my mickey smith appreciation post.

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withabigyellowtruck:

fatimagic:

I’ve been meaning to write this one up for a long time, and now’s as good a time as any, I suppose.

First and foremost, I this post isn’t in response to any Mickey hate, per se, but rather to the seemingly few people in the Doctor Who fandom who actually care that Mickey Smith exists. People always go on and on about Rory, and how he rose from being a dorky third wheel in a sense, to an ass-kicking hero. And don’t get me wrong, I love Rory to pieces, but Mickey’s story arc, which followed the same basic template, barely seems to get any recognition from the fandom at all.

Now, I use the term “basic template” very loosely for a big reason that I’ll get to in a moment. The obvious, and more minor reason being that Rory is not a “copy” of Mickey. I believe that they are two very different characters with two different lives tat followed similar paths, especially in the beginning of their stories.

Like Rory (his arguably more popular counterpart), Mickey grew up very close with his female best friend and her family. The two friends eventually developed feelings for each other and began dating. However, when the Doctor stepped into their lives, both Mickey and Rory suddenly became the “third wheel” in their Team TARDIS, always seemingly under appreciated and labeled as “the tin dog.”

But here’s the big difference between Mickey and Rory that I referred to earlier. Rory knew that he would always have Amy. At one point or another, he knew that he had something worth fighting for. Yes, Rose is arguably worth fighting for, but Mickey was never the one that Rose had faith in. He was never the one that Rose wanted to save her. Amy always wanted Rory to be her hero, but for Rose, it was always the Doctor. This is where his and Rory’s paths differ.

Rory always had a connection to the Doctor through Amy, and the two were always friends. Yes, there were times when he thought the Doctor threatened his relationship with Amy, but nothing ever came to pass regarding that. In Mickey’s case, the threat was real, at least on Rose’s end during Nine’s tenure. To Nine, he was always “Mickey the idiot”—that dunce who always follows Rose around. Even the writers made a point to paint Mickey in that light at first. We weren’t supposed to care about him, and we especially weren’t supposed to like him.

All Mickey’s life, people walked away from him—his father, his emotionally unstable mother, and now Rose. His ties to her were being irreparably severed, and the Doctor was kicking him while he was down. While he did have his grandmother, he had to care for her during the majority of his adult life. He played the role of the caretaker, while Rory never really had to.

Then, out of nowhere, this random big-eared “Doctor” comes into Rose’s life, and the woman who he had come to love since he was a child was now feeling the same thing overnight—but for another man. Hell, Rose’s traveling (albeit unintentionally) got him accused of her murder at one point! Jackie and everyone he knew might have turned on him for a whole year.

But did he sever his ties to his childhood friend? Nope. He remained loyal to her constantly. Even when he realized he never had a chance with Rose and started dating other people (which she blasted him for), he continued to love and support her and Jackie, and he would eventually earn the Doctor’s love and respect, as well.

During his relatively short time as a companion, Mickey found his place in the universe, where Rory had arguably always known his, deep down. When he was flung into a world where he had to face an alternate version of himself, he chose to stay and fight the Cybermen, against everybody’s expectations. And he stayed for his grandmother, the one family member who never left him, and whom he’d lost in our dimension. He didn’t have to (hell, Rose was willing to leave her family behind multiple times), but he did, without a second thought.

And then, after all that, Mickey came back to help the world—again, twice, at that. He never ended his friendships with Rose, the Doctor, or Jackie, and he finally found true love with another one of the Doctor’s companions. He finally became someone’s hero—Martha’s hero. Not to mention he’s now kicking alien ass and defending the earth with her.

Mickey and Rory are far from the same character, and each are amazing characters in their own right.

That said, Mickey deserves just as much love from this fandom as Rory gets.

I… wow.  Thank you.

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kidziasonic:

remember back when memes weren’t even called memes. like before youtube, before know your meme, back when all there was were flash movies on albino sheep and newgrounds and colin mochrie was in all of them.

there are memes that are older than people currently using the internet. there are old memes being referenced as new memes. i quoted all your base are belong to us all the time in 5th grade and that was before some of my friends were born.

this is such a bizarre thing to think about. i remember being in middle school and watching all this stupid shit with my friends, and they weren’t memes back then, they were just flash videos. badger badger mushroom mushroom, they’re taking the hobbits to isengard, all your base are belong to us, weebl’s stuff.

i was there for the first memes and that is a very strange thing to think about.

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kierongillen:

carriagelamp:

dearnonacepeople:

So let me get this straight, in Monopoly if you give one player more money to start out it’s “unfair” but if you do it in real life it’s “capitalism”? 

You know what, I’m going to tell you guys a story.

In my Sociology class a few semesters ago, our prof had us break off into groups and, much to our naive joy, began distributing Monopoly boards! We had no idea what was going on but yay! Games! Of course, once our group, and a number of others, got the board we began to work at setting up and distributing the money…

until suddenly our prof told us to put the money down and pick up the dice.

“Roll the dice and sort yourselves from highest to lowest,” our teacher commanded.  "Now, the highest number is the upper class. The next one is upper middle class.  The next two or three are middle class. The last person is in poverty.“

Well, as the person who rolled a two this was startling and not wholly welcome news.

From that point the game changed entirely. We had to hand out the money so that the “upper class” had this fucking mountain, and then less for upper middle, even less for middle, and I didn’t get any triple digit bills. We would all collect different amounts from passing go as well.

The biggest change though? Going to jail. Upper class didn’t. Period. Upper middle class could go but they only had to stay for one turn or they could immediately pay their way out. Middle class had some pretty easy guidelines for when they could pay to get out. As lower class, it was really easy for me to wind up in jail and REALLY hard to get out. But since I was working with so little money when everyone else had so much I was in jail all the time because there was no “game over”.  If I couldn’t pay I had to go to jail for a certain period of time. I had to take out loans with interest I could never pay back just to get out only to wind up back in it again, rolling dice turn after turn hoping to be able to get out.

It was simultaneously the most enlightening and most awful game I had ever played. I was bored and frustrated and a little terrified about it all. And it wasn’t only me. I would never win, I sort of accepted this, but it was amazing how the middle classes reacted as well.  They were stressed. Because they were always that close to either being able to one-up the upper class or from crashing into poverty with me. They had to fight constantly just to stay in the middle.

(I should also mention that the upper class player in one group felt so bad for the lower income players that they ended up overhauling their entire game and creating a “socialist” society instead. I’m not sure how our teacher felt about that one.)

Worth stressing this is entirely in the spirit of the original designer’s aims for Monopoly. 

Monopoly’s  original form of The Landlord Game which was explicitly designed to teach people about the unfairness of rent systems. To quote from the wikipedia entry, just as it’s the easiest source to hand…

Magie designed the game to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences”.[2] She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed byHenry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.

When the usual suspects start making “don’t bring politics into games” noises, I roll my eyes pretty hard. They have no idea of the history of the form.

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