elphabaforpresidentofgallifrey:
steven moffat is just a british joss whedon
Okay, like … can someone please explain to me why Moffat is so hated? Serious question, no trolling, no antagonism. Tumblr seems to hate the ever living shit out of him but I have never seen anyone break down why, exactly.
That’s because at this point, 90% of the hate is totally unreasonable.
(There’s nothing wrong with people preferring RTD, obviously, but the blatant hatred for Moffat is what almost never actually makes much sense.)
As far as I know, I think some of it came from some interviews Moffat did back in like, 2012, where some of the stuff he said got taken the wrong way because he’s an awkward, sarcastic little shit who didn’t interview very well back then.
Also, people were struggling with the stylistic differences between the RTD and Moffat eras of Doctor Who. Moffat’s first season as showrunner was rather predominantly white (something I’ll go into in a second). Some people lacked the critical analysis skills to understand the nuances of River Song’s character or the entire point of Series 7 Clara’s arc.
Somehow, along the way, everyone decided that Moffat is obscenely sexist/racist/full of himself/loves white men or whatever. (Some of the stuff going on with Sherlock probably didn’t help, but I don’t honestly give a shit about Sherlock so I’m sticking to DW here.)
The ridiculous part is that none of those things could be further from the truth, or what I and many others have actually gone out of our way to observe as the closest to the truth we can discern.
Now, don’t get me wrong. He’s still a straight white guy, who has made mistakes, because the industry itself is too white and so he probably hasn’t had enough people around him to catch mistakes that come from his being straight and white.
But he knows he’s flawed, for a start. I have honestly no idea where the idea that Moffat is any kind of egotist came from, because if you watch him being interviewed around series 9 or 10, he’s extremely self deprecating!
He is a huge liberal who has admitted it was super stupid of him to think that open casting for Series 5 would result in a diverse cast, and that he learned from it. He’s really listened to a lot of the things people have said, and as a result, the background diversity in DW has gotten a LOT better as his era has gone on.
There’s a lot of opinion that he writes the same ‘flirty, feisty’ woman over and over, but it’s the people saying that which are reducing fully fleshed out female characters to something that basic. Amy, River, Clara and Bill could not be more different at heart, even if a couple of them share a few surface traits.
His last season saw a black lesbian co-lead who got a happy ending, and it’s pretty much entirely down to him that the general public were open to the idea of a female Doctor by the time Chibnall actually cast Jodie Whittaker. The opinions starting changing when he made the Master a woman, and then he continued to throw in line after line after blatant onscreen regeneration from white dude to black lady in order to make it clear that the matter of canonically genderfluid Time Lords was not up for debate. The Series 10 finale two parter had the Doctor confirm this verbally, too.
I think what confirmed the idea that so many people (not all, but so many) who hate Moffat literally have no idea what they’re talking about anymore, is when I saw someone celebrating Thirteen’s casting and going “a female Doctor is in defiance of everything the Moffat era stood for”.
Like. What the fuck. You might as well have painted I haven’t watched Doctor Who in the last four years on your forehead. Because a female Doctor is exactly what the Moffat era has been trying to build, this whole time. Twelve’s whole era has been a setup for Thirteen, for “yes, this can and should happen”.
There are legitimate criticisms about his work to be made. And about him too, I’m sure. Moffat is far from perfect, but he has very actively worked to make Doctor Who much more diverse, and as far as I’m concerned, his obvious good intentions mean more than the fact that sometimes he doesn’t manage to deliver in the way that he might have intended, or has bungled something somewhere.
I’m not going to tell you what to think about him. But I’m telling you to not listen to what most people say about him, and to go and find facts, and keep in mind that he has shown remarkable growth in the last few years (but god forbid people on Tumblr get their heads around the concept of people growing and learning).
#literally in every interview recently he’s so excited for jodie#how do people think he’s against that? (via @scriptscribbles)
honestly, if anyone thinks THEY’RE excited for Jodie Whittaker as Thirteen, they got fucking nothing on Moffat he’s like a five year old bouncing up and down I swear to god, it’s adorable
He said some really casually misogynistic things… nine or ten years ago. Then he got his act together and generally started behaving much, much better. When he cast Pearl Mackie as Bill I think he even came out and said (although unfortunately I’ve lost the link right now) “This is what showrunners should be doing, I don’t deserve phrase for it.” And of all his lesbian characters, not a single one died as far as I remember (although he is a little too fond of the fake-out for my tastes) – and dang, he’s even outright apologizing for stuff now, having previously once said, I believe, that he never listens to criticism?
He’s not the British Joss Whedon. He’s the opposite Joss Whedon.