the cusp before everyone realised what a shitty word ‘chav’ was.)

Plus he says biphobic and aphobic stuff in real life – bisexual people
are “too busy with other things” to watch his show, and asexual people
are “too boring” to write about

Yeah, I remember that, that’s true (well, to the best of my knowledge, he deleted his Twitter so long ago I can’t check.)

He also, essentially, erased Davies era. I’m on mobile and too tired to
explain how. But he did, and for a lot of show fans, that was extremely
upsetting. Not only was the era we missed gone, but it wasn’t even… part
of continuity anymore. Fuck you too, Moffat.

But this isn’t! That really, thoroughly didn’t happen! Unless you count putting Gallifrey back, which a) just returned things to how they were in all the other eras of the show and b) ….made the Doctor not an asshole who killed millions of children? Is that it? Because there’s nothing, nothing to imply that Rose, Martha, Donna, various planets, various planet-ending events etc didn’t happen. I keep hearing this “Moffat erased the RTD era!” and I honestly can’t work out where it came from, beyond the Gallifrey-returning thing. Because like… Eleven talks about Rose, Twelve talks about Jack, Donna’s words to the Doctor in The Fires of Pompeii are part of the plot in The Girl Who Died, there’s holograms of Rose/Martha/Donna in the TARDIS, the RTD-era Master comes back and references past events, there’s flashbacks to the RTD companions in The Doctor Falls… where did this come from?!

tl;dr I have some good news for you I guess?

I get the Moffat thing, I honestly do. I’ve seen some tweets from him and read interviews with him that make me want to punch the computer screen, but I’ve gradually realised over the years that a lot of stuff about him is exaggerated, and it’s kinda a shame if people deliberately skipped Bill (or continue to hate Amy and Clara) on the basis of those exaggerated things.